 What's up, guys? Today, we're going to be talking with Matt Brown. He's a current airman in the United States Air Force about his job. I am an air traffic control specialist. AFSC's one Charlie one X one. X for those who don't know is like your skill level. Yeah. So that can change. So that's why it's an X. A little pro tip if you join the military is whenever you see the AFSCs, the reason there's an X on every single one of them is because it's your skill level. So something I like to ask people when I interview them about what they do for their job is not only what they're doing but why they're doing it. So why did you join the Air Force in the first place? I wanted to be an air traffic controller before I actually decided to join the Air Force. Okay. I figured I could either go to school, go to college and that kind of stuff and then join the FAA just to be around an airport, be around aircraft. I figured I could either go to college and all that or join the Air Force and have the Air Force train me. Pretty much it. Yeah. You just wanted to be an air traffic controller? Yeah. And you were like, oh, I paid for me to become an air traffic controller. So why not? I figured I could either be a pilot. I can go to the Air Force Academy in Colorado. I can do all this other stuff. But that takes congressional recommendation and the whole everything going on. I could be a maintainer. I could drive fuel trucks or something like that. I just wanted to be around aircraft. I figured, hey, air traffic control can be a six-figure job on the civilian side. And you get to tell pilots what to do. Exactly. You get to tell pilots what to do. So how long have you been in the Air Force and what rank are you currently? Currently a senior airman. I feel like a lot of the videos when I interview people, it's going to be mostly senior airmen. I've been in since August of 2016, three years in August. So when you got air traffic control, did you get that job in-depth or did you join as an open contract and then get it later on? I signed the contract with a recruiter. I had air traffic control, something in com and something in cybersecurity. My recruiter had initially came back to me saying, hey, you got fire protection. This is like number four or five on my list because I just had to give the whole 10 thing to the recruiter. He said, I can either give you fire protection right now and you can leave come like June, right after graduated high school. Or you can wait a little bit until one of those top three jobs open. And I said, I'll wait a little bit. That's why I joined in August. You had the opportunity to take another job before that, which is fire protection, which a lot of people might also want. That's a pretty hard job to get as well. You got lucky. You got your top pick, but then you also got suggested or you got given a job that isn't one that most people usually come by over taking the fire protection one. That's just me though. So earlier you were talking about you were still going to have E3 regardless whether you signed a four or six year contract. So what contract did you end up going with? So air traffic. So the FSC air traffic requires a six year contract because of how long the on the job training is. I did not know this. So this is new to me too. Yes. Air traffic control requires the six year contract. So if you're looking for a four year something short air traffic control is not going to be your thing. That's good to know. I definitely did not know that. I know there's some jobs that require six years, but I did not know air traffic control air traffic requires six years. All right. So some of the people that are still watching that probably very much interested in air traffic control want to know a little bit more. So we're going to jump into tech school. Where was it and how long was it? Tech school was at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi. The city is Biloxi. I was there for three and a half months. No washbacks. No like now being held back. No delays in training or anything like that. Tech school is pretty. Actually, I want to most of the jobs. I don't really touch on the tech school stuff. But air traffic control is a pretty stressful job. Isn't it like I I've known of a few people that actually have washed out of air traffic control. They wait in the maintenance. So what was tech school like if you could sum it up in like two minutes of just talking about tech school? How intense was the training and how difficult was it? How many people did you see maybe wash out or get held back? Class of about 10 or so other people, three people from my class that got washed back one week. Because there's like different weeks of training that you have to take a test every week. Not a test every week, but there's different blocks of training like block one, two, three, four, five. Gotcha. Block one is just an information dump. A whole bunch of this is what these words mean. And then block two starts with more like informational detail about what radar is at tech school. You train both radar and tower. I trained first in radar. So pretty much you'd sit down at a computer screen at a radar radar scope. You have the instructor plugged in with you so that they can listen to everything that you're hearing. Another room. There would be other people entering commands for all the pilots to move the little dots and all that. How to descend and just change all the numbers. Basic kind of just sequencing aircraft to the landing runway. You were in charge of making sure and making sure these two in radar. It's making sure that these two dots don't don't get too close. Okay. Was it stressful when you were learning? Like as a brand new airman? As a brand new airman, it was kind of like a video game. You're like speaking into your microphone and you have like a little push button and then you hit with your foot and that kind of stuff. Where I think the stress comes in is when you start failing or you do something wrong and you just snowball into just more. You make a mistake and then you are overthinking that mistake instead of like focusing on the now. You either over... So then you're overthinking stuff that already happened preventing you from making decisions in the now? Some mistakes depending on what you're doing can like impact the rest of your traffic flow. So then you'd have to like fix a bunch of things? So if you had to adjust one guy by two miles back, you'd have to slow down the next guy and the next guy and the next guy and everybody else coming in. So it's like a domino effect almost. It can be depending on what kind of mistake you're making. So don't make mistakes. So after radar, the tower uses different, mostly visual separation, some like runway separation. And you have to be able to sequence aircraft like in a smaller area than you do with the radar. Because in the radar, you have space, you can bring people around. But in the tower, you've only got your pattern, which is maybe two miles long, a mile over and then two miles back. Training in tech school in the tower was more of a challenge for me. I'm currently in the tower now, but at tech school, it was definitely more stressful in the tower than it was in the radar. I've seen a few videos of like air traffic control like training videos or like they explain the job, I guess. And they always have like a headset on with like a little like screen in front of them. So is that radar? Yes. So if you're sitting with the screen in front of you, that's radar. If you're in the tower, you've got the windows. So the tower is you're looking at the runway and you're looking at the taxiways and everything. Correct. So you basically see in all aircraft that they're getting. The whole airfield, everything, everything at all. So currently you're stationed at Nome's Air Force Base because I live in Las Vegas and that's where you are now. So either you'd be TDI here or you live here, but you just got stationed here. And then before that you were where? McConnell Air Force Base, which is in Wichita, Kansas. Was it terrible there? Not at all. Wasn't? Not at all. We actually passed through there on our road trip. We actually stayed at Matt's house on our five month road trip when we were driving through Wichita. So it's funny that he got orders here because now we're meeting up again. I'll throw the link up above if you guys want to check out the vlog where we hung out with Matt. But on top of talking about the two bases that you've been to, what other bases can you go to? I know you had mentioned Minot and Shepard. So is there like a select few bases that you can go to or are you guys just kind of everywhere? As an air traffic controller, you can go to really any Air Force base that has an airfield. In fact, even... So there's a missile range, White Sands missile range in New Mexico. I know some controllers that I knew at McConnell who pieced yes to there, which is actually an army missile range. This is the part of the video which most people that are watching for this are probably interested in and I'm just going to let you talk about your job. So you already explained the two types that you guys have, right? Is there anything else on top of that other than tower and radar? Do you guys have any other duties? Do you have to have somebody that's in charge of training? When we went to McConnell, you actually showed us the air traffic control tower when we were on our road trip and we didn't record any of it because we're not going to take our camera and record all that stuff. But you have these monitors that you would simulate and is there somebody that is the person that runs that air traffic control as well? What I was showing you was the tower simulator. So just it's the same equipment that we use in tech school. It's got about five or so just TV screens that are all linked up and they show an image of the airfield and... So it makes it you seem like you're like in the tower basically. Yeah, yeah, it simulates the windows in the tower. So is the person that is in charge of doing that training, are they air traffic control? They are a controller, yes. Do they get like slotted for that for a certain time? No, there are different additional duties like publications, monitor, training simulator. And then there are actual like office positions like NCOIC of the NSE. There's the chief controller office. There's someone who's in charge of records, someone who's in charge of like monthly protests, which is not like pick a fence. That's what I would have thought. Yeah, it's a proficiency test every month. So we have to keep testing to keep up to make sure you're qualified. So yeah, if you fail, if you fail protests, you'll get like an LOR or something like saying like, hey, stop doing your protests and if you fail too many of them, they'll kick you out of the career. Whoa, so don't fail again. Don't fail. Something about air traffic is that when you fail, there's a big process that goes on. If you ever break your separation minima or you got forbid crash two aircrafts into each other, the entire tower, no matter who's working, has to do drug tests, has to go out and everything is recorded. So they'll have to pull tapes. They'll have to like interview everyone who was there. So another thing when you get to your first base after tech school or the 50% of you that do, because normally it's about a 50% washout rate at tech school. Holy smokes. Yeah, that's why you see that's why you see so many retrainies. That's like a super high amount for just like a normal job, like not like a special operations job. There's about 50% at tech school. There's about another third to 50% once you get to your first base that also washout because you're not playing with simulations anymore. No, once you get to your base, you're playing with a million dollar jets. You're playing with lives. Yes. That's crazy. Lives. When you get to your first base, you'll enter upgrade training, which is mostly on the job. There are depending on where you go, there's different positions from what I've seen. There's a front load, which is just all the information. This is what Nellis Air Force bases like or McConnell Air Force bases like. This is what broad FAA rules are, what broad air traffic rules are, just like to make sure that you know your stuff and that tech school didn't put out like someone who doesn't know what they're doing. Yeah. Then you move into, at least for me, I moved into flight data. Flight data is a position of the tower that does all the other coordination without the facilities like base operations. They'll talk to the fire department or command post or whatever job they need to. There's also different recorded lines that anybody can call that they're responsible for. Then there's ground control. Ground control talks to all the vehicles that want to move across the runways or inspect the runways. Ground control is in charge of maintaining separation so that no aircraft go nose to nose and get stuck and then have to get towed out of the way because that delays operations. They have to make sure that at some places they have to issue clearances to those aircraft. At other places, the radar will do that and then you move into local. Local is in charge of all the planes in the air. They make sure that everybody is sequenced. Everybody knows who they're following. They have people on site. They got whatever spacing maneuvers they need to do to make sure that they meet those separation minimum. So that's probably what people think air traffic control. Yes. When you think air traffic control, the person with the headset that's sitting there talking and that's watching out the glass windows on the runways. So local's like that's the one thing and maybe radar. But you just listed a bunch of other things that aren't even exactly what you would think air traffic control does. Because we're responsible for the controlled movement areas on the airfield. So if it's controlled, it's us talking to them. Local is the iconic portion of at least the tower. So you originally joined because you want to do air traffic control possibly as a civilian. So now that you've been doing this for almost three years, what's your outlook on this? Are you happy with the Air Force? I've definitely enjoyed my time in the Air Force. We haven't had or at least I haven't had any major issue like you may have experienced. I haven't had that kind of like negative environment. Air traffic has crew rest hours that require you to have a certain amount of off time. So you can't just work 12 to 12 to 12 to 12 to 12 and just maintenance doesn't have this. Just live on 12s. Yeah. So the schedule is nice. The just the environment people understand like what you're struggling with. So I overall planning on planning on re-enlisting. Yeah. Okay. At this point and you're at three years. When did when do you think you decided that? I don't know. Probably about a year ago. Okay. So around your two year mark. It took me. So that's why you're really hoping to make staff because you're planning on staying in. Yes. Make staff. All right to finish off this interview. It's also getting dark. So I apologize for this. We have this little tiny lamp as our lighting because we got rid of our ring light with our road trip. So I apologize for the lighting here. But I'm sure you guys don't really care because you're just listening to information. I'm going to let Matt give you guys some advice on any of you guys that are looking to go air traffic control in the Air Force. Just don't do like something stupid like don't smoke. We don't get like don't get you I don't show up to work drunk. Don't whoa. Yeah. Don't show up to work drunk. Don't show up to work hungover even when you first get to your first base. As long as you study because there's a lot to study. There's a lot to learn and there's a lot of skills and stuff to develop as long as you're showing that you want to succeed the people your trainers the supervisors everybody will help you succeed if you show I've seen it if you show that you don't like this if you show that you are not wanting to like succeed at this they'll wash you out and they'll put you over. You're almost a risk for people at that point because if you're like I don't really care or you're not taking it serious. I'm like for one you're in charge of people's lives. Yeah. If you don't take it serious and your trainer your supervisor already put you up and you get rated you get certified on everything and then you still don't have like some kind of I want to be here. I want to succeed kind of motivation then you're going to crash planes you're going to break separation going to have a vehicle on the runway when somebody is coming in a land and you're going to get pulled you're going to get kicked out and everybody's going to have to do drug tests. Don't make other people do drug tests for real something I noticed you're seeing there's a lot to learn so in my job for instance we can go out and we can like mess up up on the aircraft and then they look it over and be like no this is wrong redo it. My on-the-job training I can mess up and as long as it's corrected before the aircraft flies we're good but for you like your training is like you have to study and know what you're doing before you do it probably want you to know what you're doing before you're up there telling pilots what to do. Exactly. How much time did it take you to feel comfortable talking to a pilot and like controlling stuff? First time I plugged into ground which was my first time actually talking to real pilots I felt prepared enough because I knew the phraseology I knew what to say when they called up for an engine start and knew what they said when they were ready to go knew how to read a clearance because I wanted to learn I wanted to succeed. So something about air traffic that may have not come up before is air traffic control does not have CDCs. I would have thought you guys would have. No. So we had a CDC it's your career development course. Yes. So it's basically your job like in a book so my job when I joined had five volumes now it has four so there's like four books like an encyclopedia for your job essentially just everything you have to know in order to progress and it's like the most general basic like it covered all five of those books cover everything that we did in our job as a brand new airman. How do you guys learn or study or how? Wait as soon as you get to your first base or even at Tech School still because you are still doing the same kind of training when you get to your first base we have a Federal Aviation Administration the FAA publications. We have our Air Force publications that we have to follow. We have our NELA specific or McConnell specific wherever specific instructions and then as we're starting the whole time you're three level until you have one year on station and and a facility certification. Do you have to read all these publications and you don't have to know everything and you don't have to memorize every single detail as long as you have shown in your workplace that you are competent and know like how to work air traffic then you're considered like intelligent or proficient enough to be awarded your five level. Alright guys well that was an interview with Matt Senior Airman in the United States Air Force about air traffic control if you guys learned something new or appreciate this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and comment down below let us know if you guys learned anything new or if you appreciate this video also go ahead and tell Matt thank you in the comment section because you're like the only person that I personally know that's air traffic control so thanks for coming here and doing the interview sure thing and I don't know if there's anything else you want to send people out with or we would show you his coin that he has but he doesn't have it on him but you guys will learn about that when you join the Air Force. You'll get that you'll learn about that coin when you get when you get rated. Alright thanks for watching guys.