Day 32:

OK, today we had a problem that instructors refer to as "the humbler". There is good reason for this name. Here's the deal (haha). Not only is it a very busy problem (you could say steady traffic), but you lose your DBRITE (radar) and you lose a runway because airport management needs it for some reason or other. Now, you may not think it's that bad, but there are always touch and goes in these TSS problems and the runway that you lose is often used for touch and go traffic. The traffic count on this problem is 73 ops/hr. So, you're doing more than 1 operation per minute and then you lose your runway and DBRITE. Planes are everywhere! It gets so busy that even some instructors have a hard time keeping up.

It gets to the point where your instructor is helping you sort out who is who and by the time that you get that figured out, airport management gives you the runway back. I guess that after going through this problem, our PV will seem boring.

Note: 73 ops./hr is a combination of arrivals and departures. For example, to get an airplane down, you need to give it a pattern entry, a landing clearance, and taxi instructions. So one airplane gets 3-4 transmissions from you. Now, multiply that 73 by 4 and you're doing a lot of talking.