>>1624909>changing between parallel runways, TWICEwhat the fuck man. I've never even heard about changing runways while on final, let alone twice. You should've filed a report because this is retarded and unsafe.
I don't know how they managed to forget a plane in downwind either. Usually we ask pilots to call us back mid-downwind, then we give them their number in the pattern, giving traffic information if they're not n°1. If they can see the traffic preceeding, we just tell them to call back on final. If they can't, we tell them to keep going downwind unless we can clearly see on the radar or by the window they'll never see each other anyway.
I feel like American ATC is nowhere near as rigorous as Europeans. Maybe it's due to the incredible amount of airspace they have, since they don't have major airports crammed in next to each other.
In France, you pass a competitive exam after studying maths and physics for 2-3 years in some kind of extended, hardcore high school called CPGE. It's designed to prepare for competitive exams for French engineering schools (including Harvard-tier ones) but they found out that recruiting ATC from there worked well too.
Afterwards, you spend 2 years at the ENAC for initial training (theory and regulation, simulators, english classes, PPL training, small tower training for a month), and you must pass every rating. So we're trained for tower, approach and en-route. Then based on your ranking in the class you get a list of stations avaliable, and the best ranked student signs first, then the second one is called and signs...etc and the last one has to go to the last station avaliable. Usually there are few surprises because we get the list in advance and people agree on signing there or there.
Rating is European-wide, but since we're public servants and we got paid during our training aswell as having our entire training paid for, we signed a 10 year contract with the government.
Thanks man, appreciated.
