AT-SAT Part II

Listening to - Philadelphia Phillies vs. New York Mets (Opening day woo!)

Well, after yesterdays brief post regarding the exam I figured I'll go ahead and give all the details of the day.

I had fallen asleep at 2200 the night before quite to my surprise. The nerves had started to get to me, but somehow I managed to fall asleep. I set my alarm for 0600 which would give me plenty of time to feed the dog, shower, eat a good breakfast, and grab a coffee down at 7-11. During the night I woke up once around 0300, but fell asleep again in about a half hour. Next thing I knew I had woken up again at it was 0545. Instead of waiting for the alarm, I got up and checked my e-mail and such.

After getting ready and eating breakfast, my parents gave me some money to go out with later on that night and I wasted about ten minutes around the house. 0720 I was off to 7-11 and I got a small coffee. I knew better than to get the 24.oz lol. The hotel where the exam was administered is literally ten minutes away from my house, so even with stopping for coffee, I was at the hotel by 0735. I wasted another ten minutes in my car listening to Opie & Anthony and finally went inside.

A group of us went into the testing room and registered but the girl sitting next to me looked so familiar. As I was walking back and she was walking up to go register (you had to wait to be called since you had to confirm your SSN) I went, "You went to Sachem didn't you?" and got a "OMG I KNEW I KNEW YOU FROM SOMEWHERE!" lol. The school district I went to has two 9th-12th high schools of ~2,800 students each so finding someone you actually recognize from somewhere isn't that hard. What made this meeting unique though is that we were both in our districts aviation program; I was in the program at East, she was at North.

She was one of only about 4 students that actually got their private certificate (out of about 40 total students) so our teacher had told us about her over at my school. Of course though, I couldn't remember her name for the life of me. I don't think she remembered mine though, so we're even. I could've sworn it was something like Cassandra, and sure enough when I got home and checked my year book, it's Sandra. Close enough right???

We talked for almost the entire time before the exam and funny enough, when we randomly picked our computer numbers we were next to each other. We're both OTS (Off The Street) potential hires so we talked about the difficulties of finding a job and how we both randomly stumbled upon this.

Anyway back to the exam. Around 0825 we were led into a room and given our briefing on exam procedures. Yadahyadahyadah, exam is videotaped, yadahyadahyadah, don't cheat, take your time, etc etc etc...

First thing you do when you take the AT-SAT is confirm that the information that they put in on your computer is actually you! All you need is to take your time on the exam just to find out you took it for the kid next to you. After checking your personal info, you move onto the first section.

The first section is called "Dial Reading". You're given seven different instruments that you would see on an instrument panel. Off the top of my head they had a voltmeter, tachometer, fuel-air ratio indicator, airspeed indicator, altimeter, ammeter, engine temperature/oil temp/fuel flow(maybe?). You're then given approximately sixteen questions such as "What does the fuel-air ratio gauge read?" All very simple stuff but you only have approximately ten minutes to read each gauge and answer the question so you had to be quick. And of course they use non-standard markings so your altimeter reads 1,000 tick mark, tick mark, tick mark, 2,000. Not to mention if you were given an altimeter that read 1,500, the correct answer would be 1.5 (since the gauge is in 1,000's of feet). As a pilot, that really screwed me up at the beginning. Luckily, I catch on quick ;-)

After the dial reading section, you move onto the "Applied Math" section. This part was hard and consisted of twenty four questions in twenty six minutes. Now, I'm a math person by nature but my mental math ability is all it needs to be to fly an airplane safely and efficiently, make sure I get the correct change back at the store, and make sure I'm not getting horrible gas mileage in my car. As me to figure out the triple integral in spherical coordinates of some spherical equation and I could probably figure it out for you. Ask me to figure out the solution to an ordinary differential equation and I could figure that out for you. Ask me to give you an exact answer to how long it'll take an aircraft to fly 1,320NM at 267kts without pen and paper or whiz-wheel and I say, "You're crazy!" (It's approximately four hours and fifty six minutes btw, thanks whiz-wheel!)Granted, you can somewhat easily estimate most of the answers or do the "plug in the choices" method, it was a major pain in the ass and the numbers were not friendly. Of course, numbers in real life will not be perfect either but I think most of the questions were a bit ridiculous in their desire for precision. Lesson learned though, study up on my mental math abilities if I want to be the best I can be.

Next on the menu was testing how good your scan is. The screen is turned into a "scope" and aircraft pop up with a letter and number on top representing an N number or call sign, and another number on the bottom representing ground speed. These represent data blocks that you'd see on a scope at a facility. At the bottom of your "scope" there is a range of speeds, say 150-410. You must enter the number of all aircraft outside of that range which then turns them red. The hardest part about this exercise is that data blocks just pop up where ever, when ever, and also disappear whenever. A couple of times I went to go type a number in, made a mistake, hit delete, and by the time I got the right number in the plane was gone! This section wasn't hard, but wasn't easy either.

After the scan we had the opportunity for our first scheduled break. I opted out of this break since there was just two more sections left until our lunch break. How long could two sections take?! I believe if you take all the scheduled breaks and do all of the practice problems (Oh right, you get to practice about 2-3 problems for each section before you being) the exam would take seven hours. You have eight hours total to take the exam, so that gives you the potential for an extra hour of break time if you need it. Looking back on things it might have been in my best interest to take more breaks but alas... no point in dwelling on the past.

So there I was, starting my next section which was the "Letter Factory" scenario. This is the first in a set of video games that even mom would approve of. During the letter factor you have four conveyor belts - A, B, C, and D. The letters come out in three different colors - Orange, Green, and Purple. Your job is to put the correct color letter in the correct color box. To the bottom right of the screen you have your stack of boxes, three of each color. As soon as you see a green A for instance, you move a green box to a open position at the bottom of the conveyor belts. Once the green A has passed the "availability line" it beings to flash and you can now click and drag the letter to the box. Your goal is to put A, B, C, and D of the same color, into the same color box. Throughout the game, P's, Q's, R's, T's, and other "defect" letters may come down the belt. As soon as you see the defective letter, you must click the "Quality Control" button on the bottom left hand corner to get rid of the defect. This in all honesty is quite simple. The hard part comes when all of a sudden your screen goes white and you're bombarded with three to four questions about the status of your factory.

"What color boxes do you have at the bottom of the belts?"
"What letter caused you to move a new box to the bottom of the belts?"
"If the scenario was to continue and no more letters were added, how many boxes would be left over and what letters would you need to complete the box?"
"Which belt had the lowest availability point?"
"Which belt was moving slowest?"

etc...

Those type of questions can come at any point during the scenario. I had a couple pop up literally ten seconds into a scenario.

Of course, about half way through this 30-45 minute section, that coffee wanted out but I couldn't leave during the middle of a section. I told you I should have taken that break when I was supposed to! I managed a quick, unscheduled break after the letter factory and then it was off to the next section before lunch.

The next section was angles. If you took and passed high school math you should have absolutely no problem with this. the angles run from thirty degrees to 350 degrees and you just have to remember the rules which, in case you've forgotten since high school, they remind you of in the practice section. I do believe I got 100% on that section, thank you very much!

I decided it was time for another cup of coffee and maybe something light to eat. See, the pilot diet has already set me up for the ATC diet. Coffee, vending machine snacks, and water. Now if I become an ATC I just need to pick up some sort of nicotine addiction and I'll be set! Just kidding, I can't stand cigarettes and chew and all that other crap is pretty disgusting, no offense to those who smoke or chew, that's just me.

During my lunch break I made a few calls to family and such and I caught up some more with high school classmate. We talked ATC politics with a couple of the others who were taking breaks too. Two out of the five of us who were talking had family that were ATC's in NY. They were also married, and that's just scary... Marriage... lol

After lunch it was on to the part I was looking forward to most, "Air traffic Scenarios". This is a dumbed down versions of training that you'd go through as a approach/departure controller at either an Up/Down facility or a TRACON. The plane pops up white, you click on it, it turns green and you have positive control. You direct the aircraft to it's departure gate and a flight level of four and a speed of F (Fast) or you bring it down to flight level one and line it up in the direction of landing traffic at the two airports on the scope with a speed of S (Slow). There's a speed M too (I'll let you figure that one out on your own boys and girls) so you can space aircraft if they're losing the five miles of required separation. The goal is to simply get aircraft where they need to go efficiently and safely. Sounds familiar to something that might be required of an ATC eh?? You get points taken off your score for reducing an aircrafts speed too early, losing separation, landing in the wrong direction, putting an aircraft through the wrong departure gate or improper altitude/speed etc.

The Air Traffic Scenarios section is about an hour to an hour and a half long. I don't remember exactly. I was in the zone so to say so I wasn't really looking at my watch much. But after that section you had another scheduled fifteen minute coffee break.

After that break I was ready to get the hell outta there. All you have left now is the analogies section and the "Experience" section. Analogies suck. I hate analogies. Thirty word analogies which can be your standard analogy, or have the same vowel sounds or some crap like that, or have anagrams (I think that's what they're called?) where like Analysis and Land have NAL and then LAN in the word. Can you say pain in the ass? Then there were sixteen analogies with shapes and shading. Those were pretty easy but a few were tricky.

And, last but not least Ladies and Gentlemen, you have your "Experience" questions which I like to think of as a nice way to say, "Let's make sure you're not a psycho before we go any further!" section. They ask questions like;

"Do you loose your temper often?"
"Do you handle stress efficiently?"
"Do you believe laws are useless?"

And you respond with highly agree, somewhat agree, neutral, somewhat disagree, or highly disagree.

There are 146 of those questions and you better answer them truthfully because they check for inconsistencies in your answers. Any inconsistencies lead to the termination of your application.

I ended my exam at approximately 1345 for a total time of five hours and fifteen minutes. That includes two five minute breaks and a twenty minute lunch for a total test time of four hours and forty five minutes. I could've stayed longer and taken my breaks to their full length, but I really just wanted to get done with the exam. I wasn't fatigued or anything so...

The next step is to wait. The time frame I was given was seven to ten business days up on the ASAP system. Hopefully it's right.

Let's now get on to the night after the exam! I bought my first bottle of liquor and wasn't even ID'd... How upsetting is that?! We almost missed the train into the city because one of my friends is a little bit special. He completely forget him and his girlfriends tickets to the show. Way to go! We killed a liter of JD on the train ride in between three of us which made us all very happy. One friend of course had to ruin it all for the rest of us by acting overly drunken and annoying the crap out of everyone. The show we went to was freakin' AWESOME though. Some great music and an awesome light show for the headlining band. I wish I had brought my camera, but a lot of the shows in NYC are no cameras allowed so I wasn't risking it. I couldn't believe how much a drink cost out there... although I'm not really too surprised I guess. I (well...for most of the show my friends) were paying $7 for a budlight, $9 for a hieny, $9 for Jack and Cokes, $10 for Long Islands. The mixed drinks came in like 8oz cups too. So sad... That's what you get in NYC though!

After the show, since none of my friends were twenty one yet, we just headed back uptown towards Penn Station. Of course aforementioned overly drunk friend NEEDED A VITAMIN WATER RIGHT NOW!!!! So we missed the LIRR train because we stopped at a Walgreen's on 14th street before getting on the subway. That left us killing an hour or so in Penn which isn't that hard to do but...

I got home at like 0300, showered, rehydrated, and passed out.

And that's how I spent my 21st birthday... No complaints.

- Matt