What The Air Traffic Controller Saw

Airway Facilities & Abilities

2012-01-31T16:15:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I dream in VFR ~ only to awake amid rapidly deteriorating conditions. Why am I always surprised? Pilots and controllers know full well that clouds can conceal some pretty nasty twists, so we should also recognize that even the most ideal flight conditions might take an unexpected turn against us. In perfect VFR weather though, we're not always as mentally prepared for problems. Favorable conditions, complacency and high expectations are powerful drugs. They could make me so high that unforeseen troubles and the subsequent emotional plunges would result in harder landings and longer recovery times. When those nasty twists occurred at work, I was always thankful for those who could step up and somehow clear the air. If the twist involved one of the many tools of our trade, I was thankful for the technicians of our Airway Facilities staff.

Late 1970s, early November. It was one of those days when the idea of going to work really energized me. From the first morning cup of coffee to that last post-shift bottle of beer, life was going to be good. When I met up with my carpool buddies, I could see they were equally anxious to strap on their headsets. As we sputtered onto the main highway in Carl's slightly out-of-tune Beetle, everyone bubbled enthusiastically about the great weather. Winds were light, so the airport would most likely be running on our optimum runway and airspace configuration. Visual approaches would rule the day and there'd probably be very few departure restrictions. In other words; it looked like we were in for a high volume, happy to be here, whipped cream kind of shift. We knew it was going to be smooth, sweet and a hell of a lot of fun!

When Carl's VW finally skidded to a stop in the facility parking lot, everyone clambered out and peered over at the airfield. As expected, things were looking good. Aroused by the possibilities, we started our brisk walk into work. Carl was so excited that he didn't even notice the Beetle's right front tire was going flat. Neither did the rest of us. We wouldn't discover that till shift's end, when it would be referred to as the last straw.

Arriving at the facility's secure entrance, someone swiped their badge, punched a code into the keypad and the four of us hurried, in tandem, toward the sign-in log. Unlike most evening shifts, I was actually hoping for a tower assignment. Conditions were perfect for watching airplanes and Big Time's lofty tower cab was the place to do it. I really needed some tower proficiency time anyway, and a "CAFB" day like this was the best way to get it. I just needed to convince Pete to send me up. That wasn't going to happen.

Entering the TRACON we immediately noticed something different about it. But what? There was still the usual cacophony of control instructions, the hollering back and forth between sectors and, of course, the cigarette smoke. Actually, there was a bit more smoke than normal. It was so thick, in fact, that I couldn't tell whether it was coming from the ashtrays, the equipment or both. Still, there was something missing from the continual din of our musty, timeworn radar room. I noticed an abnormally large group of people standing at our Flight Data position. That's when I realized what was different. The incessant chatter, usually emanating from our Flight Strip printers (FSPs), was missing.

There were three printers mounted at the Data position. One printed the arrival and overflight strips, one printed departure strips and the third machine was a spare. Under normal circumstances, the arrival and departure printers ran nearly non-stop. Sounding like a chorus of teleprinters, they banged out new and amended information controllers would need on traffic entering or exiting their airspace.

Sample departure strip from a little aerodrome in Texas.

Strips would be slid into plastic holders and disbursed to the appropriate radar sector. This particular afternoon though, in the smoky chaos of the pre-evening rush radar room, they sat like cinder blocks ~ stone still and silent. There was, however, another ominous noise coming from the Data position. It would be the sound of those deteriorating conditions I mentioned earlier.

What met our ears sounded less like an ATC facility and more like a call center in the basement of some desperate and acutely confused telemarketing company. I heard one controller muttering; "Yeah . . . yeah . . . uh huh. What was the airway after Falmouth?" As he spoke, he was writing on a flight strip. Two other controllers stood at the data console; each one scribbling frantically on blank strips. A couple of Airway Facilities technicians wearing worried faces brushed quickly past me. They were pushing a cart piled high with parts and tools. That was the moment when I realized this was not going to be a "whipped cream kind of shift." It was going to be some kind of nightmare. Imagine your Sunday paper not showing up on the doorstep. Maybe a wheel fell off the kid's bike? Who knows. So the phone rings. You pick up the receiver and a guy says; "This is The Gazette calling with your Sunday paper. Are you ready to copy?" You scramble for a pen and several large pads of paper. That kind of nightmare.

For some reason, the whole scene made me think of my old Air Force roommate William.

The old AFCS patch

I lived in the barracks during much of my Air Force time. It was a building that controllers, radio and radar technicians, plus many of the other enlisted troops who had jobs in the Communications Squadron called their home. The place was more like a college dormitory where everyone wore uniforms for half the day. The rest of the time was usually spent in civilian clothes, planning and executing forays to any of the many bars and clubs that thrived outside the base perimeter.

William, my first roommate, was a freckled redhead from central Pennsylvania. A radar technician ~ he was one of the guys who, armed with a selection of scewdrivers and diagnostic tools, kept our aging GCA unit operational. The two of us shared a bathroom, ate at the same table in the chow hall and trekked across the base together when it was time for work. I'd often find voluminous technical manuals strewn around our room; each opened to a schematic of one of the many systems he maintained. William studied a lot and I admired him for it. After all; two or three chapters in just one of his books were thicker than the entire Air Traffic Control manual I kept, mostly unread, under my bunk. He and the other guys in his shop were all that stood between us controllers and the huge pain in the ass of a radar failure.

Ground Controlled Approach (GCA) Unit

There were several technicians in my squadron. Their areas of expertise covered radios, radar, telephone equipment and nearly everything else a controller needed to get through the day. Some of the techs even maintained our VOR and TACAN sites. We had no idea what they did between equipment outages and didn't really care. As long as someone showed up when something broke, we were happy . . . very happy.

Although the pilots in our Base's fighter wing flew the most advanced aircraft in the Air Force's inventory, our ATC equipment was fragile, antiquated and capricious. Somehow though, our techs kept everything running fairly well. They saved our asses nearly every day and, for that, we regarded them as peers and partners in the mission. Still, during those after-hours forays into inebriation, we'd rib them mercilessly and they'd do the same to us. The truth was that every Air Force controller I knew had the highest regard for those guys. We'd lie for them, trade countless rounds of drinks in the local gin mills and, when they transferred out, we'd lament their departure. Years later, I would discover a kind of caste system in the FAA that placed Airway Facilities (AF) personnel a few notches beneath the "Air Traffic elite." It seemed AF existed solely to support us and, in the opinions of many, that could only be done from below.

Standing in that late afternoon TRACON, with three inoperative strip printers, I could hear frenetic muttering coming from the Flight Data position as controllers hand-copied flight plans, subsequent amendments, GENOTs and other data from the Center. Information on departing flights would then be relayed to the tower, by phone, where another controller had to make a copy for Clearance Delivery, Ground and Local Control.

I could also hear an undercurrent of dissatisfaction and mild contempt coming from controllers seated at the approach sectors, like "What the hell is the point in having a spare printer if those idiots can't keep it working?!!" They were writing their own arrival strips by using information from the alpha-numeric data on their radar displays. This was a time-consuming and annoying distraction that only intensified as the evening rush of inbounds began creeping toward the outer fixes and the airplanes needed more and more attention. Although we had Handoff positions, where someone could sit next to the radar controller and write strips, they were rarely staffed. Today was no exception. There was a lot of angst and anger in the air, and it was all being directed at the Airway Facilities technicians who just couldn't seem to get those printers running.

Those damned printers, among the most plain and plebeian pieces of equipment in our inventory, were major labor-saving devices. As with most things, we took them for granted until something went wrong. Then we wondered why such a basic device couldn't either be fixed quickly or replaced. In this case though, replacing any of them wouldn't have helped. None of the three devices were working and we were far beyond the quick fix time frame.

More problems emerged. The extra manpower needed to make calls and write strips was wreaking havoc with the break schedule. Guys were working well beyond the desired two hour limit on their sectors and people were getting testy. Arrival restrictions had been imposed on all surrounding facilities and departure delays were beginning to mount. Phones kept ringing at the Watch desk but no one was there to answer. The TRACON Supervisor kept glaring at those technicians ~ expressing his frustration in any way he could without interrupting their work. Outside, the sun was setting on what should have been a perfect day for working airplanes.

By now, a Data Systems Specialist had joined the group huddled around the inert printers. He was talking to his counterpart at the Center. Apparently the issue was not a mechanical malfunction after all. It took an hour or two of disassembling and diagnosing but someone finally determined that Big Time's printers were actually in fine working order. They were simply not receiving data from the Center's host computer (from which all our flight data originated). It would later be discovered that someone using a backhoe, many miles from the airport, had inadvertently ripped up the cable that connected Big Time's FSPs with the Center. Repairs would take more hours than we had left on our shift.

The two AF techs vanished but the mayhem continued. We kept making calls, writing strips and working airplanes. A few controllers were asked to stick around for a couple hours of overtime. I felt bad for those AF guys. They had been the focus of much derision for several hours but took no exception to it. Understanding they could do nothing more to help, they packed up quietly and went back to their office. Nobody apologized to them and no one thanked them for their trouble ~ myself included. By the time they left, I was too busy arguing with a Center controller about the spacing between two arrivals.

The shift finally ended. Walking out of the facility, I felt sluggish, like I was wading through quicksand. A mild breeze wafted the smell of jet exhaust across our path as we four carpoolers trudged toward the parking lot. Feeling pretty deflated by events of the last eight hours, nobody had much to say. All we wanted to do by now was have a few beers and head home to bed. As we neared the lot, it looked like the right front wheel of Carl's Volkswagen had rolled into a pothole. When we realized the tire was flat, we were relieved to learn that Carl had a spare. He popped the trunk lid, only to discover the spare was also deflated. Feeling fairly flattened ourselves, we were almost too tired to figure this thing out.

Although sympathetic to our plight, none of the other guys in the lot were headed in our direction. They were also as anxious as we were to get home. In less than five minutes, we were all alone in that lot, glaring at the useless tire in the same way we had glared at those AF techs earlier in the day. Then we started glaring at Carl. There was a difference though. Unlike our AF guys, this was a situation that Carl could have prevented from happening. He muttered something about "the last straw," then started walking back to the tower. There, he was able to borrow one of the mid-shift guy's car keys. We grabbed the VW's spare tire, threw it into the back of a blue Ford sedan and sped away from the airport.

It was oppressively quiet in that Ford until we got to Carl's place. Climbing out of the car, I reminded the others it was my turn to drive tomorrow ~ making a mental note to check my spare tire.

Here's the epilogue. As a Supervisor dealing with an equipment problem, I'd sometimes have to go looking for the AF guys if they didn't answer their desk phone. The search eventually took me to one of the facility's equipment rooms. Along with radio and telephone switching equipment, they kept tools, spare parts and a lot of broken things in there. It looked like a shop that repaired pocket watches, refrigerators and old television sets by interchanging the parts.

A wiring diagram for the Great Pyramid?

Of course there were also the ubiquitous stacks of technical manuals; one or two of which were usually opened to a page of schematics. To my brain, they might as well have been hieroglyphics. Either was equally undecipherable. I could neither walk like an Egyptian or talk like a technician but was glad to know someone actually understood the stuff. While us controllers got through the day largely on our quick wits and aggressive decision making ~ these guys had to study constantly, work unerringly and go off for weeks of additional training whenever new equipment came on line. And they did it to support us. You just had to love 'em.

I should add a few lines about how we in Air Traffic could place the AF staff squarely in the middle of our own internal issues. Anyone in air traffic supervision knew that all equipment required periodic checks and preventive maintenance (PM). If such checks were not performed within prescribed time intervals, the particular piece of equipment would lose its certification. That meant we couldn't use it again until it was re-certified. For example, a tech might arrive at the Watch Desk one morning and ask us to release an ILS system for three hours of PMs. It would be up to shift management to approve it or not. Sometimes existing conditions (weather, traffic volume, etc.) made approval unwise or impossible. Sometimes though, a technician's request was denied solely because that Supervisor and/or that team felt they needed every security blanket they could keep in their clutches ~ thus foisting approval and associated impacts onto another team. I believe the popular euphemism might be "Kicking the can down the road?"

Eventually though, AF would have to take that system down or be in violation of maintenance timetables. They weren't about to let that happen. If a situation ever got to that point, Air Traffic would lose their right to refuse. Think of it this way. You miss that 36,000 mile service mentioned in your car's owner's manual, simply because you didn't feel like turning the car over to some mechanic for a day. The "Check Engine" light eventually comes on and your car immediately shuts down ~ no matter where you are or where you're going. Even worse; it won't start again until you get that servicing done. The rules made PMs a kind of technical time bomb that would eventually go off if not disarmed in time.

© NLA Factor, 2012

Aboard Southern Airways

2012-01-22T11:08:00.000-05:00

On Politics, Passing Acquaintances And Change

2012-01-12T09:51:00.000-05:00

George Wallace was running for the Democratic nomination. So was Jimmy Carter. Translation? Whenever I ventured into the break room, chances were that Billy would be sitting in there, expounding loudly and at length on his political views. Billy (no relation to Jimmy) was a professed redneck from somewhere in south Georgia. He railed against Jerry Ford and never missed an opportunity to extol the merits of voting a southern boy into the White House. It seemed we were in need of a change and Jimmy was just the guy to do it.

Billy raised a few valid points and had my interest for a while. In time though, his pontificating turned redundant, then it turned boring. His incessant partisan pounding finally became too annoying for me to take. I'd heard it all before. If I was lucky, Billy's time in the breakroom would end well ahead of mine so I could get a few minutes of peace. If not, I'd usually end up going back to work before my break was over. It's not that I had a problem with Jimmy Carter. He seemed like an honest enough fellow. Billy was my problem. He got so damned excited over this stuff. To me though, politics was about as exciting as . . . this?

Throw in a free side-order of Saltine crackers and I'm in!

Political parties and their politics just didn't garner much attention from me when I was controlling airplanes for a living. Pundits who believed they could make sense of it all or somehow tilt my opinions left or right only added more confusion to the daily bedlam of Big Time. To me, it was just an off-key and endlessly grating soundtrack for the ongoing dramas I faced at work. Most of us learned it was best to simply tune it out. The President himself couldn't generate much buzz unless he was handing out an extra day of holiday pay on the Friday after Thanksgiving ~ or maybe firing thousands of controllers. We were usually preoccupied with more immediate issues like, metaphorically speaking, how to separate the snowflakes in a blizzard.

Nixon was in the White House when I was hired but whatever happened in the Oval Office didn't faze most of us. Can I say it wasn't on our radar? Anyway, we were far more concerned over what was happening in our own front office. I don't recall whether it was oval, rectangular or square shaped but it was clearly in bad shape. That, plus there was always enough facility politics to keep the break room gossip going ad infinitum. So, who needed more of it? When it came to matters concerning our elected representatives, my personal feelings usually ranged somewhere between indifference and ambivalence. Politics was a distraction and, in my line of work, with my fugitive attention span, I couldn't handle any increase in distractions.

My attitude hasn't changed much over the years. I may slip up now and then but still try to avoid political stuff. It ain't easy. News periodicals, television and the Internet are already saturated with more cant, slant and commentary than there are degrees on a compass. It gives me vertigo, so why would I even think about generating more of it? I believe there's a reasonably convincing case that opinions actually are like assholes. Since everyone has their own, why would anyone want to hear mine?

I also realize that penning my own political views would require that I have some kind of partisan predilection. I don't. Maybe I can't. Here's the thing. There are too many problems with me. I was never responsible enough to call myself a conservative and besides; I couldn't possibly meet their moral threshold. Another sad set of truths are that I'm not smart enough to know what's best for everyone. That, plus my momma taught me never to call people names when I disagreed with them. All this and more combined to exclude me from ever practicing punditry. It's probably best for me to stick with writing about things I'm fairly familiar with.

NLA Factor
Class of '02

I don't think anyone's parochial pronouncements effect much change in other people's beliefs, no matter how well they're stated. I learned a long time ago (1981 to be exact) that I couldn't change anyone's mindset; no matter what I said or what I wrote. The fact is that no one could ever change my mind either; no matter what they said or wrote. Experiences are the true instruments of change. I write about my own experiences here; knowing they won't really change anyone else. They changed me though. What I don't know is just how much they changed me. Could I still be that goofy kid in my high school yearbook photo? That is a question I'm not qualified to answer. Ask the last girl I dated before graduation.

So now, like a recurring nightmare, I'm dealing with another Primary Election season and all the attending rhetoric. I guess I have an irreconcilable indifference to it all but my hat is off to anyone who can talk or write about it in a non-divisive way. Generally though, I think that kind of writing serves mainly as a pressure relief valve for the author. Getting a little pent up vitriol off the chest can make a writer feel much better. As for the reader ~maybe not so much. Personally, I'd rather write about Bonnie and Claire.

Bonnie transferred into Big Time a few years after me. I can't remember where she came from but it must have been a busy facility. Already well versed in the tower and TRACON arts, she soon proved to be a very capable controller. Smart, single and saucy, Bonnie could cause more excitement than a radar failure in a rainstorm. Take, for instance, the day she sauntered into work wearing a blue t-shirt, lettered in white with the word "Doable" across the front. Pete, our irascible, disheveled dictator of an Area Manager, took one look and threatened to send her home. Not for some puritanical predilection. Oh no. Pete was a ribald kind of guy who used expletives and four-letter words like a carpenter uses a hammer. They drove his point home loudly and quickly. Pete's objection over Bonnie's attire was more about the medium than the message. You see, current facility dress code prohibited t-shirts.

Bonnie ended up in one of the main terminal's gift shops where she found a twenty-dollar shirt sporting the airport's marketing logo. The "medium" aspect of his objections now mitigated, Pete let her go to work. As to the message on that notorious t-shirt? In time, a couple guys in the facility were rumored to have learned there can be truth in advertising.

I felt bad for Bonnie and the other singles at Big Time. Social life outside our circle of coworkers was difficult. With the rotating shifts, frequently changing days off, weekend and late night work, there wasn't much opportunity to meet people outside the profession. It was challenging enough for the married folks but especially hard for people like Bonnie. The outcome of it all was that we had little choice but to fraternized with our coworkers. It was a kind of social inbreeding; as unhealthy as it was unavoidable. In many ways, we were closer to our team members than we were with our immediate families. We saw each other at our best and our worst. We had to depend on each other to make the right moves at the right times. Where some people might, one day, have to trust a close relative to handle delicate or potentially dire situations, we had to trust the relative strangers in our control rooms. We also had to trust all the anonymous pilots who flew, unseen, through our sectors every day. It was a strange paradox that we trusted them all, but the moment we hung up our headsets for the day, we trusted no one.

I liked working with Bonnie. Before she transferred into Big Time, the only woman on our team was Claire. She was already a well seasoned journeyman when I hired on. Stylistically, Bonnie and Claire were at opposite poles in their approach to working traffic and the contrasts became more obvious as time passed. Claire was invariably conservative, conventional, practical and dispassionate. For example, something might abruptly reduce the airport acceptance rate, causing Final Sectors to need more miles-in-trail from the approach controllers. Suddenly, ten miles between arrivals wasn't sufficient. Now the planes needed to be 20 miles apart, slowed to 180 knots and tucked neatly onto a downwind leg. Doing so might require Claire to go into an immediate hold at her outer fixes while simultaneously issuing a series of extreme vectors to spread out the flights already on their way to the finals. This kind of play often lead to bedlam. While other controllers might have started bitching, Claire simply bent to the task, with no questions asked, for as long as needed. Quietly doing whatever had to be done, she was the embodiment of efficiency.

During my bewildering days as a developmental at Big Time, Claire's signature ended up on a lot of my training reports. Knowledgeable, unflappable and focused, she was the ideal training instructor. As I progressed further and further into the operation, I realized there were plenty of things to bitch about. Claire showed me how pointless that was, compared to just dealing with things and moving forward. Complaining burned energy, was an unnecessary distraction and nobody wanted to work with a whiner.

Then there was Bonnie, who managed her sector like a mad scientist. She invented a crazy, new idea every few minutes; often stabbing at an interphone button to coordinate her latest scheme with other affected sectors. A bit raucous but never reckless, creative energy seemed to seep from her headset and spread through the room like gas fumes. She was nearly as explosive.

While Claire ran a quiet, standard operation where things rarely went wrong, Bonnie's operation was characterized by her derring-do. She pushed relentlessly; pressing adjacent sectors for whatever was needed to make things work. In the throes of inspiration, she'd often fly out of her chair and dash across the TRACON to another sector. Once there, she'd grab the controller by his shoulder and point at some radar targets ~ describing her plan in rapid-fire detail. Then she'd rush back to her own scope to reel off a string of control instructions. Sometimes her plan didn't work but she nearly always had another one that was equally entertaining.

Some controllers were bothered by her boundless ingenuity and unrelenting aggressiveness. These were the guys who thought the word "minimums" was one of their performance standards. Bonnie was a "maximum" kind of gal. I kept up as best I could ~ often wishing I could wash those bursts of ambient energy down with a cold beer. If I could have tightened my headset like a vise, I still wouldn't have been able to squeeze as many ideas out of my skull each day as Bonnie could in an hour. Inspiration just seemed to fly off the top of her head. She was a natural.

As far as I was concerned, Bonnie and Claire combined many of the most highly valued characteristics of an air traffic controller. I was glad to be on their team; especially during those shifts when the trials and tribulations seemed more numerous than our standard methods of dealing with them. When Claire's safe, orderly and expeditious teamed up with Bonnie's creative, assertive and efficient ~ a lot of airplanes were going to be moved ~ no matter what. As you might expect ~ when a tough shift ended, Claire would head straight home, while Bonnie would follow most everyone else to the nearest bar.

Eventually 1981 rolled in and Bonnie came up with one more crazy idea. Unlike the ideas I admired her for, this one was completely reckless. I did my best to talk her out of it and I'm sure Claire did as well. Keep in mind what I said earlier about not being able to change anyone's mindset. Bonnie wasn't listening to conflicting views or unwelcome advice. Experiences taught her that pushing hard and staying the course would eventually bring success. She was confident that this would be no exception.

Unfortunately, it was a major exception. In the blink of an eye, Bonnie was gone. I saw her a few times just after the strike but she eventually disappeared along with with everyone else on the picket lines. Sometimes mad scientists create monsters and sometimes those monsters destroy their creators.

Redneck Billy landed a job in the Regional Office sometime after the strike and I never heard from him again. When I finally left Big Time myself, I tried to keep up with Claire. You know how it is though. Life has room for just so many relationships and, like it or not, some are eventually supplanted by newer ones. When it comes to keeping friends, life reminds me of a holding pattern that can only keep so many airplanes. The most recent arrivals come in at the top while the oldest ones get pushed out of the bottom and move on.

The entire cast of characters from my Big Time days have moved on; myself included. I still remember every one of them though. Memories are the last remaining vestiges of our long-gone, moved on friendships and acquaintances. The characters may be missing but they've left behind a life long legacy of smiles on demand. I'll never forget Bonnie, Claire and so many others who enriched my life through the years. Redneck Billy even crosses my mind whenever a political message comes on the TV.

The experiences I had with them all, whether good or bad, definitely changed me. But really; how much have I changed? There is no way for me to know for sure. I'd have to rely on the cast from my past to help measure the differences between then and now. After all that has happened, could I still be the frazzled, unraveled controller everyone knew back at Big Time? Again ~ I'm not qualified to answer. It's funny and ironic that when someone tells me "You've changed" I don't really believe them. And when I tell someone "I've changed" they don't really believe me. I guess it's the difference between perceptions and doubts. One thing is certain; I still don't like politics.

© NLA Factor, 2012

Another Groove

2011-12-22T17:30:00.000-05:00

The Eighties were finally coming to an end. By now, I felt like a projectile that had been fired through the entire decade at 365 days per second. The Nineties lay just ahead and I knew I was going to miss my mark unless I changed course. Time was moving on quickly and taking all the opportunities I ever dreamed of along for the ride. I felt a nagging sense of urgency ~ a need to catch up before being left behind. In haste, I threw all my career aspirations into a knapsack, ran along side and jumped on board. What this air traffic controller saw in the next ten years would eventually have me wishing I'd listened more closely to Timothy Leary, who said; "If you don't like what you're doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove." I did stop liking what I was doing and came to realize it was time to find a new groove. But it would take time.

I knew my career progression wasn't particularly linear. Rather than climbing a series of rungs on the ladder, my advancement appeared to be taking me upward but, at the same time, in circles. It was actually more like climbing a spiral staircase. I advanced upward but in continuous arcs, where every 180 degrees of travel had me heading back in the direction I'd just come from.

Sometimes though, I did seem to be putting distance between myself and the front line air traffic operation I still thought of as home. During those times, I felt myself becoming ineluctably absorbed into the cult of management. Those were the days when my old controller comrades would simply look on, shaking their heads at the mention of my name, while murmuring about how "another one" sold his soul for a desk and a title.

Then there were the times I'd seek refuge in that "home" environment where I was always most comfortable. Sadly though, It's true what Thomas Wolfe said. "You can't go home again." Giving up my headset meant I could no longer talk to pilots the way I used to. It also meant I couldn't talk to controllers the way I used to either. There was a "stuck mike" effect where I could hear them but they couldn't hear me. To the controllers though, the effect was just the opposite.

One of my stops along the way around was one facility's Plans and Procedures Office, where I served as Manager for a few awkward, baffling and challenging years (I'll just call that the "ABCs of management"). Still well connected to my tenacious controller roots, I hadn't yet developed the casual indifference typical of a professional staff functionary. The control room environment still energized me. Whenever my office window rattled with the roar of a departing heavy jet I'd usually jump up and look. I guess I couldn't (or wouldn't) break free of those damned roots. Nonetheless, I was expected to assume my new role, memorize a lot of unfamiliar lines and act the part.

One way that every Manager acted out their role was in a power play known as the meeting. With its diverse cast of characters, diverging interests, digressions and duplicities; the meeting could shift quickly from drama to comedy or even tragedy before finally being declared a farce. Important discussions and negotiations routinely took place between people who knew little or nothing about their adversary's area of expertise. Trust was always essential but usually foolish. The hidden agenda was a competitive sport.

It took time but I eventually realized the way for me to partially overcome this conundrum was simply by not limiting my contact with the other players to the narrow scope of a meeting. I engaged them at every opportunity and without an agenda (hidden or otherwise). From this, I gained a little understanding of their world and a lot of respect for their place in it. Once mutual respect was established? Well, it became a lot easier to build a sphere of trust around some very disparate organizations.

Building that mutual respect wasn't easy and it not always possible. It required an openness with others that many of my management colleagues weren't very comfortable with. Sadly but not surprisingly, gaining the trust of people in other offices and organizations would eventually cost me the trust of some folks within my own. The funny thing was; I could see this happening over time but didn't really care. I pushed on, doing what I believed was the right thing.

Some people were easier to work with than others. From the various airline and other aviation advocates, to the many offices of our local airport authority ~ meetings with those folks were normally cordial, constructive and enlightening. Generally speaking, they were an honorable bunch; knowledgeable, open and eager to share. Our own Airway Facilities (AF) Office was a prime example. Here were the people who serviced and certified nearly every piece of equipment we relied on. They took a lot of pride and care in their work; knowing that a sudden outage could bring air traffic to a halt or worse. A few controllers might end up soiling themselves.

Meeting with AF meant there'd be no hidden agenda. An issue was simply placed on the table for all to dissect. It could have been the scheduling of a required radar shutdown for maintenance, the installation of new equipment in the tower cab or any number of other issues adversely affecting ATC operations. Requirements, needs and impacts were discussed and agreements were eventually extracted ~ just like painless dentistry.

Sitting down with folks from the local airport authority was equally satisfying. These were usually large meetings, including individual airline representatives, general aviation advocates, fixed base operators and maybe even the military. Topics ranged from relatively minor airfield activity to long-term projects of epic proportions. We talked of snow removal plans, runway or taxiway closures, lighting repairs, grass cutting around movement areas and everything else needed to keep the place running. Everyone had a chance to articulate their concerns and provide input. I always left such meetings completely satisfied, if not happy. All my questions were answered and I was sometimes even able to influence the scheduling of certain work that would seriously impact air traffic.

Meetings that included other FAA offices, such as adjacent air traffic facilities, were usually a different story. They could be a kind of "rehab session" for the habitually well intended and trusting. This was where participants could relearn or reinforce their skills in deception, parochial position taking, posturing and plain old back-stabbing. It was all in good fun, of course. After all ~ humiliating, devaluing and disappointing one's adversaries at the meeting, while asserting one's own authority or facility sovereignty, was a time-honored tradition.

If the agenda included proposed interfacility airspace and/or procedural changes, you could bet the meeting would be contentious and likely to attract the Region's scrutiny. Such meetings typically included both staff and controller representation from each facility. Since controllers and management nearly always viewed operational matters differently, just gaining consensus among our own facility's negotiators could be hard. Nobody wanted to change or give up anything, unless doing so would solve at least one of their own problems or get them something in return. Nobody wanted to take on additional duties and responsibilities unless they were accompanied by some kind of "dowry" ~ usually in the form of increased staffing and/or added equipment. The Region's solution would be simpler, more imaginative and far more cost-effective. Their guidance? Do something and make it work with existing resources. Somehow, we never thought of that ourselves.

This brand of meeting made it obvious that some issues simply could never be settled locally. Faced with having to resolve dicey and disputable subjects, each facility's ideological walls were often raised and ringed with parapets. Drawbridges were pulled up and the moats were mined. They became fortresses; fending off change and vilifying its agents. Participation in these meetings should have entitled attendees to combat pay. I'd usually find myself in the middle of long and loud arguments, wishing I was back in the TRACON vectoring airplanes. The "alphabet groups" (ATA, AOPA, NBAA, etc.) would sit, metaphorically, on the sidelines ~ watching the battle while hoping for a profitable outcome. If they observed too much wheel-spinning, head-butting or a simple efficacy deficit; they might play a card that none of us had in our hands. It was a trump card, played judiciously and very effectively. They could go over our heads.

Those alphabet aviation advocates could pick up a phone and make their case directly to our Division Manager, Regional Administrator or even the top guy at 800 Independence Avenue. This card was played only when the stakes were high enough to warrant such a brash move. Shortly thereafter, we'd all receive some help and inspiration from our Regional Office. Depending on how highly visible or politically charged an issue was, the Region would send either a specialist or a particular Branch Manager. More often than not, whoever showed up would eventually side with whichever Facility's Manager had the most influence. Back then, you see, facilities were fiefdoms and their managers were lords. But as supreme arbiters, the Region's decision was sacrosanct. Really though. Could there have been anyone any further from the problem, in either proximity or perspicacity, with the power to impose a solution? Doubtful. On the other hand; there really were legitimate problems on the table, shrouded by a lot of saber rattling and rhetoric, and we seemed unable to solve them on our own, so....

By far, the most perilous of meetings were between Regional and facility management. These were, at their essence, akin to living with Lizzie Borden. You never knew who was going to get whacked or why. If the Division Manager showed up for a meeting, it was probably to either give someone an award or take someone's head. With luck, it wouldn't be yours. Once the deed was done and word got out, everyone would feign surprise and disbelief, then agree the victim had it coming.

These were strange days ~ a learning experience I suppose. Rife with ritual, arcane complexities and nuance, they're hard for me to describe. I guess you had to be there. Perhaps you were. If not, just be glad. I did have to be there. It was the path I chose and I followed it until I began to feel lost. I was an air traffic controller in an unfamiliar place far from home. In the long run I would come to realize it was time to pick up my needle and "move to another groove."

© NLA Factor, 2011

Coincidence?

2011-12-11T09:39:00.000-05:00

My trip back to Desolation Air Base was waylaid by a twist of fate and a couple of contemptible Colonels. I had thousands of miles to travel and less than sixteen hours to go before I'd be deemed AWOL (absent without official leave). Even worse, the Sergeant in charge of air traffic operations didn't have the most empathetic ear, so I knew there's be big trouble if I missed my next shift. It's not like I would have been the first one to be late returning from leave ~ but I knew I'd have been the most recent one. That was a bad place to be, because the Sergeant's tolerance for any particular infraction seemed to dwindle with each successive occurrence. Over half-way through his second tour of duty in Desolia, he was already a fairly manic guy. It wouldn't take much before he'd go completely maniacal and I didn't want to be in the cross hairs.

This little odyssey began when I decided I was long overdue for a getaway . . .

I needed to be somewhere else for a while ~ a place far away from these airplanes, this authority and the monotony of barracks life at a remote air base. Burned out on barely edible food, incredibly dumb pilots and the omnipresent dust, I needed to find that place where, as Billy Strayhorn once wrote; "one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life ~ to get the feel of life." The feel of life? Oh I needed some of that. The lush life was calling.

My deteriorating temperament was telling me it was time to put in for some leave. There was no shortage of good reasons to go. I was tired of listening to Mr. Fye, Desolia's sweaty and malodorous tower interpreter, trying to explain away the almost daily close calls between our air traffic and theirs. I needed food that didn't give me diarrhea. I needed a bed someplace where there were no other shift workers clamoring around while I was trying to sleep. I figured it was time for a break when the local beer, which normally tasted like it had been filtered through old gym socks, started tasting good to me. To quote Strayhorn again; "A week in Paris could ease the bite of it" but who could afford Paris on an E-4's pay? At least I didn't have to worry about airfare. The odds of my getting leave approved gave me enough to worry about.

Tower staffing numbers changed frequently, depending on how fast you could count backwards. Most of the Air Force's controller inventory was spread out across Southeast Asia. Some of the relatively few who were left got sent to backwater bases like Desolation. There weren't many of us here, so I worried. Asking the Sergeant for leave would be like asking if I could take his 19 year old daughter along with me. I put in my paperwork and hoped for a miracle. It came back approved. Maybe the Serg was drunk at the time or maybe he just wanted to punish the last guy who took leave by making him take on extra shifts while I was away. I didn't know and I didn't care. The smell of freedom was in my nostrils.

The troops stationed at Desolation Air Base got to take at least one trip per year on military aircraft. I started wondering about every destination we sent transport-type airplanes to. Those planes came in from almost everywhere and that's usually where they went when they left. North African, South Asian, Middle Eastern and European airports were at the far end of many flight plans ~ some further than others. I was most interested in a city that had decent hotels with rates to match my finances, good food and, hopefully, some interesting things to see. I wanted to live that "Lush Life" for a couple of weeks. As the starting date of my leave drew near, I had to make a decision.

Athens, Greece met all of my criteria ~ amazing archaeological sites, interesting food, friendly people and a favorable currency exchange rate. But best of all; it was far, far from Desolia. I just needed to get there. I knew we had a couple of flights headed that way each week so I started doing the necessary paperwork. Then, one dusty morning in May, I walked out onto the ramp and boarded a C-141 bound for Athens.

When the crew found out I worked in the control tower, they invited me to ride in the cockpit. I wondered; did they think I might serve as some kind of talisman ~ a "lucky charm" that would protect them from those menacing mishaps our airspace was known for? The Captain in command, a guy around my age named Max, radioed the tower that I was on board. This, to me, was kind of like informing a mugger you have a four-leaf clover in your wallet. It wasn't going to change the outcome.

We taxied out amidst a flock of the Desolian Air Force's F-84 trainers ~ all chattering away in the local lingo. Not knowing what they were saying only heightened the anxiety on the Starlifter's flight deck. Several of them took off ahead of us; turning left or right and vanishing into the turbid haze. As we started our takeoff roll, I took a deep breath, scanned the skies and crossed my fingers. We'd be relatively safe if we could somehow make it a hundred miles or so from the airport without being side-swiped by one of these low time trainees. From experience, our local pilots understood the probability that evasive maneuvers might be needed forthwith. By the same token, we controllers knew that steep turns and rapid altitude changes always took precedence over our control instructions. The deal was simple. Be ready for anything. But Max and his right-seat buddy weren't from around here.

The departure was blissfully uneventful but I could neither exhale or take my eyes off the sky ahead until we were well up into the flight levels. The two guys flying this thing were surprisingly cordial, given our Officer/Enlisted man relationship. They even insisted I call them by their first names while on board. Captain Max and his partner were based in The States but spent most of their time traveling along these high roads, doing pick-up and delivery everywhere. Reaching cruise altitude, we talked about some of the other bases they flew into, the latest news out of Vietnam and our home towns. Max was from Macon, Georgia where, as a teen, he watched the B-52s and big cargo planes flying in and out of Robbins AFB. He said it was his inspiration for joining the Air Force.

By far, the most popular topic was this amazing airplane. They were brimming with enthusiasm over it. In the long enroute hours we spent together, they explained every system that Starlifter had. Then, after one intermediate stop along the way, we arrived over the Aegean coastline. There were a few descent clearances and we were eventually turned over to Athens Approach. The Acropolis and its crown jewel Parthenon came into view. I was glad to be riding up front and able to take it all in while the flight crew set this huge machine up for landing.

Athens was all I expected and more. If ever there was an axis on the wheel of life . . . or civilization ~ this was it. Two weeks of palatable food, potent wine and perpetual Hellenic sunshine were exactly what was needed to rejuvenate my spirit and stamina. When it was time to leave, I was ready. I stuffed my jeans and tee shirts into the suitcase, climbed back into my Air Force uniform and called for a cab to the airport.

There was a military transport scheduled to depart Athens that day. After an intermediate stop, it would end up at Desolation Air Base. Seating was always contingent on space available and was normally assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. Not wanting to take any chances, I got to the airport very early and had my name added to the stand-by list. Although there were a few names ahead of mine, the airman working the counter was encouraging. According to him, not many people ever left sunny Athens for dusty Desolia. I listened but couldn't believe there were guys like me actually stationed here! This was his job ~ in Athens, Greece! Where the hell did I go wrong.

I sat down next to my suitcase and stared out at the Air Force ramp. The military terminal was a small gray room in need of repainting. A Greek travel poster hung on the far wall, just behind a table holding two empty coffee pots and a stack of paper cups. The whole place smelled like burned coffee. I looked at my watch, waiting for something to happen while thinking about resuming my nightmare back at work. Two C-130s were parked on the far edge of the ramp and one was taking on cargo. I watched for a while; wondering where they were headed. Then I started looking for something to read.

In an hour or so, a C141 taxied in. The crew climbed out, walked through the terminal with their duffel bags and disappeared. The guy behind the counter didn't even look up. A few more Air Force troops showed up and went to the desk. After some talk, they too settled in to wait. I wondered if they were also headed to Desolia. We all waited. Another Starlifter rolled into the ramp. One of the crew members came in, stopped briefly at the desk, studied the stand-by list then went back out to the aircraft. I got up to double check the number of people who were ahead of me on that list. There were just three; all enlisted airmen like me. That didn't worry me. These airplanes were pretty big.

A short while later, I heard some loud discussion behind me. The racket was coming from two Colonels, standing beneath the check-in sign, arguing with the airman behind the counter. I couldn't hear exactly what was being said but it didn't go on for long. Arguments between airmen and officers were usually pretty brief. Within a few minutes, the two officers took their seats in the waiting area. One was shaking his head and laughing. Then I heard; "Will Airman Factor please come to the check-in counter? Airman Factor please." I sighed and got up. This wasn't a good sign.

The Pilot in Command had advised the desk there was room for just five people for the flight to Desolation Air Base. At number four on the list, I would have been one of them; except that the two Colonels had somehow muscled their way into the top two positions. This pushed me down to number six. In other words; I was screwed. The airman behind the counter was doing his best to empathize with me but all I could really hear was my Crew Chief hollering about how I should have started back to the base sooner. I was starting to feel like I was being crushed under that "wheel of life."

I started thinking about how to get word to my duty section. Would this guy behind the counter let me use the military phone system? Or maybe the flight crew could let the people I work with know about my situation. I was starting to feel like I did before I went on leave; totally stressed out. It got even worse when I heard the boarding call and saw five people get up and head for the aircraft. The two officers were still chuckling about something as they walked by. Neither of them gave me so much as a glance. It got very quiet in that waiting area.

My mind was in turmoil as I stared off into the ramp space. An airman scurried around the aircraft, pulling the chocks away from its wheels. All the doors were closed and I thought I could hear one of the engines starting up. Feeling a little queasy, I wondered if there'd be another flight to Desolation that day. Naah. My fate was sealed up as tight as that Starlifter. Then one of the doors opened again. A guy in a flight suit stepped out and started jogging toward the terminal. He came in, went straight to the check-in desk and picked up the stand-by clip-board. In a moment, "Airman Factor, please come to the check-in counter. Airman Factor please."

The guy in the flight suit was a tough looking old Senior Master Sergeant. He told me to grab my bag and follow him. I wasn't sure what was going on but followed his orders and hoped for the best. Coming to Athens was exciting but being stuck here while my leave expired would lead to excitement of a different nature. We crossed the ramp and climbed into the aircraft. I didn't know how but it appeared I'd been saved! As my eyes grew accustomed to the murky darkness inside the fuselage, I could see those two Colonels strapped into their seats like a couple of high-ranking packages among the pallets of cargo. They weren't laughing anymore. I sighed. It looked like this trip was going to be a long one ~ in more ways than one. I started searching for an available seat but it didn't look like there were any left. Puzzled, I heard a vaguely familiar voice. "Hey airman, get yer young ass up here, and that's an order!" The voice came from the direction of the cockpit. I squinted and saw another guy in a flight suit, wearing Captain's bars. What a coincidence. It was Captain Max!

The two Colonels watched, looking a little stupefied, as this airman three-striper turned and marched toward the flight deck. I just smiled, knowing I'd be back at Desolation on schedule. That "feel of life" was returning.

I saw Max a few more times during the remainder of my tour at Desolation. He'd always call the tower and ask for me when his route brought him through. If he was remaining overnight, I'd find him some civilian clothes and sneak him into the NCO Club. It was a wild place where drinking to forget cost very little. It was also strictly off limits to officers. We'd go in, share a few pitchers of beer and have some laughs. The next morning, he'd be gone. The last time we spoke, he told me he was leaving the Air Force after this hitch and going for a job with the airlines. I hope he made it. Who knows? Maybe Max was one of the countless thousands of voices I heard coming from the skies during my time on the boards. Less plausible coincidences have happened; like that day he appeared, literally out of thin air, to became my lucky charm and save my "young ass" in Athens. It made me wonder; was his route of flight that day simply a coincidence or was it not-so-simply a milestone in some magnificent plan?

That brings me to the question I've often pondered while making my way through life's long labyrinth. Are coincidences really coincidental? As one who believes that everything, good or bad, happens for a reason, I'd have to say no.

© NLA Factor, 2011

Committed To The Game

2011-11-22T08:04:00.000-05:00

I wouldn't have admitted it back then. Couldn't have, really. Such solemn disclosures might have played well with "Doctor Phil" but not with a bunch of coworkers who depended on you in a busy air traffic control facility. I wanted to tell them though. I wanted to let them know that coming into work for one of those historically busy shifts often gave me a nasty case of the jitters. Take any hot Thursday or Friday evening in the Summer. Even under ideal conditions, the traffic volume was intimidating enough. But, if you threw in a little adverse weather or took away something from our standard tool chest full of runways, navigational aids, radar, radios and such? Well, even some of our most seasoned stoics might try timing their arrival at the sign-in log; hoping the most harrowing positions had already been taken. I might have been a little more concerned than most though, especially during my early years at Big Time. I was worried. In my four years of Air Force ATC, I'd never seen so many airplanes.

So there I was; a newly certified journeyman; transformed from trembling trainee to knock-kneed neophyte controller. Seasoned or not, we'd all arrive for those tough shifts energized, apprehensive and maybe even a little uneasy. The more experienced fellows would just sneer at heavy traffic. Saturated sectors? No problem for them. They'd stride into the TRACON and take their positions without uttering a word. I, on the other hand, might walk in, chattering nervously with one of the other rookies on my team, glancing from sector to sector and looking for any signs of an impending apocalypse.

You see, it was all about that naive layman's image of the overworked, underpaid and often alcoholic air traffic controllers who held hundreds of lives in the palm of their trembling hands ~ all the while wondering when that one fatal slip-up would make national headlines. I guess every cliché gets its start somewhere. The unspeakable disaster could happen, of course, but that would be about as likely as one of Big Time's controllers forgetting to keep a cold quart of beer and a church key in his car for the drive home.

Still, we rookies worried because of the underlying and veritable gravity of what we were about to get involved in. So we'd stand together, muttering quietly and awaiting our fate. It wouldn't take long before Pete, the Area Manager, would walk up, give us that savvy scowl of his and say something like; "Will one of you fucking idiots get Crock Pot off East Arrival? The other one needs to open up Final Two ~ and don't screw it up!" We'd just smile feebly and move off toward our assigned sectors. The shift was under way.

Insults, expletives and verbal abuse usually broke the tension and were as much a part of the controller culture as headsets and airplanes. Pete was a master at it and even had names for many of the guys on my team. John was known as "Crock Pot." This was a guy who had come to Big Time from a smaller radar facility. He never outgrew his light traffic mentality and, compared to others, always seemed to be working in slow motion. John was a slow cooker and that pushed Pete's buttons. "Fry Baby," or Freddy, could push them too. This guy was always getting pissed at one pilot or another. It was usually because somebody didn't comply with a control instruction fast enough or foolishly asked Freddy to repeat something. Fry Baby would get all hot under the collar, lose his temper, then sit in the break room for as long as possible; whining about everything. It could be the pilots, supervisors, procedures and maybe even one or two of his teammates. Soon Pete would appear in the doorway with that penetrating glare of his and say something like; "Hey Fry Baby! Get your ass up to the tower ~ now!" Freddy was a good controller but he drove me nuts with his bitching.

Back in the TRACON, signing onto one of the control positions was a tense moment. As a new guy, I didn't have enough experience to "read into" either the sector or the controller working there. Whether aggressive, conservative, burned out or crazy; it was sometimes hard for me to understand how and why they got to this point in the picture and where they were going with it. Was this the best plan? Should I dare to try something different? That would be risky because, if I botched things up, people would be all over me later in the break room. If I let things ride, I might end up facing the same heat from my teammates ~ but for a different reason. My mind would race through various options as I listened to the position relief briefing. Like a newborn pony, all I could do was stand on my unsteady legs, use whatever judgment I had assimilated so far and hope for the best.

Surprisingly, it wasn't a rising sense of self-confidence that finally quelled my apprehension. It was usually the sound of the pilots voices on my frequency. Most of them, especially the airline drivers, would calmly acknowledge each transmission and comply. It turned out that calm, just like panic, was actually contagious. I started breathing easier when I heard the pilots quietly acknowledging my instructions. It sounded like they had confidence in what I was doing, so why shouldn't I? With each transmission I made, the traffic picture I'd just inherited was becoming more my own. It felt good.

Because of my long standing preconceptions of FAA life, it would take me several years to reach the level of confidence that gets you in trouble. Those preconceptions started forming back when I was an Air Force controller. I read everything I could find about life in the FAA. Shortly after graduating from ATC school at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, I joined the Air Traffic Control Association (ATCA). I think I must have found a copy of their monthly magazine laying around one of our instructor's offices and ripped out the application form. Their publications were my window into another world of ATC that was vastly different from the Air Force version. It seemed the only thing Air Force and FAA controllers had in common was the phraseology.

There were always interesting articles about new radar systems, control towers, technical innovations and TRACONS ~ plus features about controllers who distinguished themselves in one notable way or another. I ate it all up and licked the plate. Then along came PATCO, which me and my GI buddies joined immediately. The articles in their publications made ATCA's writings seem staid and saccharine ~ maybe even a bit stodgy. PATCO journalism was gritty and radical but probably a bit of an exaggeration ~ or so I thought. Things couldn't really be that bad, could they? What always caught my interest were the pieces written about the pressures a controller was subjected to. There were tales of working long hours on positions, under heavy, unrelenting traffic. Then there were issues involving broken or outdated equipment and having to deal with insensitive megalomaniacs in Management. Apparently, it was all lead to high divorce rates, hypertension and heavy drinking.

Did that scare a 22 year old Airman into deciding he should reenlist rather than jump aboard this train to high anxiety and pandemonium? Nope. Remember; I was twenty-two and, like most in my age group, was producing testosterone at a much faster rate than I could burn it off. I already knew I could handle a few flights of military jets in the bounce pattern at my local Air Base but I needed the chance to prove myself under more challenging conditions. The downsides didn't matter. I had no plans to get married, was already drinking fairly heavily with my Air Force cronies and thought hypertension was something that only happened to old people. As far as I was concerned, my four-year hitch couldn't end quick enough. I thought I was ready for the big league. Somewhere out there, more money, more airplanes and bigger challenges were waiting for me.

Expectations and realities can be like taking your car in for a $200.00 tune-up, only to learn you need a new engine and transmission. My expectations of FAA life and the realities I discovered weren't really that far apart. I expected to find a lot of quivering manic depressive chain smokers who smelled a little like bourbon ~ talking about their girlfriends and boats while deftly working an endless array of airplanes. What I found was a little different. They smelled more like stale beer.

What I found at Big Time was a facility that had daily traffic counts well into the four-figure range. It wasn't just a little more traffic than I was comfortable with. This was a high volume, high complexity game that tumbled and shifted at speeds I wasn't used to ~ and it was being played by a crowd of crazy people. This was kinda worrisome. What's more; the equipment really was old and prone to sudden failure. Some of the newer equipment was just as unreliable but for different reasons. It had probably been deployed to the field before all the tiny design flaws had been discovered and corrected. No problem though. The controllers would eventually find every one of them and FAA's contractors knew it. Protests from the weary workforce were seen as whining and were generally countered with a grand and imperious apathy. Maybe even a little contempt.

So . . . were the articles I read in those early PATCO publications really true? Were things as bad as they said? Was I in over my head and on the verge of overtaxing my testosterone supply? I'd just have to play this game for a while to decide for myself. Jitters or not, it looked like I was committed to doing just that.

The Way It Was

2011-11-21T18:20:00.000-05:00

St. Louis Blues

2011-11-03T21:57:00.000-04:00

"I hate to see the ev'nin' sun go down
Hate to see the ev'nin' sun go down,
'cause my baby, he done left this town."

W. C. Handy ~ "St. Louis Blues."

'TWAs a different era. Air travel was far more than mere transportation ~ it was an adrenalin rush powered by radial engines, mystique and imagination. Memorable in a good way, people were drawn to their local airport by the glamour and adventure of it all. It was a magical place and stepping out onto the ramp to board your plane was to tread on hallowed ground. What had once seemed impossible would actually happen here as smartly dressed passengers queued up anxiously to embark on their voyage across the cloudscape.

The Sun was rising on commercial aviation and Trans World Airlines was right there, along with a few other airline giants, roaming the nearly empty skies. Back then, their future couldn't have looked any brighter. The evolution of commercial aviation was on a fast track. Bigger, quicker airplanes would fly off the assembly lines. In a temporary triumph of form over function, airport terminals were being designed with style in mind. There were even advances being made in air traffic control. Everything was taking off. No one could see the storm clouds forming ahead and no one could imagine the shadows they'd eventually cast over some of our most legendary and prosperous airports ~ like St. Louis (STL).

Giants in the clouds - with thanks to N. C. Wyeth

The aviation landscape would change over the years; its glamour fading into a flying boxcar mentality. Bad business decisions and corporate warfare took the lives of many great airlines and the communities they served. TWA, call it the other Spirit of St. Louis, would disappear forever. Sadly, the fabled Lindbergh Line turned out to be much shorter than it should have been ~ ending on December 1, 2001, after being eaten alive by (the proper euphemism would be "merging with") American Airlines. It was a giant-sized tragedy for air travelers in general and St. Louis in particular, on that sad day when Trans World Airlines made its final approach.

Hub operations would come and go at many other airports; leaving empty terminal buildings, vacant gates and fewer options for air travelers. Infrastructure improvements, made to accommodate hub growth, would be left underutilized. Based on growth projections, St Louis invested a billion dollars on a new runway (11/29). It's now used by only a small percentage their traffic.

There are plenty of other examples of abandoned hubs. Take American and Midway Airlines misadventures at Raleigh-Durham (RDU) for instance. And who could forget the People Express operation at Newark? Here was a true "no shirt, no shoes, no service" kind of carrier that helped turn the magic of air travel into the tedious skyPod, prisoner transfer experience we now tolerate as just another of life's grim realities.

People Express ~ AKA "Brownhound"

There were those antediluvian days before the corporate feeding frenzies began ~ before merger actually meant murder. When I checked into Big Time back in the Seventies, the terminal buildings weren't all surrounded by airplanes sporting the same logo. I could look down from the tower cab and see some of the names that made aviation so glamorous. Pan American, Trans World, Eastern, Braniff, National and many others ~ now crushed into small pieces of memorabilia you might still find on eBay but never at an airport. They're all gone, taking the heart and soul of air travel with them. Aviation ~ ripped up by its roots.

Right back at you sweetie!

I've heard folks say that everything is cyclical. What goes around comes around. If so, we might one day expect to see some style and service return to air travel. We won't see aviation giants like TWA, Pan Am or National again though. They all "done left this town."

A brief aside. Back in my military years, back at Desolation Air Base, we would occasionally get late night calls on our approach control frequency. It would be from one of Trans World or Pan Am's long haul international flights, hurtling through the night sky between brightly lit world capitals. When they came within radio range, they'd dial us up and just chat until our signal faded. We had no idea where they were at the time but they'd usually tell us where they were headed. Hearing of those exotic destinations would take me, at least mentally and momentarily, far away from where I was. Listening to those very American voices in the night was a comfort to all of us who sat in that darkened tower cab, far from home.

The Inevitability Of Innovation And Living In The Moment

2011-10-04T09:47:00.001-04:00

I had a plan. I was going to try rounding up my fleeting thoughts about the "Wraparound Remote ATC" piece posted over at the Praxis Foundation site but kept putting it off. The Praxis piece was a compelling read for an old fashioned controller like me. Curiosity even drove me over to the SAAB website, where I learned more about their Remote Tower system specifications and read their sales pitch. I would have have called my post "Control On A Pole." Then I thought twice about it and decided against the project. It worried me ~ just like the idea of email and other means of electronic data transfer probably worried our local postman.

Besides that, I usually stick to writing about my past life in ATC. For better or worse, it's my modus operandi.

Mulling over the idea of a remote tower just brought back bad memories about how vulnerable our air traffic control system is ~ without even thinking about things like control on a pole or NextGen or even the idea of separating airplanes via GPS. Resolving not to write about it was a big relief.

I did think about it though, because SAAB's website gave me so much information to ponder. The longer I thought about it, the more skeptical I became. For instance, they say that fewer employees (controllers) will be needed if you get yourself a Remote Tower and "punctuality will improve." I wondered if they meant air traffic punctuality or the controller's? Well, whatever. Punctuality is all good, right?

They also claim we'll get "enhanced situational awareness!" Now that's something I could never get enough of during my time on the boards. But wait; there's more! SAAB says that "one controller could potentially provide aerodrome control service for two to three towers simultaneously." One controller ~ working three airports? Really? When things go wrong, isn't someone usually hollering about the fact that positions were combined or there just weren't enough people on duty? It was one thing to walk into the TRACON and be told that the Final sector was combined with one of the arrival scopes. Do we now believe sending a controller in to work Airport A, combined with Airport B and/or Airport C is a good idea?

See what I mean? Total skepticism.

Still, SAAB's basic concept (minus their hyperbole) intrigued me, like so many other technological advances have in the past. But really though . . .

fewer employees (much fewer) . . .

enhanced situational awareness?

Thinking back on the early days of ARTS (Automated Radar Terminal System), I recall how little the controllers trusted it. Rightly so. Problems were frequent and serious. As time passed ~ RNAV, Automated ATIS, automated Pre-Departure Clearance, TCAS, DSP (don't even ask) and a host of other new systems made their way into our lexicon. Each was greeted with great suspicion by the workforce. Eventually, either the glitches would be worked out (often a painful process) or the idea was thrown out.

Hard as it was, I always tried to keep an open mind. I never wanted to appear so deeply mired in traditional ways of getting the job done that I couldn't appreciate new ideas. They were going to happen anyway; whether I liked them or not. Therein lies the inevitability of innovation. It's really just evolution at work and that's generally a good thing, albeit a bit disconcerting at times.

If this post was really about control on a pole, I'd have to say my discomfort has nothing to do with the idea itself. Basically, it's feasible and has merit. Get rid of SAAB's utopian claims and I'm fairly sure this thing would work at low density airports. What does concern me is that vulnerability issue I mentioned earlier. Back in the Autumn of '81, after the smoke of a long battle cleared out of the facility, our Chief and a couple Supervisors cracked open the once private locker used by PATCO to store their union business. There, tucked among the clutter of the Local's many scurrilous newsletters, grievance forms, grievance denials and other combustibles, was a large manila envelope. Inside were fragments of their own "strike contingency plan." Fascinating, shocking and sad; the only part I'll mention here is a document that laid out their plan to blow up our radar antenna if the job action failed to meet expected goals. It would have been a fairly simple task to accomplish and, if successful, would have been catastrophic.

At its best, the human element in air traffic control is what makes it work so well. At its worst, the human element is its biggest liability. Speaking from experience.

ATC is and always was a very fragile system. Controller staffing levels fluctuate; generally downward. Radar, radios, landlines, computers and even satellites can and do blink off-line almost as quick as controllers can piss themselves when it happens. Which reminds me; unless the Remote Tower can also it fix itself, I suspect finding a technician to climb that pole when it's 20 degrees outside, with blowing snow or sleet, might prove difficult ~ at least in the mind of a skeptic.

As anyone in the aviation industry will tell you, things go wrong ~ more often than we read about. During my 30 some years in the business, I had my share of unexpected radar, computer and communications failures. Do we really want to consider erecting a "control tower" that could be completely snuffed out from a half-mile away by anyone with a hunting rifle and a good aim? Okay, maybe I'm both skeptical AND paranoid. So, in deference to my paranoia, I'm not going to write about control on a pole.

I said it before. I'm an old fashioned controller. Workable as it may be, the remote tower idea takes me so far out of my comfort zone that I feel like I'm in orbit ~ some thousand miles or so above reality. I can't even imagine a series of cameras, Internet connections and projectors wired in between me, my airplanes and my airport. Could more practical information about the system make me feel better? Probably. I have to admit though; when it comes to control towers, I'm a glass enclosed son of a light gun who always liked the sound of airplane engines, other controllers and the smell of Jet A.

For me, it comes down to this. I believe new concepts, their design and development should be like gift giving. People say "it's the thought that counts." There needs to be lots of thought invested before technological and procedural "gifts" are imposed on the aviation community. Sometimes it seems like people are in a hurry to fail. Good ideas are deployed too soon, leaving folks in the field to discover their shortfalls at the least opportune times. That all important first impression turns bad and establishing credibility for the new becomes exponentially more difficult.

I referred to the law of apporetics in an earlier post. The law states that once an idea becomes plausible it becomes possible and once it becomes possible it becomes inevitable. The remote tower is a good example of a plausible idea making the leap to possible and I am certain of its inevitability. There will undoubtedly be many more plausible ideas put forth in the field of air traffic control and the law will push them to their inevitable conclusion.

One conclusion? As time goes by there will be fewer controllers. To those who doubt it, I suggest you talk to the unemployed Flight Engineers who believed in the fool's gold of indispensability. In these days of robots and drones, we see an increasing number of job functions that require a decreasing number of people to perform them. Although it is nearly impossible to imagine a National Airspace System (NAS) without any controllers, I am reasonably sure that day will come too. We may not see it in our lifetime but it will come. Watch for a slow, sometimes subtle but inexorable process (like the Remote Tower) and you might actually see that glacier moving forward.

I wouldn't worry about it though. If you are now or ever were an air traffic controller, just be proud of what you are doing or what you did. It's never been done any better, by anybody anywhere. Accept the fact that change is inevitable. Live and be happy in this moment. It's all we really have.

© NLA Factor, 2011

No Longer A Factor ~ The Early Years

2011-09-28T16:51:00.001-04:00

MY FIRST POSITION CERTIFICATION

This photo was taken back when pleated pants, dress shirts and neckties were mandatory. We had some latitude with the shirts though. They could be any color; as long as they were colored white. Oh, and we had to roll the shirt sleeves up. Somehow, it made us look busier.

The guy to my right had tippled a bit too much "Pilot's Special Fuel" that day. He thought he was working Ground Control but you'll notice the microphone is plugged into his pants.

Things I Learned . . .

2011-09-20T06:28:00.000-04:00

WHILE BECOMING A PILOT

WHILE BECOMING AN AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER

ATC ~ Music To My Ears

2011-09-08T13:34:00.000-04:00

I had a little fun recently, working at what turned out to be a very illuminating part-time job. It added up to five weekends in a restaurant kitchen, assisting a slightly crazy and more than slightly corpulent Bulgarian Chef who had just landed the catering contract for a local music festival. The restaurant was located near the festival grounds and the owners graciously, perhaps foolishly, allowed us to use their kitchen for our purposes during off hours.

I've known Yuri for years. He used to have a fantastic restaurant nearby. Now he only does freelance work and consulting. Anyway, he needed someone reliable who lived nearby so he asked me to help out. I hesitated because it was Summer and I had several big outdoor projects to get done. I also hesitated because this was new territory for me; a fact that actually brought me around to agreeing. Although I’d never done commercial kitchen work before, I ended up seeing many similarities between the food service game and my years in air traffic control. There was the boss ~ scurrying around in circles, scowling and sputtering at everyone. The workplace was chaotic, the help temperamental and unreliable, product quality was inconsistent, customers complained, management offered baffling excuses and, of course, knives could be thrown at any moment. Sound familiar? Also like ATC, it was a continual learning experience and one hell of a lot of fun!

Chef Yuri is considered a genius among his peers. He's always been very successful and, having worked for him a while, I think I now understand why. His main emphasis with me and the other three who were helping with the festival project was absolute standardization throughout the preparation process. You'll understand the importance of this when you think about the many times you went to a particular restaurant and ordered the same menu item ~ maybe a cheeseburger. Chances are, if you ordered it five different times, it was served five different ways. Sometimes it was a little over or under done. Sometimes there was hardly any cheese or so much lettuce and tomato that you couldn't get your mouth around the bun. Not so at Chef Yuri's table.

Yuri preached standardization ~ literally at knife point; starting with the most basic steps in preparation like slicing and dicing each ingredient. Every piece had to be cut to the prototypic size or, according to Yuri, you'd end up with some parts either overcooked or undercooked. Weights, measures, cooking temperatures and times always had to be the same for any particular dish. These constraints yielded constancy, which meant his customers were rarely disappointed. Innovation and creativity were things to be tried off-line ~ NOT when the restaurant was full of anxious customers and food orders were flying in and out of his kitchen! The consecutive culinary successes served up to customers at Chef Yuri's table were prepared in strict compliance with his table of weights and measures.

This was one aspect of the job that was starkly different from air traffic control which, unlike Yuri's tightly controlled recipe standards, I always considered more analogous to music. To me, a controller's prescribed standards were really nothing more than sheets of music, from which one could, like a fine musician, spontaneously improvise on the melody line, change the rhythm or pick up the pace. The best controllers I knew were valued for their innovation and creativity under pressure. They didn't rely solely on the sheet music. They knew the score and could play it by ear.

We've all either worked with them or, with luck, will one day. These controllers reveal a prodigious touch when it comes to moving airplanes. They always seem to have a sixth sense about what needs to be done and can innovate on the fly to meet their goals. They were out there, moving airplanes, long before the hackneyed phrase about thinking "outside the box" was coined. To me, they were also a litmus test for shift Supervisors; the best of whom were always willing to endorse a new or different way of doing something. The worst Supervisors would cling to conventional thinking like a security blanket. They'd often end their shift with at least two problems. Operational inefficiencies could lead to reportable delays ~ delays they'd have to justify (never fun). They had also just reinforced at least one controller's stereotypical belief that Management never listens. Remember; just because something is considered a stereotype doesn't mean it's not true.

So this was as it should be in our business. As long as safety is never compromised, air traffic control should be an exercise in freedom of expression. That also means giving other people's ideas some consideration. Sure, we have our necessary constraints and limits. Your old, dog-eared copy of the point sixty-five is full of them. It's a manual of minimums and must-do standards ~ the printed sheets of music I mentioned earlier. We need it for safety's sake. Think, however, about what all the relevant air traffic directives don't tell you. Here is small slice of wisdom from that book we all love:

Among other things, this paragraph advises us of our "not optional" obligation to provide additional services. However, it doesn't give us any specifics. So what are we talking about here? An extra wind check for the guy on short final? Clearing an airplane direct to some point a couple hundred miles away at 3:00 AM? Coordinating with an overlying sector so a departure can climb above 10,000 sooner? Could it be something like entering a flight plan into the system for some poor sap caught VFR on top? All of this and more ~ but don't ask the people who wrote this time-honored tome for a definition. Paragraph 2-1-1simply tells us it's okay, in fact, expected that we be "musicians" but does not tell us how to do it. You have to know the score, then be free and willing to use your imagination. That's the moment when ATC, like music, becomes an art form. Be mindful of those "security blanket" Supervisors though. They may not appreciate your creative instincts . . which reminds me of Old Jack.

The first time I saw one of our most accomplished journeymen get hollered at was on a stunningly VFR Winter morning at Big Time. We were having our problems though. The area had gotten about 12 inches of snowfall overnight. This left us dayshifters with just one landing runway and a few main taxiways to use while snow removal crews worked on the rest of the place. Holding patterns stayed full since the tower needed an honest 5 miles in-trail (MIT) to allow time for each airplane to clear the runway. Only one exit taxiway was open at the far end and it took the landing traffic a while to get there. As a result, inbounds were trickling off the outer fixes, 20 MIT, and merging into one long, widely spaced line to the airport.

Old Jack was working at one of the approach sectors when word came down that another landing runway was opening. I was a newly minted journeyman, seated at one of the other approach positions and completely engrossed in managing my own holding pattern. The TRACON Supervisor came around and told me, Jack and the other approach sectors to empty the holding patterns and "run 'em, ten in trail!" That was all Jack needed to hear.

Old Jack had "street cred." He'd worked at two other high density facilities, was smart, level headed and well respected by all. On the other hand, our TRACON Supervisor had come to us from the Regional Office because . . . well, because it was his turn to get supervisory experience at a busy facility. A bureaucrat with relatively little field experience, we grudgingly tolerated his frequent dithering because we knew he'd be gone in a year or two ~ probably back to the Mother Ship as a Branch Chief, then off to some other field facility as Manager. This was the typical career path for those anointed by the Air Traffic Division.

"Run 'em!" was the call, so I obligingly cleared the bottom aircraft out of my pattern, started descending the rest to the next available altitude, updated a few EFC times and thought about letting the Center sector know what my highest holding altitude now was. Chef Yuri would have been proud of me because it was all being done by the numbers. Then I glanced over at Old Jack's traffic. In the minute or two since we got the word to run planes; he already had two off his holding fix and a third about to join the line.

The next thing I knew, Mr. Security Blanket was standing behind Jack and yelling something about "first come, first served." Rather than starting at the bottom of his holding pattern (like me), apparently Jack had pulled a couple of flights from the middle of the stack because he saw an opportunity to "organize and expedite" his traffic (See Par. 2-1-1 above). Both airplanes happened to be inbound toward the holding fix when the "Run 'em " order was heard. Therefore, they could be on vectors toward home quicker than the guys on their outbound leg. To Jack, they were targets of time and money saving opportunity.

Old Jack couldn't have pulled off this cunning feat without some interfacility coordination either. Up at those altitudes, he didn't own the airspace outside the holding pattern. All was quickly and quietly accomplished with the imagination and virtuosity of an accomplished musician.

As the team neophyte, I'd never seen such a move and was impressed. Our annoying Regional superstar was not. He was now ranting about which flights had been holding the longest, who had the earliest EFC times, who would be calling to complain and blah, blah, blah. Jack turned his head briefly and made what I thought was a very appropriate, albeit vulgar suggestion. I heard the word "insubordination" being used repeatedly. That's when Pete, our Area Manager appeared. After assessing the issue, Pete told the Supervisor to stop by the Watch Desk. We couldn't hear all of what was being said but we could feel the heat radiating out from their discussion. Two minutes later, Pete sent him upstairs to relieve the tower Supervisor.

Once Mr. Security Blanket left the TRACON, Pete walked over to check on the arrival sectors. Everything was running according to plan and we'd soon be out of reportable delays. Later in the shift, he and Old Jack had a long discussion which, according to Jack, went well. He and Pete had both come up through busy facilities as controllers. They both understood how useless any extra miles between arrivals were and while "first come, first served" was an equitable way of conducting business, it wasn't always the best way to "organize and expedite the flow of traffic."

Pete eventually moved on to another facility that was closer to where he planned on retiring. We would soon miss his uncanny ability to cut through the most complex crap, identify the underlying issues and take action. The idea of Management taking action would gradually fade as the years passed; trending instead toward a "wait and see" attitude that allowed problems to grow out of hand.

The "security blanket Supervisor" did, as expected, return to the Regional Office. I saw his signature on the bottom of several mindless memos sent out to the facilities. Each one of them served to accelerate the loss of credibility our leadership had with the controllers, Supervisors and other field personnel.

Old jack retired a couple of years later; taking his music out the door with him. As we settled into the post-strike, point and click era, I met fewer and fewer controllers like Jack, who "knew the score and could play it by ear."

Not to discount the value of standards in our business. In my time, I saw too many aggravating examples of sub-standard performance. There was inattentiveness, horrible phraseology, non-compliance with procedures, too much room between departures or arrivals, holding airplanes too long or not long enough, being oblivious to the traffic situation in adjacent sectors and the list goes on. I saw it all and was occasionally a part of it. Things like these, if viewed singularly, had relatively minor impact on the big picture. But taken cumulatively, they would subtly erode overall system efficiency.

I also saw the rise of a workforce who grew to need everything spelled out for them. If it wasn't in writing somewhere; they didn't do it. A kind of security blanket, I suppose. Spontaneity, creativity, taking the initiative and seizing the moment was fading into my old friend Chef Yuri's vision of success through "doing everything the same way." That's why, in my later years, if I heard a controller who dared to do something different; it was truly music to my ears!

© NLA Factor, 2011

Corporal Clueless Gets The Message

2011-09-05T14:46:00.000-04:00

Stepping Into History

2011-08-03T09:19:00.000-04:00

It's been 30 years since the strike. For me, that's not nearly enough time to shake off the vivid memories and strong emotions it left me with. Sometimes, especially this time of year, I wonder what ever happened to all those guys and the few women I worked with so long ago. It's funny. I can't remember most of the people I knew during my last two FAA assignments but I can't forget the names of everyone I worked with before August 3rd of '81 ~ good friends and trusted coworkers all. It was a sobering time when much was revealed about the capabilities of people I thought I already knew pretty well.

Time Magazine, August 17, 1981
A lot has been written about the strike in those thirty years. Some writers have been respectful, informative and honest in their reporting. Some took what they learned in an interview or two, extrapolated more from that, then wrote an interesting, if not entirely factual story. Other writers made their partisan agenda far too obvious to be credible. You really had to be there.

Many who were involved before and after the strike know only a fraction of the tale. Those who walked away from their positions on August 3rd of '81 know only the first part of a drama that dragged on for many more years. Controllers hired immediately after August 3rd were privy to another part of the story but can only imagine how it started. Then there were the ones who went out, came to their senses and returned to work within the 48 hour grace period. They know much but still missed a beat or two. Unless a person was working in an FAA air traffic facility before, during and after the strike, I read or listen to what they have to say about it all with a measure of skepticism.

One frequently reported ambiguity has been that pre-strike morale among FAA's air traffic employees was scraping bottom. True, but I think it's important to clarify a couple of things. The term "employees" applied to all kinds of air traffic employees ~ not just the controllers standing in towers or sitting at their sectors. At Big Time, morale was also low among Supervisors who had to deal directly with an increasingly belligerent workforce while having to enforce policies that ranged from the petty to the preposterous. A first line Supervisor was usually the one standing at the flash point whenever a controller blew up over something. Many of the Supes I knew were actually more anxious to see a walkout than even the most radical PATCO members because it would remove several thorns from their side.

Morale was also low among Facility Management personnel. Although they'd deny it, the Staff Officers were growing tired of dealing with a seemingly endless stream of incoming Grievances, Unsafe Condition Reports and accusations of Unfair Labor Practices. Worse was the fact that local Management was rarely given the latitude to settle things at the facility level with their union counterparts. Everything went through the Regional Office, who ultimately dictated the approved response to their field facilities. The risks associated with allowing any one facility to establish what might become an untenable precedent was simply too great. So, emasculated by forces beyond his control, our Chief would shuffle out of his office now and then to posture for the workforce. His usual posture however, was to be slumped at his desk, reading through the growing piles of trouble and waiting for the next Regional Telcon to begin.

Of course, many of the controllers suffered from low morale. No surprise there either. Oppressive, uncompromising Management policies roiled them while PATCO's rhetoric and bellicosity roused them. Most were in a place where there was no refuge from the turbulence. They got angry and the angrier they became, the more conflicts there were with each other and with Management. More conflict meant more discontent, resentment and retaliation. Combined, they were the catalyst for what would soon occur. PATCO had its members right where they wanted them.

Everyone had their issues. . . with the exception of those working in Regional Offices or FAA Headquarters who knew they had the upper hand ~ no matter what the outcome.

It should also be recognized that not all employees of the FAA's Air Traffic Organization suffered from low morale. Discontent maybe but not low morale. The fact that I stayed on the job should not be construed as an endorsement of the way FAA managed its air traffic control enterprise. Far from it. I worked under the same out of touch autocracy that finally exasperated many of the strikers. Fortunately, I was among those who could either ignore or cope with FAA's imperfections by focusing on what, to us, was still the pure elation of working traffic. We just tuned out the cacophony of dissonance, immersed ourselves in the airplanes and waited for shift change.

Our morale was high. As the strike deadline neared, we shared an indescribably high level of energy brought on by the challenge we anticipated. The feeling was probably akin to a boxer about to step into the ring with a world champion. We were spoiling for a fight like everyone else, but for different reasons. Of course this made us targets for union members who recognized us as future scabs in the upcoming strike.

All of us, no matter what our plans for August 3, had at least one thing in common. Together, we were about to be goaded into uncharted territory. The union had a long history of mischief but had never gone this far before. As certain as the strike seemed on the morning of August 2, most of us were still unsure. Would PATCO really pull the trigger on Monday morning or was it all a bluff intended to make the FAA blink in the contract negotiations?

Everyone was anxious. Some who had reluctantly committed to the strike were feeling a sense of dread ~ each one hoping the union would step back from the point of no return ~ hoping they wouldn't have to go through with what they'd committed to and fearing the consequences. Local PATCO leadership tried to strengthen any unsteady confidence with their pre-strike mantra ~ "They can't fire all of us!"

There were many on the management side who hoped the strike would happen. Pete, our Area Manager, was one who left no doubt in anyone's mind about his hope for a strike. Like many of us, he saw an opportunity to rid the facility of its chronic complainers, union militance and malevolence. I was pretty sick of it myself because of the uncooperative atmosphere it had created between control positions. Unlike me though, Pete knew they'd be fired long before the general public ever heard it from Ronald Reagan. He also must have known a lot more than I did about FAA's strike contingency plans and was confident that they would work. So, at shift change, he frequently traded barbs and witticisms with the PATCO dissidents as they left the TRACON ~ hoping he wouldn't have to see or hear from them much longer. Just part of the game.

From the other side, PATCO's most combative members grew increasingly antagonistic toward anyone recognized as a probable non-participant. I was getting used to my status as adversary and came to anticipate being jammed with traffic, handoffs being accepted late, pointouts refused and other subtle techniques employed to raise my anxiety level. Just another part of the game. I was also being shunned by many old friends in the break room. It didn't bother me though. I had nothing to say to anyone foolish enough to walk away from one of the Federal Government's highest paying jobs ~ a job I loved and had waited a long time to get.

There were intense efforts by PATCO to establish or strengthen the bonds of union solidarity with anyone still undecided about whether or not to participate in the strike. Most of the faithful were convinced the aviation system would cease to function during a strike. They were also confident that the Government could never afford to purge themselves of such a large part of the controller workforce. They were ready to go. But there remained those few "fence sitters" who couldn't decide which bed to put their shoes under. Various degrees of persuasion and arm-twisting ensued ~ with chilling success.

Where you were working in 1981 largely determined how you experienced the strike's run-up and aftermath. My first-hand pre and post strike observations at Big Time would not necessarily correspond with what went on elsewhere. For example; at Big Time, the pre-strike focus for most controllers was indeed on the money aspects of the contract. The $2,500.00 raise in salary FAA offered in June might have sounded significant to controllers at Level One through Three facilities. Generally speaking, they worked in areas where the cost of living was much lower. However, those of us who worked at the Level Four and Five facilities lived mostly in areas where the cost of living was quite high. Much of that $2,500.00 would have vanished into increases in our tax rates. Yes, money was important to all of us. After all, debt is a timeless phenomenon and back then, as today, we had plenty of it.

Although some have attempted to explain it differently, the 32 hour work week proposed by PATCO was, to me, also a money issue. The way I saw it ~ anyone receiving the same salary for working 32 hours that they once got for working 40 hours was getting an hourly pay raise.

There were other, tantalizing tidbits contained in FAA's June offer but it wasn't enough to placate the PATCO faithful. So, early on the morning of August 3rd, I received a telephone call from one very excited Supervisor. The strike was on. Day shift staffing appeared adequate for traffic levels but I would be needed at 3:00 p.m. He warned me about probable picketing at the entrance to our parking lot. "Just ignore them" he said. I sat in front of the television all morning, watching various news teams cover the strike from several locations across the country. Even though I wasn't really surprised by what was happening, I was still incredulous.

The picket lines were long, loud and impossible to ignore. All those faces I knew so well looked very different under the intense heat of an August sun and the pressure of a struggle they would never win. Anger, fear and apprehension had quickly overtaken the look of audaciousness and arrogance they wore just a day ago. Some looked like they were facing a firing squad. Well, there actually would be a lot of firing but they didn't know it yet.

There are some persistent truths associated with what happened thirty years ago. For one thing, it changed the future for everyone who walked out. It also changed the future for those who stayed to deal with the consequences. Sadly though, it did not change the future for controllers hired after the strike. With the Federal Aviation Administration stuck riding on a not so merry-go-round of repeat mistakes, it seems unlikely that things will change soon. Beneath all the new programs and platitudes I saw since the strike, there remained the same culture of confrontation that started all the trouble.

What of all those people who loomed so large in my life in 1981? I miss everyone; whether they stayed or struck. Sometimes I wonder though. What might have been if the whole thing hadn't happened? By the mid-nineties, many of those fired thousands might have worked their way into upper management positions. Once there, would they have attempted to make positive changes to a system they had once fought so hard against ~ or would they simply have scrapped their ideals and assimilated? We'll never know. I can tell you this from experience though . . . a controller's ideals, brought into management, can be seen as excess baggage that should have been left behind.

So anyway, here's to a happy thirtieth anniversary. For those who went out, I don't agree with what they did but I do agree with some of their motives. Face it; this wasn't the first time people did the wrong thing for the right reasons. Most of us were such kids back then but, for better or worse, we all made our choices. Whether walking onto or off the job that day; we all stepped into history.

© NLA Factor, 2011

Forget The Coffin

2011-07-22T11:41:00.003-04:00

H. L Mencken once said; "A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin."

So I often wondered; would the ATC profession eventually desensitize me to what I did for a living? Would I become jaded and indifferent to the amazing things I saw every working day? Cloistered away in a control room, would my fascination with flight gradually decomposes into the more practical problems associated with separating airplanes? Let's add to that the incumbent stress, interpersonal issues, frequent changes in equipment or procedures and the distracting squeaks and groans emanating incessantly from the apparatus of Labor and Management. Would all their cumulative effects gradually dissipate my love affair with airplanes; turning it into apathy or utter contempt? Would I turn sour, cynical and sardonic over the career I held dear? I wouldn't have had to ask some of the guys I worked with. The permanent smirk on their faces said it all.

I had my brushes with on-the-job cynicism. You've heard it; "Management doesn't know what it's doing" or "Controller X is just kissin' up to get that staff job" and "My Supervisor is out to get me." Feel free to sing along of you know the lyrics. Back then you might have also heard that "airline pilots are a bunch of overpaid pinheads!" Well, they did make a lot more than we did at the time. Whether any of it was true or false didn't matter. I tuned it out as best I could. It was all negative energy and a needless distraction. Instead, I tried to keep the more positive aspects of our story in mind.

Being an air traffic controller connected me to aviation in a way like no other. We're literally plugged into it. Besides, controllers are the only people capable of straddling the line between sky and sector because we can also be pilots. The reverse cannot be said. You simply won't see any pilots dabbling in the air traffic control arts on their day off. This is a fact that presents controllers with the unique opportunity for insight into what's happening on the other side of a transmission. Such depth of understanding makes many controllers true hybrids in the genus of aviation professionals.

As a controller trainee in the early 1970s, I felt a need for some balance in my aviation knowledge. My brain was being force-fed with all things ATC and the stuff I heard in the break room was intensely one-sided. Knowing there are at least two sides to every story, including ours, I wanted to learn more about that other side. I needed the pilot's perspective. There had to be more to it than making big bucks, looking cool in a uniform and working with a flock of flight attendants. But what? I needed to find out.

Oh, and I also needed a way to use my GI Bill education benefits. So . . .

There was a small airport about fifty miles from the city. Those miles made it far enough away to be well outside the TCA, yet close enough that local pilots could occasionally see a distant stream of Big Time's arrivals or departures. It wasn't exactly a grass strip but the paved runway wasn't much wider than your average suburban driveway. There were no taxiways ~ only well traveled trails in the grass. It was the perfect place for a fledgling air traffic controller to begin his flying lessons.

Arriving at this airport early on sunny Summer mornings, I'd walk out through the wet grass to my rented Cherokee and give it a thorough going over. I was able to fly "solo" by then and, although I was itching to get airborne, I knew better than to rush through that preflight inspection. Flying, like air traffic control, is something never to be rushed. Once satisfied that everything was good, it was time to undo the tie-down lines, remove the wheel chocks and climb into the cockpit.

Back then, the runway was nothing but a country road that led to the sky. And damn! I couldn't wait to get on the road! My pulse always quickened when that Cherokee rolled nimbly into takeoff position. Lined up with the runway, I'd cross check the magnetic compass with the heading indicator. There'd be one more check of the controls, flap setting and a few other things to keep me out of trouble. You know ~ all the things my flight instructor drummed into me. Once satisfied, I'd push that throttle forward and feel the rush of a new adventure beginning. As the Piper accelerated I scanned both the skies ahead and the airspeed indicator; waiting for that needle to touch the right number. When it did, a little back pressure on the yoke was all it took for me to be flying.

leaving the ground was my "Walter Mitty" moment. I may as well have been the cockpit of a B727 ~ all screaming turbines, streaming smoke and shoving me skyward. I scanned the instruments and the airspace ahead. A blur of airplanes parked along the runway rushed by in my peripheral vision.

A good rate of climb established, I could then enjoy the singular sensation of watching the wide, rural horizon sink slowly beneath the aircraft's nose. Soon, into a lazy left turn out of the traffic pattern, I could see the long concrete stretch of State highway that brought me to this point. Down below, morning commuters seemed to crawl toward the distant city; probably uttering their commuter curses and glancing at their watches. I, on the other hand, was giddy with the elation brought on by 110 knots of airspeed and 2,500 feet of altitude. I trimmed the airplane for level flight.

Straddling the line had its benefits. Safely out of the traffic pattern, I could then tune one of the plane's radios to any of Big Time's control positions. Having those numbers at my fingertips gave me an edge over most of the other locally based pilots. I'd select a TRACON or tower frequency and just listen while I practiced my flight maneuvers. Things I heard from my 2,500 foot perch were almost like free OJT. Call it educational eavesdropping. Sometimes I'd even call it revealing . . . or disappointing.

I was practicing my turns around a point on one surprisingly clear, haze free August morning. There was a large, red barn about fifteen miles from the airport that many of us students used in perfecting this basic flight maneuver. At this point in my flight training, I needed to work on turn coordination while maintaining my altitude. Funny, but when you turn an airplane on its side, it tends to slide downhill. This is unacceptable if, for instance, you're IFR at 5,000 and the controller needs a 360 for spacing. So you practice.

One of my VHF radios was tuned to Unicom. The other I dialed to Big Time Tower's Local Control frequency. I was surprised to hear my teammate Al's voice. Our team was off duty that day so I guessed he must have been pulled in for overtime. Curious. He was one who always warned people to never, ever answer the telephone on their day off!

It was the kind of fast-paced banter one would expect to hear at this "morning rush" time of day. Planes were leaving and landing all over the place. Some were taxiing out to join the long departure queues while others rushed in toward their gates. Everything tumbled along at a furious pace. It was like Nascar, The Blue Angels and Cirque du Soleil rolled into one. Al was apparently doing a decent job of keeping the airport in motion ~ even though he'd be among the first to smile if the entire place dropped into a sinkhole. Al's career had long exceeded his level of tolerance for this business and he should have moved on. Given his jaundiced attitude toward Management, contempt for pilots, constant complaining and waning skills; most of us would rather spend eight hours throwing rotten road kill into a truck than be working anywhere near him.

He'd just cleared a Delta flight to land and was prepping the next departure (a Pan Am 707) for takeoff. It was clear that Al was going to need "an immediate." The arriving Delta had already been asked to try for the first available highspeed turnoff. About 20 seconds later, I heard him clear Pan Am into position. Just as he unkeyed his mike, an Eastern B727 called four miles out on a visual approach. I heard the pilot ask; "Is that Clipper jet rolling?" "In a moment" was Al's terse reply. I detected a bit of strain in his voice as my Cherokee circled around the south side of that red barn. Within seconds, Delta called clear of the runway. "Clipper one-oh-five, cleared for immediate takeoff, traffic three out."

When you're working in the tower, you are always aware of indicators that portend trouble. A controller's nonverbal communications can, if closely observed over time, be a dead giveaway. It might be an impatient fidgeting, a change in voice level or a particular box-step someone does in front of their control position when they're getting anxious over a situation. It might also be the cab Supervisor ~ rising suddenly from his desk with a worried expression on his face. Sometimes . . . well sometimes it's the fact that nobody seems to be breathing. From where I sat, it was all masked by an eerie and seemingly endless silence. In my mind's eye I could see the 707 begin to edge forward. A fully loaded and fueled 707 never did come flying off the blocks like a well whacked pinball and Pan Am was known as being slow on the uptake. I could 'see' the Eastern jet crossing over the four lane highway - now just two miles out. I could 'see' Al sliding strips around on the console and scanning the BRITE display in a faltering attempt to project an air of normality and confidence. I could see this wasn't going to work.
The next voice I heard was the Eastern Captain. "We're going around."

Now, as I fought to regain the altitude I'd lost during my last spin around the barn, I could almost hear Al coordinating with the TRACON. "Eastern is going around. How do you want him?" Then I heard: "Eastern One-Twenty-five climb and maintain five thousand, turn right heading two-four-zero and contact approach on one-two-four point six." Next, he sent Pan Am to Departure Control ~ but not before admonishing the pilot that "Immediate means right now!". Then the bitching would begin. The go-around was, of course, "all the Clipper's fault for not moving fast enough." Oh yes....of course. "Those guys don't know what cleared for immediate takeoff means!" As the story spread, some would quickly agree with Al's assessment while others simply nodded politely. None of his fellow controllers were going to slap him with the cold realities. Call it a professional courtesy combined with the fact that we all have our lapses in judgment now and then.

I thought about those last minute checks I always made when taking the runway in my Cherokee. Important moments. Then I wondered what went on inside the cockpit of a B707 just before takeoff.

The shift Manager would later receive a call from Eastern's local Operations Office and would talk with a pilot who undoubtedly asked some good questions. Apparently the Pan Am pilot also called several hours later. His side of the story was decidedly different from Al's. He also didn't appreciate the bawling out he received from the Local controller. The tower tape was pulled. Al and his Supervisor had to listen to every uncomfortable moment. Al upheld his position that Pan Am screwed him and no one ever implied anything else ~ like the poor judgment that caused it all. Instead, his supervisor's focus was on the unpleasant afterthought of chewing out the Pan Am pilot. He characterized it as unprofessional and unnecessary. The whole episode caused Al to be even less trustful and tolerant of pilots than he was the day before.

I switched off the tower frequency and went over to Unicom. My hour's rental was almost up and I needed to head back. Approaching the airport, I could see the windsock pointing at a nearly perpendicular angle to the runway. Damn! Trying to recall everything my instructor taught me about crosswind landings, I settled onto the downwind leg, taking one last look in the direction of Big Time Airport. Miles away, sunlight flashed briefly off the wing of a departure turning toward ARTCC airspace. I turned base leg. The ride was becoming a bit bumpy; nearly shaking what little confidence I had right out of me. But hey, I was the one who wanted to learn how to fly. Telling myself that didn't make my mouth any less dry though.

Turning onto final, I crabbed the airplane into the wind, trying to keep the nose pointed at the runway. With one eye on the threshold and the other on my airspeed, I gulped, jounced and gasped my way toward the numbers. My flare was a little high but the ride suddenly smoothed out. The Cherokee dropped another five feet or so and bounced onto the runway. It wasn't the best crosswind landing ever but it wasn't bad. I sighed, smiled, slowed up and turned the Piper smartly onto the grass.

Taxi in and tie down took only a few minutes. It wasn't long before I was back in my car and heading for a little pub about five miles from the airport. A roast beef sandwich and a cold beer would cap this morning off perfectly. I had a day shift coming up. Maybe I'd get some radar training or maybe even end up on Local Control which, at that time, was my favorite position. Al would probably be holding court in the breakroom, whining about how great this job would be if it weren't for the airplanes. It didn't matter to me. I knew I had the best job in the world and I'd even survived my first solo crosswind landing! Forget the coffin. Forever the idealist, I was too busy smelling flowers to look around.

Good old H. L. Mencken also said; "An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."

Hmmm. Really dude?

© NLA Factor, 2011

The Curtain Falls - Part Two

2011-07-06T16:34:00.006-04:00

Part One Here

The Other NextGen

2011-06-06T10:00:00.002-04:00

NextGen ~ Air traffic panacea or pricey placebo? Quantum jump ahead or just a head ache? Having pushed my share of tin in a decidedly lower tech air traffic environment, I'm really not qualified to say. The tools of the trade have evolved considerably since I left the boards but there is one thing I learned a long time ago hasn't changed a bit. Riding along comfortably in a high-mileage status quo isn't the best means of travel if you plan on effectively navigating that tricky road into the future. But I'm not going to waste time on that "ongoing transformation of the National Airspace System" touted on FAA's website. If interested, you can go here: video . I recommend checking it out only if you're not working mids and are having trouble sleeping.

I'm talking about another kind of next generation ~ namely the next generation of air traffic controllers. What I saw in the second half of my career was a system for training new controllers that was already in retrograde. But let me take you back to the first half.

When I started my FAA career at Big Time, it wasn't really so big. Busy? Yes . . . but still operating far below a capacity we couldn't have imagined at the time. Many of the guys I met during those first months on the job had been there for several years before PATCO came into existence. A pragmatic and persevering bunch, they were accustomed to fighting and losing their own battles, then dealing with the defeat. Facility policies or procedures were routinely imposed on the workforce by management. Eventual compromise, if any, was hailed by the controllers as somewhat of a victory.

There was, however, that one particular area where concessions were neither anticipated or accepted. In fact, the staunch unwillingness by either side of the bargaining table to compromise was as strong as management's recalcitrance in most other matters. It was actually one of very few subjects everyone agreed on. So ~ what was it that could bring anarchists and autocrats together under the same tent? I remember it like yesterday.

No epiphany moment here. This is a subject that, like a splinter under the fingernail, has been lodged in the air traffic control profession for years. I'm only writing about it now because it's still important to me and because I sense, from friends who are still working airplanes, that the situation is becoming more acute. I'm not just talking about controller training. I'm also talking about the more nebulous concept of facility performance standards. The gradual decline of each is gnawing away at overall skill levels, morale and, inevitably, aviation safety itself.

Believe me, I don't like having to invoke that old bromide ~ aviation safety. In my years on the boards, I heard it overused by PATCO and eventually NATCA to characterize almost anything they disagreed with. But this really was and still is a safety issue.

Take the case of Bobby Joe for example. "BJ" and I began our careers on the same day in the early '70s. Back then, we were among the next generation of controllers coming into Big Time. Former military, BJ was an affable fellow, good humored and as glad to be there as the rest of us. During those first few weeks of classroom training, one thing became clear though. BJ's study habits fell a little short of satisfactory. Always the last to complete his written tests, he also finished with the lowest passing grades. It was okay though. Add a little self-deprecating humor to a buoyant disposition and it'll easily float a guy way out of his depth. Most everyone was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt ~ at least for a while.

On the job training (OJT) was a constant struggle. Although the controllers liked BJ personally, training him was rarely a gratifying experience. All the trainees started their run through the OJT gauntlet on Flight Data/Clearance Delivery. This meant a solid understanding of routes, altitude assignments, computer input formats and clearance delivery phraseology was imperative. Where other trainees eventually demonstrated fluency in these skills, BJ blundered along, skipping or stumbling over many of the essentials. His training sessions often finished up under a withering barrage of assertions by instructors that he was unprepared to work the position. Was it laziness, low aptitude or was he simply too slow? It didn't really matter because nobody was going to be washed out on Clearance Delivery; even if it portended bigger problems ahead. Opinions were forming among his coworkers though. People's expectations declined and, when instructors talked about BJ, doubt crept into their conversation.

Ground Control training was even more troublesome for BJ. There was good reason. This old airport was conceived and constructed during the piston and propeller days when hours could pass between an arrival and the next departure. As the years passed, renovations and updates were thrown into the mix. Terminal buildings grew larger, runways grew longer and new ones were added. All the while, a bewildering network of taxiways spread across the field like some kind of alien ground cover. As the airport's geometry grew increasingly complex, so did the Ground Control position.

BJ struggled with it all, especially at night. To keep up with a dimly lit labyrinth of vague silhouettes, moving lights and airline logos; good strip management was fundamental. Everyone had their own system for sorting out where each airplane was; both coming and going. Without it, confusion could set in quickly. Airplanes instructed to hold at some darkened intersection could easily be forgotten until an irate pilot piped up. Even worse was the possibility of a runway incursion or that a business jet, barreling toward the general aviation ramp, might come face-to-face with an outbound air carrier on the same taxiway. Things could get ugly quick and you literally couldn't see it coming.

BJ's training hours added up, approaching their upper limit when he finally checked out. He tried hard but never managed to develop that "swagger" of confidence on Ground Control that his peers demonstrated. Working the position, BJ always wore an anxious expression on his face. The job got done but it seemed to be taking a toll on BJ and everyone else on the crew. He reminded me of the teenagers in one of those Hollywood "slasher" movies, creeping gingerly through an abandoned factory after dark ~ expecting something horrible to happen at any moment. Since it sometimes did, other controllers in the tower had to be extra vigilant about what BJ was doing on Ground. Working one control position is challenging enough but having to keep an eye on another one can cause undue overload.

Local Control training quickly proved too much for him. Although he knew the applicable rules, his reflexes and, of course, that impossible to teach sixth sense that alerts controllers when something needs to be done never fully developed. Some controllers wanted to see his training terminated long before he ran out of allotted hours. We came to expect go-arounds and missed departure slots when BJ got busy. They spawned delays and delays could quickly segue into airport gridlock. Downstairs; approach controllers grew angry over having to work go-arounds back into an already tight arrival sequence. BJ's OJT reports told the story over and over again. By the time he was called in to have that "talk" with his Supervisor, he was about ready to call it quits anyway. The easy-going nature and good humor he'd been known for was gone and soon ~ so was Bobby Joe.

There was no loud keening from the union. Had he been certified, they would have had to work with, or more aptly, around him. This was a disturbing prospect. Everyone, including the PATCO faithful, understood one thing; when it came to Big Time's tower and TRACON, you had to either keep up or keep out. BJ offered neither excuses or accusations. The front office was mostly silent on the matter, although calls were being exchanged with those who could assist in placing BJ in a less active facility. The consensus was that he had given it his best shot. There was an adequate knowledge of what to do on Local Control but he simply couldn't do it with sufficient speed and competence to meet facility standards and expectations. It was a scenario that I saw repeated several times in the up and down world of Big Time Tower.

Trainees who made it to the radar room would find an atmosphere far less forgiving than tower operations; especially during IFR weather. The airport and our facility were, in fact, simply the vital components of a huge, self-perpetuating machine. Planes were delivered into one end, processed, then spit out the other end in a continuous cycle that should only have stopped when the machine ran out of planes. Any trainee who couldn't learn to make or fill gaps in the arrival sequence, adjust the spacing when demand required or maintain a steady departure flow would soon be, as my Air Force sergeant used to say, doing the "duffel bag drag." There were several examples. Gender or ethnicity issues got the ill-fated fledgling very little consideration. Looking good in a headset or tight fitting jeans got them none at all. It was simple. Everyone was expected to keep the machine running at full speed. It was a matter of pride.

When it became necessary, washing someone out of the training program back then was not seen as an act of aggression. It was cathartic. It was reassuring. It removed someone from an environment where they could not succeed and placed them in one where they stood a better chance.

Then came the strike and a subsequent scramble to hire, train and certify another generation of controllers. As time went by, training strategies and standards began to slip under the weight of increasing demand and user expectations. A culture of compromise began to grow among the weary workforce that had been holding things together since August of '81. "Good enough" became good enough. We began certifying people if they could simply demonstrate the necessary position knowledge and stay out of trouble. Nothing more. Within a year or two, these folks were starting to train even newer recruits and the decline in performance gathered momentum. We were like bartenders watering down our own drinks. The price was high. We'd created a morass of marginally capable controllers who sat like speed bumps in our road to system recovery.

By 1983, there was a fairly large population of 'Strike Babies' (those hired after August of 1981) in the facility and many were fully certified. By default, some of them would hold their trainees to the same "good enough" standards that they had been held to when they were trained. Let's face it; there were work schedules to fill. There were sectors, running combined since the strike, that needed to be staffed separately. Older journeymen longed for retirement while other, younger ones, looked forward to career progression. I was one of them. I'd had enough of Big Time and needed a new challenge. There were also the few acutely fatigued fellas who held themselves together with nothing more than long strings of profanity whenever control room pressure peaked. So any attempt to get rid of a trainee who clearly wasn't up for the task (like old BJ) would often be met with opposition.

Years passed. A new union formed and a new philosophy toward training was taking shape. Try to terminate training on a developmental and you learned several surprising facts. First; it was rarely ever the trainee's fault. It was more likely attributed to a series of unfair and inaccurate training reports. Or maybe the trainee was scheduled for OJT when traffic was either too heavy or too light for his or her capabilities. It could also have been a Supervisor or Manager who "had it in" for them and was trying to railroad them out of the facility. When all else failed, it might simply come down to incomplete or improperly completed training reports. The idea of moving incapable controllers to a place where they stood a better chance of succeeding was being replaced by the idea of training them for as long as it took to become "good enough."

The new reality was to eventually certify trainees - no matter what, let them season on the position when traffic wasn't too heavy, keep an eye on them and hope for the best. Of course this meant the heaviest pushes still had to be handled by our older, more experienced and more fatigued controllers. Many of them were well beyond their nineteenth nervous breakdown and some were about to spontaneously combust.

The world was changing. Most newly hired controllers were coming in with solid academic credentials while the pre-1981 recruits brought prior military ATC experience with them. Decisions, formerly guided by what was best for the system, were increasingly influenced by the course of least resistance. It wasn't simply an issue confined to the control rooms either. It seemed that everyone, from the regional office on down to the controller workforce, was passively complicit in this plunge toward mediocrity. We all shared in the responsibility for aviation safety and had, for whatever reason, tacitly condoned the new 'good enough' standards.

So I'll ask you; how is the next generation of controllers coming along? With a lot of pride in our ATC system still remaining, I am very curious. Has the FAA set its recruitment standards high enough to bring in only the most promising applicants? Will those involved in on-the-job training of our next generation apply the highest standards to that process? Will Management and the union support well founded and clearly documented recommendations by instructors and Supervisors to terminate training on those who don't meet those standards? Will our next generation continue to display the intangible earmarks that once identified our best controllers? Will they be able to cope with the many changes, known and unknown, coming at them? Will they be able to withstand the increasing pressure of inevitable air traffic increases? Does safety still come first? The answers may rest with our current generation but, again, I'm not qualified to say.

© NLA Factor, 2011

A Waking Nightmare

2011-04-23T10:40:00.003-04:00

Here it is folks ~ the long awaited, much anticipated and absolutely latest installment in FAA's long history of artificial incredulity and disingenuous scapegoating. I'll call it "The Waking Nightmare" in honor of those who fall asleep while reading this, then wake up to find they're still on duty. Although I am no longer a factor, I can still make a point out or two. Here are a few things I'd like to point out.

First of all, controllers and Supervisors have been napping on mid shifts for as far back as I can remember - sometimes deliberately and sometimes inadvertently. I can tell you it happened regularly in military facilities as well. Anyone out there care to deny it?

Is anyone surprised? Is this really a dirty little secret known only to the few insomniacs who never nodded off? I don't think so. Is sleeping while signed onto a control position a good idea? Absolutely not. But ponder this; Could catching a nap sometime during your shift be such a bad idea? By today's standards ~ yes. Ironically, I'm sure that FAA's field facilities and Regional Offices, the Hughes Technical Center, Monroney Aeronautical Center, that hideous Bauhaus box at 800 Independence Avenue and even NATCA's offices are all populated by more than a few former controllers who once slept on their mid-shifts. If anyone tells you otherwise, I'd say "let the sleeping dogs lie." Or is it "let the lying dogs sleep?" Guaranteed, it wouldn't be their first time.

I think we're overdue for a wake-up call. These are the people who, by now, could have initiated changes to FAA's utopian standards but apparently they're not being paid to provide upper Management with the occasional "reality check."

Here's another surprise. Frequent changes in people's work schedules and sleep cycles can bring on circadian dysrhythmia-like symptoms. Its a lot like jet lag. Consider also the fact that we humans are not nocturnal creatures. Neither are the super humans ~ like 7-Eleven clerks (Hey, I couldn't handle the job!) and air traffic controllers. We sleep at night. It's just a shame this news had to come as such a shock to some people. Is FAA's family so dysfunctional that it can never openly address and fix its ongoing problems before our fabled "Fourth Estate" pokes the flying public in the eye with them? Don't answer that.

© NLA Factor, 2011

"Every Picture Tells A Story Don't It?"

2011-04-16T14:19:00.007-04:00

The new control tower was finally finished so the office staff crowded in to play air traffic controller for this press release photo.

Chief Mike "Fright" Furbish took Local Control, pointed at a runway and yawned.

Deputy Chief Izzy Landon did his perennial favorite "binoculars and microphone" thing on Ground while staff lackey Les Di'Ley took care of business at the Flight Data console.

Of course, the new airport wouldn't be open for another two weeks . . .

© NLA Factor, 2011

Location, Location, etc.

2011-04-06T12:02:00.007-04:00

Another Way Out

2011-03-29T07:30:00.003-04:00

I'm taking another "sentimental journey" back to Desolia; a pockmarked asteroid of a country, tumbling, unchanged, through time. Although far from the most significant chapter in my aviation career, it sure was an interesting one. Of course the Country and Air Base names are fictitious and I've given the characters pseudonyms, but the place and what happened back then are as real as I remember them. Anyone who's been reading this Blog over the last year or so may recall my first tale of Desolation. To continue . . .

Staff Sergeant Wendt was gone. He had been missing for two days and nobody really knew what happened to him; although we controllers had our theories. For sure, someone around here had the facts but they would be talking in hushed tones behind the doors of some conference room at base Headquarters or whispering in the quiet corridors of the Officer's Club. The facts in this matter simply resided too far above the enlisted grades for us to ever learn the truth. The only truth we knew was that Wendt was gone. His disappearance wasn't entirely unexpected though. Others had also vanished after having similar experiences around here. I'll tell you what I can remember.

The scene was the cab of an aged control tower at Desolation Air Base. It was a late '60s Summer and we were plodding through the slow-motion minutes of an evening shift with nothing but a trickle of traffic. Our DAF (Desolian Air Force) counterparts were gathered together in the back of the tower, engaged in their favorite late evening pastime of card playing. I don't remember what the game was called but it resembled poker and they were passionate about it.

Me, Sergeant Wendt (our NCO in charge) and another airman sat on our side of the cab talking about what we usually talked about when there were no airplanes. Such discussions generally revolved around one of two subjects. The first, and by far the most popular was how much time was left on our tour of duty at Desolation AB. Who was the shortest "short-timer?" Wendt hadn't been there very long and neither had George, the other airman on duty. I had less than four months to go and so was clearly the short-timer. The subtext of these discussions was what we'd do as soon as we returned stateside. For me, there was a restaurant waiting in my hometown that made the best lasagna ever.

The next most intriguing topic was who might get lucky in the upcoming promotion cycle. I can tell you now ~ it wouldn't be Sergeant Wendt.

Our Desolian interpreter, Mr Fye, never worked the night shift so if any communication was needed between their controllers and ours; we had to rely on their limited command of English, our limited command of Desolian or, more likely, a series of wild semaphoric hand signals to figure out what was going on. Of course, knowing what was going on and actually caring about what was going on were two different things in Desolation Tower.

A phone began ringing at the non-radar approach control position. It was there we practiced the dark arts you read about in Chapter 6 (Nonradar) of the 7110.65. TACAN penetrations, timed approaches, diverging, converging and crossing course separation and other mystical means of keeping airplanes from colliding were all performed using nothing more than a clock, flight strips and black felt tip markers. The card players had a similar position on their side of the tower but, as their phone continued ringing, it became clear they were not going to answer. After a few moments, Sergeant Wendt picked up the line.

The civilian enroute center was calling with an inbound. Wendt grabbed a blank flight progress strip and began writing. Although a bit late, it was the usual traffic for this hour of night. A Vickers Viscount, operated by the Desolian National Airline, was on a slightly behind schedule run into the nearby civil airport. The airfield was uncontrolled but our facility furnished approach control services. As always though; house rules required each Air Force to control their own traffic ~ civil or military. Wendt completed the inbound ticket, placed it in a strip holder on their side of the console and rejoined our conversation. Ten or fifteen minutes passed and the phone lit up again. A progress report from the center. The Desolian flight was estimating our boundary in five minutes.

Wendt marked the strip then tapped the plastic holder on the approach console to get someone's attention on the DAF's side of the tower. They looked up briefly from their card game then resumed their own conversation. Mildly irritated, Wendt slapped the strip holder into their bay. Sometime later, another phone rang. This time, Sergeant Mouseff, their senior NCO answered. Someone over at the civil airport was looking for a release for a departing Viscount. Mouseff scribbled on a strip, made a few remarks in the native tongue, then hung up. Within seconds, he was reimmersed in their card game. Wendt glanced at the strip, now stacked above the inbound ticket in the bay. He was curious because simultaneous arrival and departure activity at that airport was pretty rare. The Viscount was released and, as usual for traffic out of there, was cleared short to the only VOR inside our airspace. There was an "up" arrow drawn in with the number 50 printed next to it ~ also the usual. We resumed our discussion over the chances for promotion.

Wendt offered to buy the pizza if one of us junior bird men would run over to the NCO Club for it. Overcome with boredom, I volunteered. Wendt reached into his wallet and handed me a twenty. Within seconds I was hurrying down the stairs and out the door. I was hungry and the club was only four blocks away. What apparently happened next soon became an important part of Desolation Tower folklore.

Minutes after I left, that inbound Desolian Airliner called over a fix just outside our boundary. The card game paused just long enough for one of their guys to answer ~ in the native tongue. He unkeyed his mic, marked the strip and returned to his game. Now . . . although the native language is difficult, you couldn't work in that tower for very long without at least understanding a few basic phrases, such as the pilot's readback of his altitude assignment. Sergeant Wendt thought he heard their controller clear that flight to the VOR at five thousand, so he couldn't resist peeking at the strip. It was, in fact, marked with a down arrow and the number 50. Wendt peered over at the card players and waved his hand in a "come hither" kind of gesture. Sergeant Mouseff stood up, looking very annoyed. It was known by all that Mouseff strongly disliked Americans and made no effort to hide it. He especially disliked Sergeant Wendt.

I waited for our pizza in the lobby. Desolation's NCO club was a raucous place; always busy because there wasn't much else to do around there but drink. Most of us reasoned that alcohol might eventually kill whatever caused our ongoing dysentery. It didn't, of course, but at least you could forget the pain for a while. Desolia was known as a place where no one ever broke wind for fear of shitting themselves. Everyone learned this the hard way within a month after transferring into Desolation Air Base.

The pizza came out in about ten minutes. Then there was another ten minute walk back to work. All tolled, I must have been gone maybe 30 minutes or so. Reaching the top step of the tower, the first thing I noticed was our Chief Controller; a Senior Master Sergeant named Clay. In civilian clothes, he looked tired and pissed. I immediately suspected I'd be getting my ass chewed for being away from duty. George sat on a widow ledge looking worried. The Desolian controllers were still playing cards but Wendt and Mouseff were missing.

George gave me all the details later on. Apparently Wendt had tried pointing out to Mouseff that both the arriving and departing flights appeared to be cleared to the VOR at the same altitude. Mouseff, who actually spoke fairly good English, stared at his cards, sneered and reminded Wendt in a low tone, that these were Desolian flights and to mind his own business. Minutes passed as Wendt sat fidgeting nervously. The departing Viscount called "leaving fifteen hundred." A few moments later, the arriving flight reported reaching five thousand. Neither had crossed the VOR yet but, based on past experience, Wendt figured they'd both be there within three or four minutes of each other ~ and head on. It became too much for him to take sitting down. He stood up and loudly insisted that Mouseff do something quickly.

The other controllers watched silently as Mouseff put his cards down and slowly arose. Now Wendt was shouting urgently so Mouseff shouted back in Desolian. Hands waved and fingers pointed. According to George it became so chaotic that nobody heard the departure report reaching four thousand. Wendt was still yelling as Mouseff picked up a phone and pushed one of the lighted buttons.

Within minutes, two Desolian Air Policemen appeared, took Wendt by the arms and marshaled him toward the tower steps. Mouseff spoke a few words to his controllers then disappeared down the steps behind Wendt ~ who I never saw again. George immediately called Sergeant Clay at his home in the base housing area.

Investigations revealed that Mouseff had actually cleared the departure to four thousand but somehow printed five on the strip. Was it a mistake or a deliberate attempt to goad Wendt into interfering? We never knew for sure. We did know that Wendt's involvement triggered the incident. Both flights were Desolian. It was their traffic.

Sometimes good intentions can get you into trouble; especially while stationed overseas. Sometimes Uncle Sam can get you out of it and sometimes he can't. One thing was certain though. Getting into any difficulties with the DAF pretty much meant you were screwed. It was their base and we were simply a tenant organization expected to comply with the house rules. What your actual infraction was didn't matter as much as which military authority got to you first. Falling into the hands of Desolia's military could be as final as falling into a volcano. We'd heard of several American GIs doing time in the local prison and no measure of diplomacy would ever dislodge them.

There were always rumors of another way out of these delicate situations. We had no idea what it was but hoped Wendt could find it. Wendt had been arrested by Desolian military authorities. As expected, both the American and Desolian Base Commanders was called in and briefed on the charges brought by Sergeant Mouseff. Our Commander, a full Colonel and one of those square-jawed fighter pilots, promised there would be a full investigation. For this, he was given temporary custody of the bewildered Sergeant Wendt; who was then lead away by an American Air Police officer.

Nobody saw Wendt over the next two days and a rumor had already begun to circulate. Was he in the USAF lockup or could he really be in the Desolian military prison? Nobody knew. One thing for sure; we had a new Crew Chief. By now, it was day three after the incident and another evening shift. I was working Ground Control, watching a group of guys in flight suits trekking across the ramp toward one of several itinerant C-141 Starlifters. It was probably the crew and a few others hitching a ride. There was a Loadmaster standing behind the aircraft, supervising as the last cargo pallet rolled into the yawning fuselage. A long shadow cast by the tall vertical stabilizer pointed east toward the DAF ramp. Several of their F-84s were moving about and merging, single file, onto the taxiway. A flight of two lifted off the runway as the sun fell behind a mountain. Sergeant Mouseff was working their Local Control Position. Mr. Fye, our intrepid interpreter, had gone home; leaving us to face another night of DAF student pilot training by ourselves. It grew dark and I could feel one of my DAF headaches coming on.

There were a few departure strips in my Ground Control bay; all Starlifters destined for European or Asian air bases. The first to call for taxi instructions was headed to Rhein-Main AB in Frankfurt. It was the same aircraft I had seen the crew climb into earlier. I sent them off toward the active runway and switched them over to George, who was working Local. Meanwhile, another flight of two F-84s sat on the runway chattering between themselves and Sergeant Mouseff. When they finally rolled and were airborne, he called to George and gestured toward the waiting C-141. It was our turn.

The Starlifter lumbered down the runway, lifted off and disappeared into some low clouds. The pilot checked in with our nonradar controller and was given a climb clearance. Acknowledging that, he then made a peculiar transmission that got the attention of nearly everyone in the tower. Mouseff didn't hear it because he was busy yelling at a flight of his F-84s who nearly ran into an F-100 in our GCA pattern. So the C-141 pilot said that "someone on board wants to know where his change for that pizza is!" In an instant I understood everything. Me, George and the new Sergeant working Approach looked at each other and smiled. So there was another way out!

Sometime later, we heard that Wendt had taken a couple weeks leave in the States, then was reassigned to Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Vietnam. Better than Desolian prison, I suppose.
Farewell Sergeant Wendt. I still owe you twelve bucks.

© NLA Factor, 2011

In a word:

2011-03-09T09:30:00.001-05:00

Life as an Air Force controller was pretty simple once I learned the rules. I got to work on time, kept my hair senselessly short, my uniform pressed and my shoes polished. I did what I was told to do, when I was told to do it (a new and rather impractical concept for me) and I never questioned my superiors. The rules didn't bother me and the rules didn't change ~ ever. Once I got used to it all, life was easy. I was now an air traffic controller! I worked in a control tower where I did my eight hour shift watching incredible airplanes doing awesome things on and above the airfield. I even had an entirely new vocabulary that included such terms as "afterburners, hung ordnance" and "formation takeoff." In my opinion, it was the coolest job ever and I felt lucky to be there. After all, it was only a few months prior that I could have been a poster boy for dead end jobs.

Initially, the Air Force wanted to make me into an aircraft mechanic. A mistake like that would have put my life on an entirely different trajectory and, given my mechanical aptitude, would also have left the Air Force with a lot of broken airplanes rusting away on the ramp. Besides that; anyone who ever looked out a control tower window to see those aircraft mechanics working down on the flight line during snow storms, sleet or sweltering heat knew where the better place to work was.

Controllers lead a relatively privileged life around the base. Since we worked shifts we were exempted from most of the crap that other enlisted airmen had to put up with. Work details, guard duty, parades and inspections were for the other chumps in the squadron. We controllers just did our shifts and were left on our own the rest of the time. That time was usually spent off base; going to one of the many nearby bars with my teammates, getting drunk and amusing the local women. Throw in some occasional sleep and you'd have a pretty good snapshot of my life. I was so young in those days, easily influenced, eager for acceptance and wholly high on everything.

A couple floors below the tower cab was our head office. This was where the Flight Facilities Officer sat, along with a couple of senior NCOs who were directly responsible for tower and Radar operations. Those two guys were the real forces to be reckoned with if ever there were problems. The officer, a baby-faced First Lieutenant named John, seemed either perpetually bored or stricken with hemorrhoids. He'd graduated college with an engineering degree, joined the Air Force and was immediately put in charge of an air traffic control facility. It made no sense ~ to him or us. Most times we'd find him at his desk, talking on the telephone, reading magazines or just staring out the window. It wasn’t much of a job ~ unless Bob the FAA Air Traffic Representative happened to be around. We never knew for sure but it seemed that Bob outranked everyone. Even Lieutenant John tried to look busy when he was around.

Bob, or the "Atrep" as he was referred to, was an FAA employee; the only FAA employee on the entire base. At one time there were lots of Atreps; each was assigned to a military air traffic facility, where they oversaw operations and acted as a liaison between their military hosts and the FAA. It was a much coveted and difficult job to get. Difficult because no one in his right mind ever gave up an Atrep job until they retired. It was that good.

Bob was rarely in his office and practically never came to the tower cab unless there was a Wing exercise, major overseas deployment, in-flight emergency or if he found out his boss in the Regional Office was stopping in. He'd also have to be on hand to administer CTO (Control Tower Operator) tests and sign off on newly certified controllers. Most times though, Bob was out playing golf with the Base Commander or hanging out at the Officer's Club. During those rare appearances in the tower, he'd tell tales about his ATC career, the people he knew and the airplanes he'd worked. Most of the guys on my crew, Vietnam vets and career Air Force controllers, were skeptical or indifferent to Bob’s rambling recollections. Not me. I was twenty years old and completely riveted by his commentaries on big airliners, bustling terminal buildings and busy tarmacs. For the first time, a vision of my future began to take shape. I finally had a goal in life but needed to finish my military hitch first. Getting into the FAA probably wouldn't be easy but it would surely be worth it. I loved being an Air Force controller but was sure the job would be even better in the FAA.

We'd all heard the stories of Air Force controllers who got discharged one day and went to work in an FAA facility the next. We heard they could make upward to $12,000 a year as FAA controllers! But you know...as an Airman Second Class standing watch in a small control tower ~ looking out at the nearly three years remaining on my enlistment? Getting a controller job with the FAA was nothing more than a pipe dream.

After being discharged, I rushed off immediately to take the Civil Service test for Air Traffic Control ~ only to find the FAA wasn't hiring. That started me off on a long odyssey through several jobs about which I knew very little and cared even less. Time passed. I become depressed and disengaged. Persistent memories of those years spent as a controller only made things worse. Although not exactly in Dire Straits, I did have to "move those refrigerators" and color TVs to get by. Never say fate doesn't have a great sense of humor though. No sooner did I finally land an interesting job that paid me something other than a pittance and a promise when the FAA called. Grabbing the ring, I soon found myself checking into Big Time Tower as a trainee; where I would come to realize that life as an FAA controller wasn’t as easy to understand as my Air Force life had been.

Unlike the Air Force, life as an FAA controller was not so simple. Rules changed, it seemed, every time I opened the "Read and Initial" binder. Gone was the constancy of military life. My world was now a large gray area; where issues and edicts could be debated ad infinitum. I could wear whatever I wanted to work, as long as I maintained "a neat, businesslike appearance." Nobody cared how long my hair was and, for the first time in my controller career, individual goals and ideologies were permissible. The coalescence and lockstep compliance required of a military unit was not applicable here. Open conflict with superiors, although officially discouraged, was tolerated and widely practiced by many of the journeymen. Even the Supervisors got into it but usually fought their battles behind closed doors.

There was a union, who’s job it seemed, was to highlight management’s incompetence, provide cover for clumsy controllers, ensure everyone understood just how oppressed and underpaid we were and have monthly meetings at a nearby bar ~ where we'd usually end up getting drunk and amusing the local women. Okay ~ so there was at least one similarity between the Air Force and the FAA. There were union Contracts, new and old, containing sundry Articles, the meanings or intent of which were often debated ad infinitum. This often resulted in grievances; usually denied, which could lead to arbitration and possibly another interpretation of the Article in question. It was stuff that ole' Bob the Atrep never talked about and couldn't even have imagined.

At first, I didn’t have the time to really appreciate the sharp contrasts between the Air Force and FAA's working environment. On my first day at Big Time, I was handed a copy of the point sixty-five, along with several Change Notices that needed to be posted. Then came the letters of agreement, Facility Standard Operating Procedures Manual, Emergency Operations Manual, copies of all applicable SIDs and approach plates, the Airport Operations Manual and, of course, a list of nearby restaurants that delivered to the tower. The Training Officer pointed to a couple of large loose-leaf binders filled with Facility Orders, Notices and Memos. Required reading.

I took it all home and dropped it on the coffee table. Familiarization, memorization and successful completion of the periodic written exams would be my ticket out of the Training Department and into OJT ~ a place where I'd actually talk to airplanes again. I opened a beer and started to read. Wading through the reams of reference material was a pure pleasure to me. My "pipe dream" of becoming an FAA controller was coming true. I was making good money, or so I thought at the time. If I made it through the training program, there would be even more money in my pocket. Coming in from a lengthy run of minimum wage jobs with no benefits; I felt like a lottery winner. Once again, I thought I had the coolest job ever and I felt lucky to be there.

The Training Department, however, was apparently some kind of "cocoon" that kept me insulated from the constant sawing and hammering of labor/management relations. Every now and then the local PATCO President would stop in to brief me and the other trainees on what was happening. I was astonished to learn just how bad things were out there "on the boards." Outside my little cocoon, a tempest of grievances, Unfair Labor Practices and Unsatisfactory Condition Reports raged on endlessly. We were encouraged to stay alert, support PATCO and push its initiatives. I was confused. I couldn't reconcile what I was hearing with my fond memories of Air Force ATC. Could the career I'd been craving all these years really be so bad? It would take PATCO to eventually help me understand the dynamics of what was going on here. Meanwhile, I just nodded my head stupidly. Well; I was so young back then, easily influenced and eager for acceptance.

It took a while but I finally got out of the Training Department and into OJT. These were happy and humbling times. I quickly learned that hotshot Air Force controller of the late '60s was now an idiot who knew nothing about air traffic control. I was a Gong Show reject among the true artistes. As promised, I put my shoulder to the wheel whenever I could and, along with the other PATCO members, pushed the union's campaigns against management. What I eventually learned was; no matter how hard one pushes against an obstacle, it may never move. That's not so bad though. The real problems begin when the obstacle starts pushing back at you. So it was with our PATCO Local and facility management.

It didn't take long for the union to convince me of just how bad things were. Looking back, I see it mostly as a self-fulfilling prophesy. For every problem I was told about, I would see at least two examples per day. Every time PATCO hassled and nit-picked at management, the reaction became more severe. The more defensive and unreasonable they appeared, the more we hassled and nit-picked at them. Within a few months I felt myself becoming disgruntled, frustrated and irate but I wasn't really sure why. I was progressing normally through the training program and should have been satisfied, if not exuberant. But the constant droning of dissent was inescapable and seemed to suck all the joy out of my success at the job.

My descent into full discontent took place at a glacial pace. It was a slow leak in my morale that eventually left me deflated and disconsolate. Having once believed I had the coolest job ever; only to learn it was mere drudgery took a while for me to accept. Did I feel lucky to be here? Well yes ~ but only when I was controlling airplanes. Once unplugged from my console I couldn't avoid hearing that sawing and hammering again. Oh there were still those loud monthly union meeting/beer parties. Lots of fun but the next day always brought back a hangover of cynicism and resentment toward management. It was a situation that would take me years of listening, questioning and self-scrutiny to climb out of.

Then one day I thought of those mentally disabled guys I used to work with back in my department store janitor days. It wasn't so long ago and yet I'd completely forgotten how humble and happy they were with their work. Back then I was just marching in place till a real opportunity like the FAA came along. But to those guys, cleaning floors and bathrooms was their career and they were proud of it. It was probably still their career and, if so, they'd still be coming to work with that "lottery winner" attitude. What would they say of my current situation, salary and attitude? Once again, just like back then, I began feeling ashamed of myself. Was I the underlying cause of my own discontent? Was I simply making my personal situation worse? Was it possible to tune out the caterwauling negativity and just enjoy the job I loved? In a word: yes!

© NLA Factor, 2011

The Curtain Falls On Bob's Career. . .

2011-02-24T12:55:00.006-05:00

The Manager Gets Recertified

2011-02-13T07:34:00.004-05:00

Error Of Omission

2011-01-28T15:00:00.002-05:00

People, sometimes even us controllers, make bad decisions in life. Oh, they appear to be fine at the time; wise and considered ~ decisions that will bring us to a desired outcome. Sometimes though, we don't think things through or cogitate the possibly negative consequences. We don't do an adequate risk assessment. The result can not only be a bad decision, but possibly the last decision we ever get to make. And sometimes the outcome of a bad decision is exacerbated when important data is discounted or omitted during the decision-making process. That's where we came in on one very inclement Summer day.

Big Time's surveillance radar made its ceaseless sweep around the airspace and each turn of the antenna painted a changing panorama of storm cells and circuitous traffic patterns. Although arrivals were crowding into holding patterns and receiving lengthy EFC delays; approach controllers somehow managed to weave a few at a time around the shifting weather and on toward a waiting ILS. From my position in the tower, the airport was a dreary looking place; partly obscured by steady rainfall and occasional fog. Airplanes were landing though ~ some even reporting decent conditions on final. This didn't mollify our growing concern over the darkening skies just north of the field.

Down in the TRACON, frequencies were squealing with transmissions from pilots who refused to accept assigned headings. Departures were deviating into adjacent ARTCC sectors while arrivals wandered into the departure flow. Pointouts, both inter and intrafacility, were frequent and frantic. Many were done by Supervisors who would dash across the radar room from one sector to another; point at a particular target on the controller's display and say something like: "Watch this guy - he's turning left!" The room was rife with the smell of sweat and cigarette smoke.

High above a small rural town some miles from the city, the pilot in command of one passenger jet in a holding pattern listened to Big Time's ATIS broadcast. He'd been listening to other flights in the pattern. Some were now on their way into the airport while others were being cleared to an alternate destination. It sounded like rough going no matter which way you were headed. He tuned into the tower frequency and listened to a few pilot reports about conditions on final. When his turn finally came to leave holding, he decided to go for it. As he was vectored out of the pattern, other flight crews in the hold were probably happy to sit tight for a while longer ~ hoping conditions would improve.

Unfortunately, conditions were not improving. In fact, they seemed to be worsening. Landing airplanes came into view about a mile out, crabbing a few degrees left to compensate for a gusty, quartering crosswind. Then they'd kick it straight toward the runway, touch down and quickly fade into the mist blown up by their reverse thrusters. Local Controllers would ask; "Say flight conditions on final." The reports remained relatively benign ~ not as bad as it looked ~ braking action good. "Thanks Cap'n. Contact ground point seven." But a vile looking veil of weather was looming to the north and closing in on our only usable ILS.

Wind-driven rain slashed incessantly at the tower windows. Neophyte that I was, I stood at the Ground Control position, watching the approaching darkness nervously and shifting my weight from one foot to the other. Everyone in the cab was talking about the lightning and watching the wind direction indicators; now beginning to twitch erratically back and forth in a 45 degree arc. I saw gusts approach 30 knots and wondered just how wet I was going to get on my way to the parking lot at shift change.

Glancing at the BRITE display, I saw another airliner turn to intercept the final. Lightning flashed within five miles of the field and the rain intensified. Our high intensity runway lights glared in the distance but, from where we stood, there was only a diffuse glow. Somebody called over the outer marker. I remember looking north and imagining the conversation in that cockpit! I could barely see the airfield boundary through the rain but, somewhere out there, a 707 had just touched down. As it rolled onto the second high-speed turn-off, the pilot asked for progressive taxi instructions to a remote cargo ramp.

The next time I looked at the BRITE display, the airplane making an approach was about three miles out. Looking toward the final was like staring into a railroad tunnel. There was nothing to see but blackness.

Just then, someone came up the steps to relieve the tower Supervisor. Comments were exchanged about how hostile the weather looked and how unwieldy the radar operation had been so far. I heard the local controller give another wind check to the guy on final so I looked off into the murk ~ expecting to see some landing lights. Nothing. No reply from the crew either.

A few seconds later, I saw it. First some lights; blurred by the intense rainfall. Then the whole airplane came into view. It was well right of the runway centerline and, somehow, didn't appear to be flying anymore. Still airborne, it looked like it was simply hurtling along on a trajectory established when its wings lost their lift. Nose high and tilted to the right, it fell quickly toward the airport.

Frozen, like insects in amber, everyone in the cab watched in silence. It was the silence of knowing what was to come next. Someone reached for the crash phone.

The plane hit ground with a thud that we could feel a mile away. From there, it slid along the wet grass next to the runway; skipping across a couple of connecting taxiways before skidding to a stop near the main terminal ramp. Along the way, its fuselage broke open. There was no fire and, moments after coming to rest, people began climbing out of the wreck through a gaping crack just behind the wings. Some were clutching briefcases. It was surreal.

The pilot had decided to continue with an approach that would take his airplane into some very sinister looking weather. He'd made his initial assessment before leaving the holding pattern and had decided it was worth coming down for a look. Turning onto the final, the soundness of his decision might have been debatable. However, other flights had gone through ahead of him and known conditions didn't prohibit a shot at the approach. But there were known conditions he was not aware of; conditions unintentionally omitted during his critical decision-making moments.

Were ATC's hands clean on this one? We all thought so. Except for the new kid on Ground Control, the tower crew was comprised of some of Big Time's best and the Supervisor was a savvy veteran who'd seen all of this before. Everything seemed to be clicking and, throughout Mother Nature's assault, we managed to move a lot of traffic in and out. But the tapes tell all.

Sometime shortly after that 707 landed, the touchdown RVR had dipped below minimums for the approach. No one in the tower caught it in time. We were all too busy watching the weather move in. Wind checks, braking action reports and other flight conditions were transmitted while this plane made its approach but we missed that critical change in the visibility. It was an error of omission ~ one that would change a lot of lives forever.

Rain was still falling heavily at shift change. Our crew walked out to the parking lot in small groups; everyone soaked, muttering and shaking their heads in disbelief.

© NLA Factor, 2011

Where Are They Now? Eddie

2011-01-10T12:39:00.001-05:00

I got to know a lot of people during my time in the FAA. I need to write about some of them; starting with Eddie.

My most memorable experiences from the '60s were taken from the perspective of an Air Force recruit. The world was erupting and, like a volcano, no one could stop it. Even if we could, most of us wouldn't have wanted to. I could feel everything rocking and rolling but it was from within the constraints of a well pressed military uniform. Come 1969, while much of my generation converged on Woodstock for that three days of peace and music, I stood in an Air Force control tower, lusting after Grace Slick and listening to the derisive discordance of my Sergeant's remarks about "those candy-assed, long haired Hippies!" Well, he'd already done two tours in Vietnam and had been passed over several times for promotion. Bitter about nearly everything; his outlook on life had become just another prisoner of war.

I was discharged from the Air Force later that year. The sixties-style social upheaval threw me from one tumultuous decade to the next, where I eventually landed at Big Time as a trainee controller. Images of those long gone days flicker and blink in my memory like a bad neon sign. As the years pass, they're fading from full color to a timeworn sepia tone. I still see them though ~ mostly at night. I see the people who accompanied me along the way from how things were then to how things are today. I see their faces; some smiling, some smirking and some just strung-out from exhaustion. I like to remember the impetus behind those smiles but I also recall the reasons for those wry smirks and the enervating exhaustion.

I've lost touch with most of them and often wonder; where are they now? Why do I remember so few, having forgotten so many? Why do I remember Eddie?

Eddie transferred into Big Time from another busy airport where he'd spent years working only in the control tower. By the time I arrived on the scene, Eddie was fully rated throughout the facility but clearly preferred tower duty over the TRACON. On the radar sectors, he seemed timid and unsure of himself; testing the patience of many more aggressive controllers. The tower, however, was his domain and he ruled with a flourish. To Eddie, the airport was like an amphetamine and his speed was contagious. Working any position that exchanged traffic with Local Control when he was signed on meant you kept pace with his potency. Here was a guy who couldn't stop. He couldn't even slow down. Airport traffic control was simply the outlet for his overactive adrenal gland.

He was a smooth talker and he talked to his traffic non-stop; which is to say that every pilot on his frequency knew precisely what his plans and expectations were. Accordingly, they were always ready to do their part to make it work. He was a master in the art of the squeeze-play. When I would have bet the paycheck he couldn't get a departure out between two closely spaced arrivals; I'd end up being amazed. As his next departure swung into position, someone in the tower cab might gasp and mutter "Jeesus Eddie!" The pilot on short final might gripe and the Supervisor would just shake his head and look away. In less than a minute it was over. Eddie made it happen.

Down in the TRACON, approach controllers loved him because there was rarely any whining over the arrival intervals being too tight. Departure controllers squirmed in their seats; knowing that Eddie never missed a chance to utter one of his favorite phrases: "Cleared for immediate takeoff." Ground controllers liked working next to him because, unless there were unusual restrictions, they could keep a steady supply of airplanes rolling toward the runways. The Assistant Chief would make sure Eddie was sent to the tower whenever departures and arrivals had to share the same runway.

As a trainee, I was often assigned to the mid-shift with Eddie. We'd finish up what was left of the late evening traffic by 1:30 or 2:00, then make small talk while the cargo flights trickled in and out. When the airplanes finally stopped calling and there were no more active strips in the bays, Eddie would glance at his watch. Then, at precisely 3:00 A.M., he'd sometimes suggest that I "go downstairs and study." This was code for "Go home." Too inexperienced to question the call, I'd usually head down the tower steps and into the breakroom, where I'd sleep for the rest of the shift. Getting lots of "study" time was one of the best reasons to work a round of mids with Eddie. Actually, I couldn't wait to get checked out so that I could give poor Eddie a break from those late night doldrums. As I later discovered; he wouldn't have really wanted a break.

Big Time is a sprawling airport where, like us controllers, lots of people work through the night. I met a few of them in my years. Sometimes they'd call and ask to come up to the tower for a look. One night I met a guy who had been in my high school class. He was now employed by one of the airlines and driving a tug on their ramp.

As a trainee working mids with Eddie, I even met a flight attendant! Coincidentally, she was climbing the tower steps at 3:00 A.M. as I was heading down to "study." I guess either her timing or Eddie's was a little off that night. As any controller knows ~ a departure and an arrival should never meet, opposite direction, on the same flight path. She smiled and winked as we passed each other. That was the moment when I understood why Eddie would send me off at three in the morning. I smiled too.

As I said; Eddie was a smooth talker.

Eddie eventually transferred out of Big Time. He went off to another busy tower but it was one where he wouldn't have to work radar. We'd get occasional updates from him for the first year or so but they eventually stopped coming. I suppose he's happily retired by now but who knows? Eddie had a lot of energy to burn and he never knew how to stop.

Why do I remember Eddie so vividly after all the years? Sure, he was cocky, crazy and very capable but so were many of the controllers and Supervisors I worked with. I suppose I remember Eddie because of what I learned by observing him. The lessons went much deeper than basic and advanced air traffic control. He taught me the importance of trusting my professional instincts. The years of experience had taught him to trust his own and it distinguished him from the rest. Take those "squeeze plays" for example. Where one controller may have considered the possibility of getting a departure off between two particular arrivals and wondered briefly if it would work; Eddie knew it would. Had he wasted even a moment or two on second thoughts; the opportunity would have been lost. He trusted the instincts he'd developed over his career and implemented his plan without hesitation.

No matter what the endeavor; Eddie was a 'go for it' guy and I still smile when I think of him.

© NLA Factor, 2011

High Court?

2010-11-26T09:45:00.000-05:00

The Touch

2010-11-05T15:15:00.005-04:00

The Weather these last several weeks was spectacular so I spent most of my days outside. With their spotless blue skies, balanced breezes and cool temperatures; these were the kinds of days when I never really minded being sent to the tower. Images and impressions remain, even though time eventually dilutes the adrenalin.

There was the sprawling airport to scan, rife with its hundreds of small and sizable dramas taking place all around. Dozens of airplanes could regularly be seen rushing along the runways and taxiways, slowing or speeding up in an effort to keep their promise with company timetables. Jam-packed traffic patterns raged and roiled around the airfield till you felt like you were in the eye of a hurricane. The immense energy of it all rocked and rattled the tower cab so relentlessly that, if you didn't hang onto the console with both hands, you could be thrown to the floor. Or so it seemed. All the while, a wide cityscape leaned against the distant sky like an angular mountain range; our backdrop to the continuing spectacle of Big Time Airport.Nah, I never minded a tower assignment on days like these. It wasn't just another day of rubber on and rubber off the runways. It was a sensation ~ and whether your option was terminal or enroute, the airport was where every controller's shift really began and ended. You just had to see it to believe it.

When weather was this good, Big Time would usually be on a favored runway configuration. There'd be no restrictions in or out so Approach would be cramming their traffic into the airport on visuals. Departures flowed freely in all directions ~ if your timing was good enough to squeeze them off between arrivals. The tower Supervisor could usually be found pacing around behind the local controller; glancing at the BRITE display, glaring at the stagnating departure queue and growling at his TRACON counterpart over spacing on the finals. The TRACON Supe would mutter something like "Let me know when the approach end goes IFR from rubber smoke and we'll back off a little." Us controllers would just hang on, hustle our traffic and hurl those great, good natured barbs at each other.

There was a comforting climate of normalcy to it all. We were busy all right but we were busy working airplanes rather than working out SWAP routes, calling for releases or emptying out holding patterns. It was an indefatigable exhilaration instead of the trying tedium that often awaited an incoming crew at shift change. It was pure, unadulterated air traffic control and the application of separation standards never felt so good. These were the days when there was no better job than ours; when the idea of leaving the boards for a staff position rarely occurred to anyone. This job was simply too much fun.

But some people were thinking about it. Who knows? It might have been the guy working Final who, when asked, would build me a gap between his arrivals so I could get a heavy jet off. Maybe it was the gal working Ground Control who'd ask if she could take a few departures to one of the designated arrival runways. It might even have been the Departure Controller who'd call me at Local when I had a long line of planes to go and say "Just flush 'em! I'll spread 'em out in the air! What ever became of those people?

A lot of them, like me, eventually ended up in Management. It took some of us longer to get there than others but, if that's where you wanted to be, you'd eventually get your chance. Far more important than how long it took was how the change affected those who made the transition. A few fled back to the boards after a year or so; disillusioned and disappointed by the realities of staff work and the "other world" atmosphere of the office. Some who stepped away from their headsets ultimately revealed an uncanny knack for transforming nearly everything they touched. Sadly, it wasn't the "Midas touch" kind of transformation that might have added value to the facility's operation or its staff or even the air traffic profession as a whole. It was more of a "minus touch," where the things they became involved in were somehow diminished ~ infected by arrogance, apathy and eventual conflict.

What outrageous alchemy is it that can turn a principled person perfidious or a masterful controller into a maladroit manager? The answer can be found somewhere in this seemingly innocuous little thing known as career progression. I think its an unregistered intoxicant. Some people I've known could handle a lot of it and remain upright, walking tall and leaving a trail of respect in their wake. Others fell quickly onto their bellies and began a career-long slither down the serpentine path that overlaps the line between right and wrong.

I wrote a variation on the issue several months back in a Post titled "Stepping Up Or Stepping Out." I want to know how someone you've trusted and relied on for years can change so profoundly when they're given a little authority. How does someone, who would once do almost anything to reduce your supply of stress, suddenly become its willing purveyor? There's something about this that always intrigued me. Take my old carpool buddy and teammate Richie for example.

Richie was a phenomenal controller who came to Big Time in the early seventies from another busy airdrome. He brought with him a depth of experience, a solid grasp of the rules and an ease of application that inspired many; especially the trainees such as myself. He ended up on my team where we became fast friends. As an OJT instructor, he would share gem after gem from what seemed to be a bottomless bag of tricks. To him I owed much for my relatively early Facility Rating. Beers after work eventually lead to a long social relationship between us and the wives. We even served together as officers in the PATCO Local; simultaneously shaking our fists at facility management.

There was, however, an unseen engine driving Richie ~ a latent force that no one saw at first. It was insecurity. If you listened carefully and watched closely you might have recognized the signs. Richie was skillfully glib and, even as a controller, would exercise his gift for gab on anyone who would listen. A consummate glad hander; he could charm the wits away from the unwary. Richie wanted...no...he probably needed everyone to like him. I wasn't perceptive enough to see it until it was far too late. I didn't have the time anyway. Nobody did; especially as the seventies were coming to an end. We were all too busy holding onto those quaking control consoles and fighting to keep a picture that was shaking apart before our very eyes. At that time; nobody really cared about Richie and, in spite of the perpetual PATCO rhetoric extolling unity, nobody honestly cared about anyone but themselves.

Richie started up the career ladder ahead of me; rung by rung. First came a staff specialist position in the front office. Although most were disappointed by what he did and did not accomplish during that time, I crossed it off as a situation beyond his control. We were, after all, dealing with a well entrenched and genetically stubborn autocracy in the management ranks that fancied itself qualified to create, consecrate and carry out everything from dress codes to traffic flows.

When Richie came to the tower or TRACON for a little currency time: I noticed some subtle differences in his behavior. There were still the smiling slaps on the back and the well aimed barbs thrown at other controllers when traffic permitted. But there was also an obvious tension in his voice when things got busy. Irritation greeted the ear when you needed to coordinate with a busy Richie. Gone was the steady, self-assured voice of confidence. Gone was the unsolicited offer of assistance when you needed it most. In their place came the terse irritability, manic impatience and refusal to get involved in another sector's control problems. He'd just spend his hour or two on positions then retreat to his office. This I crossed off as the consequences of a staff job. When you don't work airplanes every day, you lose your timing, situational awareness, an instinctive recall of the commonplace, like frequency and landline numbers, sector boundaries, critical provisions in a letter of agreement. In short; you lose your edge.

Richie's staff assignment was followed by his long anticipated return to the floor as a supervisor; where the "unseen engine" I mentioned became more evident. He was an excitable supervisor with an invasive attitude toward the operation. Rather than let the collective common sense and wisdom of the workforce guide his shift, he had to put his "touch" on everything. It was an early sign of the evolving loss of trust he held in us. Through it all we remained friends but, because of schedule conflicts, saw less and less of each other. He eventually left Big Time for an opportunity in the Regional Office. That's where his "minus touch" gradually manifested itself for all to see.

Richie achieved great success in the FAA, rising to heights that should have made me proud to say I knew him way back when. But I was not proud of my old friend. After I left Big Time and moved on with my own career, Richie would occasionally visit my facility in his capacity as Regional Royalty. He was nearly unrecognizable. If he ever deigned to acknowledge my presence it would be with a simple nod in my general direction.

My old friend was looking more and more like the enemy we once fought against together. In time, our relationship evolved from ammicable to adversarial. Was it because he knew that I well remembered the Richie of fifteen years prior? Can there be a danger in knowing too much about someone's past? Can this be perceived as a threat? If that person is rather high up in the organization; you bet!

The last time I saw Richie he seemed distracted and unhappy. In my eyes, he'd become a Judas to the profession and those who lived it. He came to our facility that day to put his "touch" on a particular initiative we had undertaken ~ a minus touch.

I learned long ago that unhappy controllers never really get any happier when they become management officials and that unhappy management officials can quickly scatter their discontent across those working below them. Unease is infectious; regardless of who the carrier is. I always hoped to see a positive change take place before I retired although I never held my breath. I would have liked to hold someone else's though ~ maybe Richie's.

© NLA Factor, 2010

Signs Of Trouble

2010-08-23T11:00:00.002-04:00

There's something a little unsettling about a silent TRACON. Without any hollering back and forth between sectors, without the FDEP machines hammering out their endless scroll of flight strips, without urgent squawking from the overhead speakers, or alarms, buzzers and badgering pilots to unravel your nerves; the TRACON assumes an eerie aspect of serenity.

It happens sometime after midnight. That's when Big Time's normally hectic scarespace reverts back into what nature intended; more air than airplanes. By 3:00 AM you can almost hear the radar's circular sweep as, once every four seconds, it lights up the few targets creeping across sectors temporarily deserted by their regularly resident havoc.

The big jets were all down; tucked into their gates to await the morning departure push. These hours were for the box haulers and mail carriers. Mostly piston powered airplanes; they seemed to traverse Big Time's airspace at the speed of night. Like a few ants crossing a football field, they appeared more like permanent echoes on the radar than moving targets.

I was pulling a round of mids with four other guys. Two were upstairs in the tower, me and Jay had TRACON duty and, somewhere in the back, there was a Supervisor doing the daily paperwork. It was a warm night in August of 1982. Tired and bored, I sat tapping mindlessly on the "Enter" key of my ARTS keyboard and staring at the video map. Jay had just switched the only airplane he had to the Center and was off to the breakroom for a fresh cup of coffee.

We'd cleaned up all the backlog from the evening shift, released the ARTS computer to Airway Facilities for some routine checks and were now settling into the long hours of the midshift. These were the hours when air traffic control came down to the simple challenge of staying awake. Maintaining separation meant ~ don't let your eyelids come together for more than a second. Coffee helped but just barely. The only sure-fire way for me to to avoid sleep was through conversation. Fortunately I had a topic in mind.

Jay sat back down at his scope. "Damn." I muttered. "Its been a year already." I paused, unsure of the reaction to my upcoming question. Then; "What made you come back to work?" Jay turned his head about 20 degrees toward my direction but never looked up. The late night TRACON silence hung in the air like cobwebs.

One year ago, intoxicated by a sense of invincibility and the promise of victory, Jay had gone on strike with most of the other Big Time controllers. He shook his head, leaned back in his chair and raised his eyes to the ceiling. I made a handoff that I'd been waiting 25 minutes to initiate. Then, on that quiet August night in 1982, Jay spoke to me of how his job, his family and perhaps his life were saved one day in August of '81. I can paraphrase his story but you'll have to imagine the pensive, palling looks on his face as he spoke.

He and his wife were attending one of many PATCO sponsored rallies happening across the country immediately following the strike. This one took place at a small park just a few miles from Big Time Airport. These rallies, meant to impose unity and extol its surely "inevitable" benefits among the striking controllers, also gave Union officials a way of keeping track of everyone. Since this particular rally was being held within Reagan's 48 hour grace period, there was always a chance someone might lose nerve, turn tail and run back to work. Jay told me he'd been sitting at a picnic table with his wife and two kids; sweating with everyone else under the August sun. Although there were several reasons to sweat; the heat was good enough for the moment.

Nearly everyone was either drunk or about to be. There was a lot of shouting, chanting and Union rhetoric. Some talked of revenge and retaliation against those who stayed on the job. Others talked of how different things would be when they made their triumphant return to work. Jay watched, listened and took it all in.

Big Time's local Vice President was speaking to the crowd. Dick had been staunch proponent of a strike for at least the last year or so. Although a controller with above average abilities; Dick was a chronic complainer and, in the final few months preceding the strike, became perennially petulant and antagonistic. By Spring of '81 I saw Dick as a man who seemed to have opted out of evolution ~ an animal who growled and snarled at those of us who were either undecided or unwilling to strike.

Standing next to Dick was Sal. He'd been one of the PATCO Local's team representatives. Also known for his pre-strike truculence, Sal nodded his head in agreement as Dick preached the gospel according to Poli. Silent skies and abandoned control rooms would soon bring FAA and the aviation industry to their knees. That is; if the scab controllers and blundering supervisors didn't kill hundreds of people first in a spectacular midair collision. Everyone swallowed beer, hollered and cheered. Some even laughed. The air was filled with flourishing fists and fluttering signs. It resembled a kind of chaotic carnival.

The air was also filled with other signs. These were the signs of trouble for PATCO. In an ironic contrast with the rally's pitiful propaganda, big jets could be seen, nose high and climbing over the distant cityscape. Most rolled quietly into a turn toward some distant navaid but a few eventually roared over the little park; briefly drowning out the bombastic blather below. These skies were far from silent. But why? Jay sat sipping his beer, watching the evolving spectacle and worrying.

His wife was worried too. She peered out across the crowd with a look that reflected a darkening mood, disbelief in what she was seeing and growing doubts about the success of this venture. Two of Jay's teammates were throwing a frizbee back and forth. He said he couldn't help but see the irony in what had become of their aviation careers. Two air traffic controllers - working plastic departures and arrivals while someone's dog jumped and barked at the overflights.

Jay's wife turned suddenly in his direction, threw her arms out toward the crowd and said the whole thing was insane. He could see she was on the verge of tears as she continued. "This is not working. Everyone is going to be fired! You need to get your ass back to work!"

There was no argument. Jay told me he looked around, nodded his head in agreement and wandered off through the melee to find a pay phone. He called the TRACON, spoke with the Area Manager and was soon back on the schedule.

"Why did you go out to begin with?" Jay stood up, stretched and grabbed his empty coffee cup. He looked tired and uneasy. "Now I don't even remember. Everything was all messed up back then. Grievances, management bustin' our balls all the time and nobody listening to us. And in case you missed anything, you had PATCO kinda playin' it all back to you every day. If you weren't already pissed off; they'd get you there! You know; when they don't stop talking at you; you start seeing the things they're talking about." He sighed. "I guess I didn't know how bad things were till I really started listening to 'em. Then I got mad. I came to work mad every day. By August I thought there was only one way to get the FAA to listen."

He started off toward the breakroom; empty cup dangling from his index finger. "It was just all fucked up, you know?" I knew. I pressed one of the lines to the center. "Fourteen, Big Time, eighty-three line with another handoff." Silence. I tried again. It was about 4:30 a.m. The whole damned time zone was asleep and my traffic was creeping up on the boundary. The handoff line was dead silent. Jay walked back in. "Hey, somebody forgot to bring in more coffee! Pots empty and there's nothing in the cabinet." I wondered if I was going to have to spin this guy. "Sector fourteen, Big Time, eighty-three with a hot one!" Almost three hours to go, no coffee and now the center won't... "Whaddaya got Big Time?" The midshift headed slowly toward dawn. We resorted to drinking Coke for our caffeine.

Jay had made it back from the brink. Most people in the facility never even knew he'd been on strike. And now a year had passed. Much of the early, post-strike fervor had passed as well. Supervisors still worked traffic occasionally but were mostly back to supervising. PATCO had long since been decertified. The FAA was busy trying out various human relations initiatives in what would ultimately be a failed effort to convince controllers there was no need to reorganize. Everyone was fighting fatigue and some were losing.

It was the new Management by Objective. I thought of it this way... Management was a pistol and controllers were simply the bullets. Our target, or objective, was full recovery from the strike's impact. But the "bullets" had no say over what direction they were being fired in. Consequently there were ricochets, unintended casualties and collateral damage. People began complaining and were skillfully ignored by a management team that had years of practice at it. Furtive palavers were taking place behind the backs of those who were too busy fighting to keep a hold on their waning credibility to notice. It was the worst kind of deja vu.

There were signs of trouble everywhere.

© NLA Factor, 2010

Devil In The Detail

2010-07-31T09:30:00.008-04:00

I was at a downtown gas station the other day when two tour buses went by. The unmistakable smell of that exhaust mingled with a suffocating level of humidity transported me right back to the Seventies; back to lunch breaks spent watching people in front of Big Time's Arrival Terminal. There; an endless procession of shuttle buses collected the overheated hoards of bushed and bewildered July travelers then hauled them over the horizon to one of the many distant parking lots.

Summer pressed down on Big Time like the scorched underside of a cast iron skillet. Heat radiating off congested taxiways made mirage-like images of the airplanes awaiting release. By late afternoon; thunderstorms would blossom on the BRITE display then go violently about their daily business of closing our most frequently used departure routes. It was the hottest time of day in the busiest time of year.

Heavy jets lumbered down the big city runways, struggling against high density altitudes. As we stood gasping, they'd eventually leave the ground somewhere near the departure end. Then, rising slowly over the outlying neighborhoods, they'd make shallow turns toward their assigned headings ~ fighting all the way to gain altitude. Even though you'd quickly lose sight of them in the murky Summer skies; the trail of smoke and sounds of straining engines lingered on for minutes after. It was, after all, the mid-seventies ~ when the old Convair 880 "water wagons" still roamed our taxiways and roared along our jet routes.

Airplanes never really wanted to fly in this kind of weather. Only people did.

Down in the TRACON; heat emanated from the radar scopes, drifted up from the ashtrays and oozed out of everyone's pores. The friction of discontent rubbed everyone wrong and caused another kind of heat. It started with the relentless air traffic demand and was fueled by widespread fatigue. Nobody wanted your airplanes and you didn't want theirs. Tempers flared frequently; consuming nearly all that was left of the available oxygen. Even the Watch Supervisor, a normally reticent kind of guy, was often seen angrily shouting into a telephone at his counterpart in some other facility. The atmosphere was altogether stifling and our aged air conditioning system simply couldn't cope with it all. We worked on; accepting our plight while maintaining our right to bootless bitching.

Summertime traffic was always ten to twenty percent higher than average. All of Big Time's radar sectors were usually kept open from the start of the dayshift till nearly midnight. Combining positions was risky; which meant you were often relieved for your meal break by a supervisor who'd tell you to hurry back.

My team was working a round of 3:00 to 11:00 shifts and I carpooled in with a few other guys. Between us; nobody had an operable air conditioner in his car. We'd weave through the suburban back roads, gossiping about other controllers, griping over the latest grievance denials, complaining about the latest office edicts and speculating over who might turncoat into the Chief's next staff hack. Discussions of this nature brought forth loud declarations of unity but also served to intensify the already oppressive heat.

Rolling onto the interstate highway, we could usually see enough sky to figure out the landing and departing runways at Big Time. If it was an airport configuration used during adverse weather conditions, we'd just have something else to talk about ~ like what kind of shift we were in for. So, by the time we reached the facility parking lot, everyone was usually on edge, irritable and sodden with sweat. That's the way it was on this particular day.

When we got into the TRACON we found an empty desk. Pete, the Watch Supervisor, was standing in the middle of the room, phone in hand, sweating and shouting at the Command Center. Pete was built stocky and square like a gas pump and, when provoked, was twice as flammable. He'd cut his ATC teeth at busy airports, knew the ropes and was skilled at knotting them around the necks of his adversaries. With a wild, Einstein shock of gray hair and matching moustache; he infused everyone with fear and awe ~ including the specialists at the Command Center. Having worked there himself a few years back; he still knew many of the guys he hollered at. Pete would make his point then hang up in the middle of their reply; refusing to answer when they called back.

Bobby, the TRACON Supervisor, was working at a handoff position ~ trying to keep track of the holding patterns for one of the arrival controllers. Me and my carpool mates stood in a cluster near the sign-in log. We just wanted someone to tell us who to relieve but everyone was too busy to notice us. Finally, Pete turned and told me to go relieve the Supervisor on the arrival handoff position. As I started to move, he grabbed my arm and said he wanted to talk to me about something later on. I shrugged and went off to work. It was going to be a hard working, high drama, headache of a shift.

Several hours later, exhausted from the time spent issuing countless EFC revisions, slalom vectoring around storm cells, working out clearances to alternate airports for the diversions ~ then attempting to hand them off to someone who was already busy enough sorting out his own little hell and didn't really need a part of mine; I shuffled out of the TRACON. It was time to sign out and shove off but Pete stopped me at the door. "The Chief wants to know if you'd be interested in a 90 day Area Supe detail."

My clock stopped. Pete had a way of smiling while making you feel like he was pointing a pistol at your face. It was all in the eyes. I probably shrugged; too tired to react with much more than a sigh. Just then, one of the mid-shift guys wandered into the TRACON. "Relieve the departures" said Pete, without taking his eyes off me. The guy turned and disappeared. "I dunno" I said. "I need to think about that one." The problem was that I had used up most of my thinking for the day and was ready to trade thinking for drinking.

You can't even swing at a curve ball if you don't see it coming. It would have been easier for me to pick out the vituperation among a speeding barrage of aspersions (a skill I was to become proficient at). And who knew it was my turn at bat? I was a loyal member of the bargaining unit. I went to most of the union meetings and was right there with the rest when it came to mocking our facility management. My personal views on that esteemed group, bolstered by experience, convinced me that at least half of Big Time's supervisors were either incompetent, arrogant, overly ambitious or an obnoxious blend of the three. Pete's lips were moving. "The Chief needs an answer by tomorrow afternoon."

The ride home with my carpool buddies was as animated as I've heard after a busy shift. We wheeled out of the parking lot; everyone singing the "poor us chorus" with verses about too much time spent on positions, too little time for our meal breaks and, of course, why the hell didn't the dayshift supervisor call in more overtime??? Then we all told our stories about how much more difficult some adjacent sectors or facility made the shift for us. We finally got down to recognizing a few of the evening's more memorable moments. "Did you see the mess Brad had on Departures?" "Oh yeah!" said another. "I was working Ground Control when everything got stopped." Our driver laughed. "See what happens when a Supe has to work positions?" I mumbled something about how he was just trying to help with lunch relief. "Some help!" said the driver, sarcastically. It was the usual post-shift banter ~ just another variation on a popular theme of the times.

I wasn't driving so I sat in the back; staring at a line of landing lights gliding through the night sky toward Big Time. It was after midnight but I was still thinking about Pete's words. "...an answer by tomorrow afternoon." I didn't dare mention the issue to the other guys. They'd only press me for my decision and I wasn't ready to make one.

Weighing the pros and cons of accepting this detail was easy because there were very few pros. I'd gain some character building experience and make a little more money for a few months. But I'd seen other controllers take such details. They were always moved to another team for the duration. My carpool would, at least temporarily, be history. My good standing as a trusted PATCO soldier would be jeopardized ~ perhaps permanently. Once it was over, the guys who took these temporary promotions were viewed with a jaundiced eye by most of the bargaining unit. It was thought they were now "spies" for the front office and therefore could no longer be trusted to hear the kind of spontaneous aspersions about management that were currently being cast about in the darkness of this hot, little car.

Some of us shared a more altruistic and clearly idealistic outlook. I often mused that an eventual move into management would be my way of helping to change their atrocious image. I mean; who raised these people anyway?

It would be difficult though. What I hadn't fully grasped at that time was just how deeply ingrained the contempt for and distrust of management was. The control room atmosphere innoculated us against anyone who didn't wear a headset and work airplanes for a living. The only people worthy of a controller's trust were other controllers ~ the guys we worked with across the room and across the handoff lines.

Further complicating matters was the fact this skepticism was carried with us into management. But once there, it reversed itself. Arriving in management; we would soon distrust anyone who did wear a headset and work airplanes for a living. I think it was because we knew from past experiences, just how profoundly controllers distrusted us. The whole paranoiac cycle would spiral ever upward into a rancorous and unremitting rivalry that neither party could ultimately win.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered why I was even considering the Chief's offer. There would be hell to pay. The car bumped over a curb and we landed in front of our favorite, post-shift watering hole. Everyone was still chattering about things that happened during the last eight hours. Our driver got out of the car and looked up. The sky around the now distant airport was full of moving lights. He chuckled; "Don must be gettin' a real good workout in the tower!"

I was hot, tired and thirsty. Perhaps looking at my personal dilemma through a glass or two of beer would help. I knew there would be long term benefits in accepting the 90 day position. It would look good on my resume and fit nicely with my career goals. There was also no denying the extra money would be helpful. But I felt a sense of dread; a premonition that there would be an irreparable rift waiting when I returned to the rank and file. I knew things would be different. I knew there would be a devil in this detail.

The next afternoon, as I shuffled into the TRACON, Pete grabbed my arm again. "You gonna take the job?" Oh, what the hell. . .

© NLA Factor, 2010

OJT ~ A New Instructor

2010-06-26T10:45:00.002-04:00

The transformation was swift. From uncertain trainee, I evolved through the unsteady journeyman phase and on to become a most unlikely OJT instructor. It took far less time than I expected and a lot less time than I required. After all; gaining confidence isn't like gaining weight. It takes time. Its more like growing. I'm sure I could gain five pounds in five days but growing five inches taller could take several years.

My guileless post check-out expectations were that I would spend a few years honing my skills, methodically acquiring some certainty in my abilities and establishing that all important credibility among my peers. But there I was; less than a year out from my facility rating and already being asked to work with the developmentals on our team. It seems I failed to consider that my expectations might differ somewhat from those of Big Time's supervisors and management staff. But why? Why the difference between their expectations and mine? The answer was shrouded in my callow naiveté.

The things we don't know at a particular time in our life will eventually catch up with us. Unfortunately, by the time they do, it usually doesn't matter so much. What was going on today would later be firsthand knowledge to me. For now though, I couldn't fathom that my being prematurely pitched into in the deep end of Big Time's OJT instructor pool was due in part to a document known as the Tracking Report. To this very day; the specter of this document still sends me off sweating and screaming. A little background may be in order.

The scourge of every new kid to the Training Department, Tracking Reports took days to complete. No wonder. Combining the most boring aspects of a spreadsheet with the irritating qualities of a skin infection and the incriminating evidence of a signed confession required a lot of time. But what was it really?

A distillation of the entire month's worth of OJT reports (there were hundreds); your typical Tracking Report detailed the status of every developmental (there were dozens) in the facility. It revealed what position each developmental was currently training on, hours allocated and hours used ~ plus a projection as to when certification was anticipated. Once compiled, the fresh data was whisked off to the Regional Office where it was perused and compared with previous monthly reports. This made it fairly easy for them to identify the trainees who were receiving the most OJT hours and the least. Comparing the most recent report from Big Time with previous monthly editions allowed the Regional Office to detect apparent trends and build mountains of data from which they could jump to amazing conclusions. Those jumps usually landed them in the middle of some very rough terrain, armed only with a pointing finger. But once they pointed that thing at us; they were prepared to use it.

To the facility staff ~ a discernable dip in the aggregate OJT hours could easily be attributed to annual and/or sick leave used, inappropriate traffic conditions, equipment problems and other routine factors. There were also the less tangible reasons; not the least of which was fatigue. If one of the better OJT instructors had just taken a beating on one position, it was hard for an empathetic supervisor to send them into an OJT session. To the regional office however, it often meant we were just goofing off over there at Big Time. That's when a phone would ring in the front office.

The Air Traffic Manager and Training Officer would be grilled by The Region's Training Branch Manager and one or two of his sycophants over why our OJT hours had fallen off. Such discussions usually afforded The Region an opportunity to showcase their superior knowledge of the way things are supposed to work in a field facility. A long, forensic debate would ensue, during which both hair and rank would be pulled. As the Regional Office always outranks any of their air traffic facilities, the home team would make their best case in the strongest possible terms; inevitably capitulating and promising to do better next month. Next, a caustic, morale-eating memo would be fired off to the Area Managers and supervisors, with a requisite copy to the Region's Training Branch. (Hey, they needed proof we were actually doing something besides working a hell of a lot of airplanes!) The memo was crafted to inspire everyone to get more OJT done.

One way to accomplish that was to ordain more instructors. This is where I stumbled into the picture.

Damn! I was still having to make excuses to the wife about why I got home so late from my checkout party, still trying to separate the good from the garbage I learned while training, still striving for consistently adequate personal performance, still masking my fear of floundering with a little flourish. Arguing with my Supervisor, who insisted I'd be a great OJTI, was not where I expected to be at this point. I countered his rationale with every reason I could think of why this wasn't a good idea. The discussion ended shortly after I said I wasn't ready and couldn't do it.

Later that day, as my new radar developmental and I shuffled off toward the TRACON, I wondered how my logic had failed, whether I could actually do this and why my mouth was so dry. Surprisingly, that day was the beginning of what would develop into a career-long interest in training. But there were obstacles.

At first; I felt like a paint-by-numbers artist trying to teach that "deaf-dumb-blind kid" how to draw like Leonardo da Vinci. I had my own lessons to learn ~ largely at the expense of those I was assigned to train. One of the most important lessons and probably the most difficult for me to master was to never preempt a good learning experience. Trainees needed to be given enough latitude to get themselves into a degree of difficulty that was commensurate with their time on the position. Low time trainees could become overwhelmed much sooner than ones who had several hours on the position but, regardless of where they were in their allotted hours, I had to let them make mistakes. As long as I could still see a way out ~ there was a chance they'd find it too. This required a lot of poise, patience and self confidence but I was short on all three. If I stepped in too soon (highly likely at my stage of development) I'd preclude an important learning experience. Step in too late and I'd end up listening to tapes and filling out paperwork.

I learned that making this work meant having to advise trainees ahead of time whenever I was going to let them dig holes for themselves. If I didn't at least do that, they'd usually assume, based on experience with a few other instructors, that I would likely step in and straighten things out for them.

There were also a few developmentals who liked to debate with me during the training session. While a civil debate could be useful during the debrief, it only got in the way during OJT, while the airplanes were flying thick and fast.

I also learned that my technique in a particular situation might not have been the best. A few trainees had some damned good ideas that I'd have never learned if I'd made them do it my way. "Out of the mouths of babes" as they say. I'd show them my techniques but never insisted they do it my way. Creativity is an amazing thing to witness and learn from. I believe I learned as much or more in the process of providing OJT than I did when I was receiving it.

So The Seventies rolled on. Planes flew in and out of Big Time's airspace as I joined with various trainees in their struggle to succeed. Most made it while others faded off into failure. Of those who failed ~ some were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time but went on to become impressive controllers elsewhere. Others departed in anger and bitterness. Blaming their shortcomings on everyone and everything that moved; they left ~ victims of an overweening ego and self-deception.

The ones who concerned me the most were those who couldn't make it as controllers at Big Time, yet eventually ended up working in the Regional Office ~ judging our monthly Tracking Reports.

© NLA Factor, 2010

OJT ~ A Caterpillar's Journey

2010-06-06T16:26:00.011-04:00

On-The-Job Training, call it OJT, seems a daunting process. There are so many things to learn and so little time allocated to getting it right. While the academic environment gives you time to study, memorize and rehearse, often among others who are doing the same, OJT places you midst practiced professionals who know the job cold. You come across as the caterpillar slinking through a cluster of butterflies. And like the caterpillar, you are the one most likely to be stepped on.

Depending on who I was working for, the substance of hands-on training varied pretty widely. In the military, OJT was mainly an exercise in knowing precisely what to say and when to say it. Phraseology and procedure took precedence over the more practical skills needed to actually work the traffic. Tools like turning airplanes away from their intended course, delaying them in order to accomplish more pressing priorities, slowing them down or speeding them up to benefit a bigger picture were always there in the toolbox but rarely used. For example; nobody would instruct an F-4 pulling a drag chute to "expedite off the runway" for landing traffic. Nor would they risk raising some high-ranking eyebrows by clearing a flight of three for "immediate takeoff." It was understood they'd taxi onto the runway, line up in departure formation, finish their checklists and await word from the flight leader. They would roll in their own good time. So my initial OJT on Ground and Local Control was steeped in phraseology, procedures and learning the rules, both written and unwritten.By the time I was transferred to my next duty assignment at Desolation Air Base, phraseology was second nature to me. All I needed to do was learn the local rules and numbers. The idea of actually reaching into the picture and manipulating my traffic was still obscured behind a veil of military protocol. Fighter jets, transports and helicopters hustled in and out of the base at their own pace, their pilots taking the controller's traffic information under advisement as they decided the order of events. When the day came to step into my first FAA facility, it would be like stepping into a bathtub with an electric toaster.

Suddenly I was expected to muscle and hustle the traffic situation; pushing, pulling, bending it to my will then cramming it into the big picture, whether it wanted to fit or not. Waiting for things to happen was frowned upon and rarely tolerated. Trainees were taught the assertive art of making things happen.

For pure pushing, bending and cramming, there was no better place than Local control during one of Big Time's peak hours. Long lines of departing flights inched toward the runways while one arrival after another flashed across each landing threshold and touched down; leaving a cloud of burnt rubber behind as they rolled on toward a high-speed turnoff. If a Local Control trainee waited till all that happened before clearing the next departure into position there'd be hell to pay. That airplane had better be moving toward the hold line in time to continue right onto the runway just as the arrival went by. It came down to learning how long it took the various kinds of airplanes to reanimate after sitting, inert, on the taxiway. Not to worry though. There was always a red-faced OJT instructor standing ready to facilitate your learning process in a loud, demonstrative and often profane way. Once you got that piece down you could understand the timing of events. You could anticipate required separation and make it happen while quickly adjusting the tempo for different types of airplanes. These were the skills central to keeping Big Time out of departure delays and the OJTI off your back. Thanks to the Air Force, I already knew how to say "Taxi into position and hold." I just never guessed I'd be saying it while the next arrival was still somewhere out over the approach lights.

Dealing with intersecting runways involved similar skills. Being able to accurately anticipate just how soon an airborne arrival would roll through the intersection versus how long it would take your departure on the crossing runway to get there had important benefits. The Final controller could maintain an efficient interval to one runway while the tower kept a crossing flow of departures moving without delay. Getting it wrong would create some fairly intense consequences, such as a go-around, an aborted takeoff or both.

For even higher drama you might end up with both a departure and a go-around ~ who's trajectories would take them simultaneously to the same point in space. This was not simply a Kodak moment but one that could add years to your life in a matter of seconds. To a developmental it meant an immediate end to the OJT session and a training report that was so hot he'd have to pick it up with oven mitts.Training in the radar room was an even bigger challenge. Since my Air Force career never provided me the opportunity to obtain a radar certification; Big Time TRACON was as alien an environment as I could imagine. Just getting acclimating to the odor down there would take months. The stink of sweat, cigarette smoke, stale ashes, jet exhaust and flatulence (because farting was seen by some as hilarious) sometimes made the place smell worse than the bargain basement of a second-hand coffin store.

The TRACON even sounded bad. There was a nearly constant cacophony caused by the incessant chatter of flight data printers mixing with ringing telephones, chiming interphones, nagging voices amplified through overhead speakers and controllers shouting from one end of the room to the other. It was sensory overload. It was also the ideal learning environment because this was where I'd have to work.

Actual, practical learning in the TRACON had to begin with an understanding of the interrelationships between Big Time's sectors. None of them could function autonomously but were rather like a series of gears that had to turn and mesh with clockwork synchronization. During rush hours or times of rugged weather the room became a swiftly spinning mechanism that hummed and murmured along; pushing and pulling the traffic in what seemed an endless pageant of arrivals and departures. One after another, they hammered the runways or hurtled off toward some place known as "the destination airport." If any one part of the mechanism slowed or stopped it could eventually slow or stop the entire operation. This changed the sound of the radar room ~ an audible change in the pitch, detected immediately by the supervisor, who would soon appear at the source of discord. One or two controllers would then be extracted from their positions like bad teeth and replaced. Soon after, the gears would start whirling and humming again.

It was also about timing. You and I know that, in life, timing is nearly as important as it is in air traffic control. Its also a difficult concept for trainees to seize onto. Learning to recognize the moment when an aircraft must be turned, when speed control must be applied, new altitude assignments made or handoffs completed were just a few of the challenges I wrestled with. The timing of other, more subtle events was even more difficult to understand. When to initiate a pointout, when to stop departures or begin holding arrivals, when combining sectors was a good idea and when it was not were ambiguous junctures on an ever changing continuum. Learning to recognize them, however, was unequivocal.

Most important to the whole OJT experience were the instructors themselves. At Big Time in 1975, there was a veritable smorgasbord of talent ~ ranging from the mad and meticulous to the lax and lazy. I had my favorite. He was a perpetually angry little anal retentive named Charles. Charles's attitude may have been a bi product of his relatively short stature. I don't know but, at just over five feet tall, he looked up at nearly everyone ~ unless he was working radar. In that particular arena he was at least equal to but usually greater than his peers. A savant; he knew the books and could handle what seemed to be a limitless amount of traffic. To watch Charles at work was to witness the perfect synchronicity of knowledge and praxis.

Most of the journeymen resented Charles because of his low tolerance for anything less than perfection. Still ~ he was the guy they'd want working Departure Control if they were stuck on Local with dozens of departures that needed to get off the airport, around a few thunderstorms and up into Center's airspace. The trainees feared him because of his brutal frankness, impatience with inadequacy and eruptive temper. He also had no tolerance for excuses and if you were dumb enough to proffer one after screwing things up ~ you'd be talking to yourself.

Charles was just what I needed and he was usually available because nobody else wanted to train with him. I learned that if I came to an OJT session prepared and willing to listen, Charles would spend the ensuing hour or so working as hard as he could to improve my game. If, however, he asked a question or two that I couldn't answer ~ he'd shake his head, unplug my headset and tell me to get lost.

When I finished up my OJT at Big Time, the final check-ride with my supervisor seemed anticlimactic. I thought I was ready for anything the system could throw at me. Little did I know the Facility Rating was merely a licence to sink or swim. It was just another landmark on the map to my future; a jumping off point from which the truly hard lessons would eventually be learned. It was nothing more than my first solo flight around the traffic pattern was some years before. Landing the airplane safely didn't make me a pilot and this rating didn't make me a controller. That would take much more time.

© NLA Factor, 2010

Anticipating Separation

2010-05-17T11:45:00.003-04:00

Every air traffic controller has days like this. Your timing is just a few seconds off or your judgment is just a hair short of sound. Planning any further ahead than the end of each transmission seems impossible and your attention span? Shorter than a two-degree turn.

I was in the middle of such a day when I had my first thought of retirement. That date would still be more than 25 years out but it flared in my mind like a flashbulb. Thanks to the short attention span it didn't linger longer than an instant but that was enough time for me to wonder; "Is it really that far off?" Then, quick as it came, the moment was gone. I blinked, readjusted my focus and resumed life's unrelenting odyssey into the unknown.

In fact, there were more days like this ~ plenty of them. None were awful enough to end my trek prematurely but the effects were cumulative. It reminds me of that wretched camel everyone refers to. If he doesn't feel the very first straw being laid on his back; he probably won't feel the second or third straw either. At some point though, there comes a nominal sensation ~ an inkling of the burdens being applied. Then one day the back breaker may fall; that renowned last straw. Its interesting how that last one can actually weigh far less than any of the others. Most times, the last straw isn't really the one that causes us to sink under the strain. Its actually the sum of all straws ~ big and small.

I was feeling the sensation of added weight on that particular afternoon when retirement first whispered to me. It was early Spring and I was a young, very inexperienced approach controller sitting at one of Big Time's arrival sectors. The winds were tricky as warm air and an advancing cold front fought over control of the skies. In addition to problems caused by scattered thunderstorms, my heading assignments weren't working well at all. As I vectored airplanes out of my holding patterns, they tended to drift gradually to the left. Corrected headings and lower altitudes made them divigate to the right. Winds aloft seemed stratified and omnidirectional. It wasn't a particularly unusual condition but at the time I just couldn't figure it out. It was like trying to vector shopping carts. Only twenty minutes into a two-hour session and the Final controller was already losing patience with my apparently arbitrary feed into her sector. If looks were straws I'd have had one stuck in my forehead.

Years later, a few more straws would be applied during the PATCO strike. The loss of friendships, hostilities, hectic schedules and stress prompted several thoughts of separation. What I found most disheartening about the strike was its senseless and futile nature. In June of '81 the Government made an unprecedented concession to a Federal employee union by offering PATCO some $40 million in compensation and improvements. That wasn't enough for PATCO and the rank and file was encouraged to reject the offer. They could have had a future. With patience, there could have been further gains made during subsequent contract negotiations but they wanted it all and they wanted it all in the Summer of 1981.

Maybe it was just another example of the need for instant gratification we've acquired though the years ~ and the blindness it can cause. PATCO's strike rationale must have somehow resembled the idea that jumping out of a window would get them to the street quicker than waiting for an elevator. The uncompromising cost of impetuosity didn't occur to them until it was too late.

Within my piles of straw were bad days among the airplanes, watching powerlessly as one flight fell onto the airport and shattered or another one dropped off my radar and died. Clashes with my peers, conflicts with management, joining management and having to brawl with the bargaining unit, incessant backstabbing among the management staff, a mostly apathetic and out of touch regional office, political posturing and power grabs...

Piles and piles of straw.

The career wasn't all difficulty and disillusion though. In spite of the occasional bad days, disappointments and moments of panic; I loved air traffic control and the people who did it. There is a particular euphoria that only those who've just finished an epic, eight hour battle with their traffic can experience. Its a withering sense of exhaustion with an underlying, ear-to-ear grin.

I also loved the technicians, the pilots and even those tangential to the trade like the guys who cleared snow from our runways or the girl who made my sandwich at the employee's cafeteria. I still love 'em. I loved every airport I worked at and even a few I didn't. There were no other places like them and no other people like those who kept everyone and everything moving.

In the years succeeding the strike I was able to spin many a straw into gold. There were opportunities, promotions, special projects and new friends waiting in my future. Several experiences actually offloaded some of the weight from this camel's back; enabling me to travel further along in my career than previously planned...but not too much further. Speculation over what awaited me after separation was too alluring. A moment would come, similar to that first flashbulb flare, when I knew it was time to move on. Besides, I couldn't see me in my later years ~ sitting at a long-forgotten desk in some self-aggrandizing FAA office, soaking my Depend For Men and saying "Yessir!" to some kid in a suit. Like all the other times I might have wet myself ~ it should be induced by high activity, challenges or excitement rather than boredom.

Retirement is a great job but it takes a while to get it. Don't lose patience. Anticipating your own separation can be an agonizing process. It took me over thirty years to finally see my personal course diverge from the FAA's and, as we went our separate ways, I never looked back. I doubt the FAA did either. Retirement, by its very nature, is a self-indulgent act. As it should be. When my time came I was done being the team player. It was finally time to act in my own best interest, thinking only of myself and my family.

My personal "last straw" wasn't even job related. It was just the gnawing curiosity over what else life might have to offer. I couldn't wait any longer to find out and, as every controller knows, the sooner separation is achieved ~ the better.

© NLA Factor, 2010

The Martinet

2010-04-27T08:58:00.006-04:00

Martinet:
Pronunciation: \ˌmär-tə-ˈnet\
Function: noun
Etymology: Jean Martinet, 17th century French army officer
Date: 1737
1. a strict disciplinarian.
2. a person who stresses a rigid adherence to the details of forms and methods.

I knew this guy. Between the crest of his garrison cap and the soles of his spit-shined shoes stood a man who's mind was heavily laden with the laws of military life. He didn't walk ~ he marched. He didn't stand at ease ~ he stood at attention. He didn't discuss ~ he commanded.

He wasn't in touch with reality ~ he denied it.

August of '81 brought a kind of military surge to the airport. Lets just say it marked the beginning of our Fall offensive. Dozens of controllers from the Navy and Air Force were rushed into Big Time Tower after the PATCO strike, where they immediately found themselves in hostile territory. Their mission was to help us fight an adversary they couldn't have even imagined when they enlisted. We were glad to see them. Reinforcements are always welcome when the battlements are being stormed and the battering ram is knocking at the door.

Even on a good day, Big Time Tower was a combat zone of fast-flying projectiles, bold battlefield maneuvers and well hidden land mines. But these were not good days. With two thirds of our forces on AWOL and the remaining troops suffering from shell shock, there was talk of a retreat. That's when the military arrived.

Most were sent in from bases around the Country that, in terms of air traffic, saw little activity. Nearly all were just kids in their early twenties, low in rank and light on experience. They were accustomed to the hierarchy of military air traffic control; where controllers are enlisted grade and all pilots are officers. This was an overriding factor whenever professional disputes came up between a military pilot and, say, an Airman First Class. The controller usually deferred to the pilot. It was a powerful mindset among these controllers that would be absolutely necessary to change if they were to survive and succeed in their new environment. They were also astonished by a volume of traffic heretofore unheard of in their military world. They'd have to get over that as well.

Of all the quirks and qualities they brought to Big Time, the most important were their high spirits and eagerness to help. That was enough for us. We put them right to work in the Training Department ~ learning everything they would need to begin on-the-job training. They'd come to class in uniform, study hard and were anxious to work airplanes. Polite and respectful; if you happened to run into one, they would greet you as "sir" or "Ma'am." Accustomed as I was to being addressed in mostly disparaging terms, "sir" was a little disorienting. Such formality would quickly dissipate once they started working in the "Fight Club" control rooms of Big Time ~ unless The Martinet had his way.

Lieutenant Swift arrived at Big Time a few weeks behind the other military controllers. As the only officer in the bunch, he became their surrogate commander in lieu of whoever they would report to back at their home base. Unhappy with what he perceived as a total breakdown of military discipline and protocol, he began taking immediate steps to restore order. This involved checking the troops daily to ensure proper attire and yelling at them for any infractions. They were already being yelled at twice daily while traversing the picket lines with the rest of us at shift change. It made The Martinet's ranting all the more annoying.

Our military controllers were losing the spirit they'd arrived with and that's where The Martinet's utopian boot camp bullshit world conflicted with ours. The reality was that we needed a continuation of the momentum they'd built up before Swift appeared on the scene. Saluting might have been suitable and addressing Lieutenant Swift as "Sir" might have been seemly but we needed certifications more than ceremony.

In addition to bringing his spit and polish prospects to Big Time, his agenda also included checking out on a few radar positions. He made it very clear, however, that he saw no need to take the normally mandatory academics. That was something the inept enlistees might have needed but not an officer with an extensive background in military air traffic control. After much debate in the front offices, a decision was made to begin training Swift on the Final Control Sector. Since he purported to have radar experience (quantity and quality unknown) it was presumed that he could learn to vector aircraft onto an ILS with relative ease.

Several of us attempted to train him. The consensus was that he knew how to marshal his traffic into lines but there was a problem. He was not controlling a military marching band and everything was not moving at the same pace. Speed control was a concept he apparently never had to deal with. Perhaps it was a little used tool in the control of fighter jets. Unheeded instructor suggestions invariably lead to the loss of required spacing, unnecessary vectoring, late acceptance of additional handoffs and global turmoil in the TRACON.

His young wards who's rank was sewn to their sleeve rather than pinned to their collars would watch The Martinet do his daily battle with airplanes and instructors. I can only imagine how hard they must have bitten their tongues to suppress an otherwise audible snicker. Those of us working with him finally reached our breaking point. We petitioned the front office to arrange for a "Swift" departure; at least from the OJT process. His obvious failure to meet requirements on Final Control and the attending embarrassment caused him to become even more heavy handed with the enlisted troops; who, in turn, became even more demoralized. We needed all the help we could get and could have used Lieutenant Swift but, in this case, the cost was becoming far too high.

He lingered on at Big Time for several more weeks; barking and snapping at his subordinates like a rabid dog. His presence in the control rooms gratefully dwindled to an occasional visit. We eventually heard he was being summoned back to his home base due to mission requirements ~ or something. We weren't ready to believe he'd been involuntarily removed from Big Time ahead of the anarchy that was brewing within the ranks. It did seem odd though. He was the very first of our military allies to be called home and well ahead of the others. Just sayin'

I couldn't fault The Martinet for doing what he believed was the right thing. I worked under enough autocratic supervisors and managers to recognize the almost religious reverence they held for the written rule. It was the security blanket they wrapped their careers in. I could respect that. However, I could not respect arrogance, inflexibility and a stubborn unwillingness to recognize the extraordinary circumstances we were trying to cope with. Logic and compromise were key and the ability to bend a rule or few without breaking them was a survival skill.

There are many circumstances and applications befitting a Martinet. I don't believe an air traffic control facility is one of them. Like piloting an airplane; managing an air traffic operation requires, among other things, a light touch on the controls, close attention to attitude indicators and the willingness to change course when clearly necessary. In another venue, a military campaign perhaps, The Martinet's "rigid adherence" approach might have been the best tool for the task at hand. Not at Big Time Tower though and clearly not in August of '81 when rigid adherence to anything could lead to your undoing.

© NLA Factor, 2010

In The News

2010-04-23T15:07:00.002-04:00

The last known photograph of Boomtown Barnstormers quarterback Sammy "Stretch" Wasserman (seated on the front edge of the trailer), was taken during the big victory parade, just moments before a fan along the route threw him a football. The pass was a little high and Sammy's attention span a little low.

A Quiet Sunday Morning

2010-04-16T09:17:00.002-04:00

It was a sloppy setup. If there'd been a few more airplanes in the picture, I would have called it a bad setup. Two air carriers, a B-737 and an MD-80, on parallel courses, were headed toward an empty localizer on a 25 mile long left base leg. The Boeing was on the airport side of the formation and the MD-80 was at its two o'clock and five miles. Although the Boeing would turn final closer to the marker, the Md-80 was s couple of miles ahead. Both aircraft, level at 4000, were cloaked in a cloud layer that extended down to about 2000 feet. Two controllers had all sectors combined. It was a quiet Sunday morning at Small Time Tower.The arrival controller had taken the handoffs at different fixes; each about 45 miles from the runway. He assigned a couple of headings toward final and gave them pilot's discretion down to 4000. The sequence would surely become self-evident when they got closer to the airport ~ although they were running neck and neck all the way. A timely dash of speed control would have taken all the guesswork out, but no. They hurtled on with nose cones glowing. On the other side of the localizer; one lonely air carrier made its way along the downwind leg. Since it hadn't yet passed the airport, there was plenty of time to figure out who'd follow who. It looked like a possible three-way tie to me.

As the dayshift supervisor, I had just finished one of my periodic walking tours of the TRACON. Everything was accounted for. Three airplanes, two controllers, one supervisor and no problems. A countdown to disaster perhaps? Nah! It was a quiet Sunday morning.

I didn't like the approach controller's serendipitous sequencing strategy but he was an experienced enough guy. I knew he'd figure something out. I sat back down at the desk and began pondering Summer leave requests from my team members. Where the hell did I put that seniority list? Oh, I must have set it down on the TRACON Data position during my last walk-through. I got up and headed across the room. Passing the arrival controller again, I noticed the Boeing and Md-80 were now level at 3000, about four miles apart laterally and still in a staggered formation with the Boeing slightly behind. The localizer was only about ten miles ahead. That lone air carrier on the opposite downwind was now looking like the proverbial fly in the ointment. Something had to give but I knew the controller must have a plan by now.

He did. Instructions were murmured into a headset, the controller's voice was heard in the MD-80's cockpit and a plan was thereby set in motion. The plan was that the Boeing would be number one. The flight on the opposite side of the final had been given a speed reduction and would turn to follow. The MD-80 was assigned a right two-seventy for spacing and would be vectored back onto the base leg as number three in sequence. That was the plan. It was a bit extreme but that was because the controller let everyone get to a point where there was no room left for more subtle solutions.

I was back at the supe's desk when I heard the Conflict Alert alarm. Within seconds I was behind the arrival controller, leaning over his shoulder and gaping at his scope with incredulity. The MD-80 was well into a left turn and closing quickly on the Boeing. Since the MD had been a couple of miles ahead to begin with, it was practically turning into the other aircraft's nose as the two aircraft converged. The controller was transmitting excitedly but his words were just white noise. All I could hear was the Conflict Alert alarm which was nearly overridden by a loud ringing in my ears. Data blocks showed both aircraft level at 3000 as the radar targets merged.I stood, frozen in horror ~ unable to speak ~ unable, even, to exhale.You can rediscover an entire lifetime between two ticks of a second hand. A kid lying on the warm suburban sidewalk; watching a Super Constellation climbing away from some big city airport. Years later ~ boarding my first airplane at that same airport and taking off for a four-year hitch in the Air Force. I recalled every tale of aviation tragedy told by the old timers at Big Time Tower. I saw the mortally wounded PSA Flight 182 leaving a clear San Diego sky one September day in '78 ~ victim of a midair collision. All this and more was there between those two ticks ~ including a vision of the headline in tomorrow's newspaper. "Hundreds Killed As Two Airliners Collide"I was overcome by the sickness of paralyzing inability. Nothing could be done but wait and I couldn't even do that. Light-headed; I might have fainted but there was no time. Resigned to the situation, like someone strapped into an electric chair, I began wondering how the collision would appear on our radar. Would there be dozens of tiny targets? Would the wreckage hit a school? Would the Warden call with a last minute reprieve? Whatever the outcome, I knew the next second would represent a seminal moment in my journey. Hit or miss, this was a life changer.

The MD-80 was still in its left turn when, once again, we could discern two targets. The radio frequency was silent. Not a word came from either aircraft as they quietly headed off in nearly opposite directions. The controller issued a descent to the Boeing, then a turn to intercept the final approach course. The MD, now moving away from the airport, was given another turn. I told the controller to have the MD-80 crew telephone the TRACON when they got to the gate. I had him relieved, appointed a controller in charge then made a call to the Regional Office. Somewhere along the line I had to sit ~ so I could finish my heart attack without the risk of falling.

I asked the controller why he hadn't done something when the MD-80 began its left turn. His reply was that it all happened too quickly. There were, of course, a few ways to have mitigated the situation. It could even have been completely avoided if he'd put those two aircraft in-trail 30 miles from the airport. Water over the dam. By the time he realized what was happening it was too late. Thinking about the fact that I was seated at the supe's desk when this started only exacerbated my discomfiture. What the hell was I doing at the desk? Oh now I remember! It was a quiet Sunday morning.

The tape playback verified what the controller had reiterated several times. He'd decided the MD-80 would be number three in the sequence and, to make it work, assigned a right two-seventy for spacing. The pilot's response was vague and should have been questioned. Then the flight turned left. Why? It took a call from the Captain to understand. He'd missed the "right" and heard only the "two-seventy for spacing." This was understood to be the new heading. From where he was, the quickest way to two-seventy was a left turn. Unwilling to believe what I assured him was the controller's actual instruction, I invited him up to hear the tape. Astonishment ensued.

It wasn't even noon and I felt like I'd been inhaling paint fumes all morning. Sick and exhausted, I made log entries and filled out forms for the rest of the shift.

Supervising the TRACON was much different than the tower. Upstairs, I could see everything from the middle of the cab. I could hear each controller and keep a general idea of what was going on across their airport world. If needed, I was ready to help.The radar room was another story. Depending on the number of open sectors, there were as many separate worlds. Standing at a vacant scope and pushing "Quick-Look" buttons only revealed a part of what each sector was doing. I could get a much better idea by spending a little time behind each controller and listening. Even at that; I was seeing and hearing only part of a composite picture. At the supervisor's desk I was mostly uninformed and therefore pretty useless if trouble broke out. But who'd expect trouble to break out on a quiet Sunday morning?

© NLA Factor, 2010

The Go-Around

2010-04-14T13:38:00.001-04:00

There are "so many people marching on the active runway" because that's the Base Parade Grounds! Now pull up you idiot!"

Superman

2010-04-10T11:43:00.003-04:00

The bygone Superman was falling through the flight levels. Dropping out of the sky faster than a speeding bullet, he twisted and tumbled like an off-balance acrobat. The cape that once carried him aloft now fluttered and snapped in the wind as he plummeted toward a very hard landing. But this was the indomitable man of steel. What had gone wrong?

As it turned out, it wasn't Lex Luthor who laid him to rest or even the low spark of high-heeled boys. It was traffic though ~ lots of traffic. That and the sudden, shocking realization that he wasn't really more powerful than a locomotive.

For many years, Superman had worked as an air traffic controller at Big Time Tower. He pulled his shifts with a few other Supermen and Superwomen who arrived each day to perform their superhuman feats in the skies over Metropolis. Keeping those skies safe while saving people's time, money and occasionally even their lives was heroic work and Superman never shied away from the task. On the contrary, he espoused it. The challenge of bringing order to the chaos of modern air travel was what awakened him each morning and propelled him toward the airport each day.

Superman was always called upon to work the busiest positions and under the most difficult circumstances. You'd see him whenever there was inclement weather, inordinately heavy traffic, inoperative navaids and other system incapacities. Hunched over his radar scope; he curbed the chaos with unfailing confidence and flourish. It was an amazing thing to watch. Little did anyone know he was growing weaker with every passing day.

It was now late 1982. In Washington, the Vietnam War Memorial had been dedicated, the U.S. budget deficit reached more than $110 trillion and on December 1st, Michael Jackson released "Thriller." Over the months following PATCO's 1981 strike, Superman had sent his blue tights to the dry cleaners with increasing frequency. It wasn't always just for the perspiration rings either. Although the strike had faded into the back pages of a few aviation industry periodicals, its effects were still front page news at Big Time Tower. The picket lines were gone; as were most of the military controllers who had come to help us through the crisis. But airline schedules were expanding and Big Time's daily traffic count often exceeded pre-strike levels. Newly hired trainees and a few controllers from smaller towers trickled into the facility; taking that first step of their two to four year journey toward certification. Of the journeymen who'd stayed on through the strike, a few had recently transferred to the Regional Office or other, less busy places. No one could blame them but we resented it nonetheless.

Adding to the strain of long weeks and increasingly heavy traffic volume was having to provide on-the-job training several times a day. If you weren't punch-drunk enough after spending the first half of the shift on busy positions, another hour or two with an unnerved and intimidated trainee could knock you down for the count. But as the only path to a fully restored work force, training had to be done.

There was also a persistent rumor that fired controllers would soon be rehired and returned to their facilities. None of us truly believed it could happen but, since these were times of unbelievable events, we weren't ready to overlook the possibility. Just the thought of returning to those pre-strike levels of acrimony was demoralizing. Adding that to the escalating fatigue often caused controllers to exceed their limits. Maybe it was an attempt to prove we didn't need the strikers to help us rebuild the system.

These times called for Supermen and Superwomen. They appeared undaunted by the daily adversities and apparently unaffected by the prevailing exhaustion among their coworkers. Superman always arrived in advance of his assigned shift so he could relieve someone early. Superman always rushed into the TRACON to work Big Time's most hectic sectors. Superman always volunteered to train the crazy kid from Tiny Tower on radar. You'd also see him flying up the tower steps with another fledgling controller who still smelled like Oklahoma City. There he'd provide an hour or two of training on Ground Control during a nighttime departure push. If you needed a shift swap, Superman was always eager to take that 4:00 to 12:00 off your hands. But by the end of his day, Superman felt a Kryptonite kind of weakness spreading through both brain and brawn. Assuring himself the feeling would pass; he pressed on and spoke nothing of it to anyone.

Then one evening, as he was flying high over one of Big Time's most frantic sectors, Superman's cape came apart. The man of steel had lost control. That's when he fell ~ his confidence and competence going down with him.

He should have seen it coming but stubborn determination can sometimes obscure the obvious. In a mighty effort to rid Big Time of delays, he had missed the fact that two airplanes, heading in two directions, were getting too close. The emerging need to intervene was hidden behind a blitz of landline calls and less urgent vectors. Scanning the adjacent bay to locate a few more flight strips took his eye away from the picture at the last moment when something could have been done. He even missed the first call from one of two pilots who came very close to falling from the skies along with him. "Big Time . . . are you working that commuter that just went by us?"

Superman landed hard and in that hard landing he learned a lot about the fleeting nature of super powers. The incident was only a temporary setback but the lessons he learned stuck with him like that big red letter on his chest. In his later years, as a supervisor, he'd survey a potentially bad situation and tell the controller; "Don't try to be a Superman." Out of adversity comes empathy.

© NLA Factor, 2010

Just Between Us

2010-04-08T10:47:00.005-04:00

I want to thank all four or five of you who actually read this Blog. I've enjoyed hearing from you and always appreciate the feedback. Since I have not posted anything new recently, you may suspect I've either lost interest or have finally run out of material. Far from it. I still have lots to tell and plan to get it all down in print before I forget. But Spring is finally here and I can no longer use poor weather as an excuse not to do all my outdoor chores.

I am working on a new posting but its just taking longer than it should. Its the old "Other duties as assigned" thing. Thanks again for reading and I hope to hear from everyone again one day. Meanwhile, enjoy the season.

Cheers,
NLAF

Learning To Draw The Line

2010-03-29T00:29:00.001-04:00

I had a big mess on my hands. It was only 6:15 on a sunny Myrtle Beach morning yet somehow I had become overrun with airplanes. This was normally the time during a mid-shift, when I'd be making a fresh pot of coffee for the incoming day crew, counting up the night's traffic and doing a little cleanup. Instead, I was holding a microphone and staring out at the runway with a look of complete bewilderment. If you could follow my gaze you'd immediately understand the situation. Out on the airfield and up in the traffic pattern was the specter of chaos.

It all began about thirty minutes earlier. Reclining on a chair, feet up on the console; I looked out over a quiet ramp and runway. The only thing moving was the Base Operations vehicle making a morning airfield inspection. Tired, I was well into planning what I'd do once I was relieved. A little breakfast at the mess hall sounded good. Maybe some pancakes. I was just getting to the part where I'd be back at the barracks sleeping when a call came in on the Local Control frequency. My feet hit the floor as I reached for a microphone.

It had to be an emergency. The entire Wing was still parked on the ramp and we never got any itinerant traffic this early in the day. "Calling Myrtle Beach Tower, say again?"

The reply was from "Cabot One-One." It was a flight of four Navy T-28 Trojans on their way up the coast from Jacksonville, Florida. On a VFR training mission, they wanted to enter the 360 overhead traffic pattern for some touch and goes. This sounded like a great way to keep me awake for a while so I reeled off all the necessary numbers and asked them to report initial. I saw them about five minutes later, out over the ocean at 1,400 feet and lining up with the runway.

The flight leader advised they'd be splitting into individual elements (Cabot One-One through One-Four) after this approach and would stay in the bounce pattern for several touch and goes. Music to the ears! I was newly certified in the tower so a little practice would be good for all of us. The flight went into the break and one-by-one did their first touch and go. In a few minutes, the four of them were nicely spread out on a right downwind and the first Trojan started his turn to base leg. That was about when I got another unexpected call.

This one was from "Cabot Two-One; another flight of four. They were also on the way up from JAX and wanted individual touch and goes. By now, Cabot One-One was over the runway. Cabot One-Two turned base while One-Three and One-Four were still on downwind.
I instructed the Cabot Two-One flight to report initial, figuring I'd shuffle them into the touch and go pattern between elements of the Cabot One-One flight. My plan worked well. As each member of the "Two-One" flight made their left break and descended toward a base turn, I exchanged traffic with the other flight of four who were in a right-hand pattern. Everyone had their traffic in sight and would follow.

My plan was simple, effective, yet terribly flawed by a few small but growing problems. The first being the fact that all eight of these airplanes looked alike. White, with an orange nose and tail, it was impossible to differentiate one from another. It would soon be like playing Billiards with only cue balls ~ by trying to memorize their positions in the rack before the break.

Then there was the tactical callsign issue. Except for some very subtle differences in the numbers, they were all identical. Finally, the pilots were mostly all students in a relatively early phase of training. Their experience levels were nearly as low as my own. These little problems combined to form a very big one soon after each aircraft had completed its first touch and go. Fighting to keep the picture; I was pretty sure the aircraft turning base was Cabot Two-Three. The T-28 just lifting off the runway was Cabot Two-Four and the one on short final was Cabot One-Two. The rest were still on the downwind. I'd be able to verify who they were when they reported turning base.

Then a call came from ten miles southwest of the airport. It was, of course, Cabot Three-One; yet another flight of four clones looking for touch and goes. By now, one or two of the students in the pattern were using the wrong numbers and immediately correcting themselves. Not to be outdone, I began transposing two-ones and one-twos. Confusion spread through the traffic pattern by the numbers.

Cabot Three-One flight checked in on a long initial.

Every air traffic controller has their occasional moments of pain. This one was becoming more painful than trying to shave with toenail clippers. By the time Cabot Three-One flight began mixing in with all the others, it was a bloody mess.

Naturally, the first day-shift person to arrive was a breathless Tech Sergeant, who immediately gave me that "What the hell?" kind of look. He heard the droning of several piston-powered airplanes from the parking lot and had sprinted up the tower steps. The sky was full of little white airplanes with orange noses and I was feeling dizzy. The Local Control frequency squealed and squawked as everyone tried to report something or other simultaneously.

It was right about then that Cabot One-One advised they'd be departing the area and heading back to Navy JAX. As his flight left the traffic pattern, "Thanks Myrtle" was all he said. Was that a chuckle I heard? Oh yeah. Score one for the Navy.

Cabot Two-One flight immediately followed suit. That left just four Trojans in the pattern. I handed my microphone to the Sergeant. Having long since changed my post-shift plan from breakfast and bed to a bar and beer; I too departed the area.

Exceeding the limits of my capability was an easy thing to do that morning. I was too inexperienced to know where my limits were. It was probably my first lesson in learning to draw the line that falls between just enough and too much ~ a lesson I would occasionally forget over time.

© NLA Factor, 2010

ATIS Information Romeo

2010-03-24T08:48:00.001-04:00

No.....I have no idea who she is but she just started an ATIS broadcast with "All you sons-of-bitches up there who never called me the next day better listen up!"

I think you'd better get right up here.

Its About The People

2010-03-23T13:50:00.004-04:00

Most of my air traffic career was spent working at airports. From one tower or another; I could watch military flight crews striding across the ramp toward their warplanes, briefcase toting road warriors lined up to board commuter flights or even the occasional flight instructor and student boarding a Piper Warrior. There was a bond of trust between us all that would exist until they left my jurisdiction and would renew when they returned. The importance of this bond was somehow underscored by having actually seen my aviation partners. It was akin to the handshake that seals a deal.

Having the opportunity to see airplanes each day; along with pilots, mechanics, tug drivers, maintenance workers and all others who are moving parts in the great airport machine, gave deeper meaning to my role in it all. By far, the most influential parts of an airport are the passengers, those who come to greet them and those who come to say goodbye. Our profession is big but it all narrows down to one fine point. That point is the people. They were always the lens that brought everything I did into focus.

At Big Time, the tower and TRACON were close enough that we controllers could walk through the terminal building during our meal breaks. It was a veritable collage of society, sounds and emotions. Many of our societal elements were there; from the large group of screaming kids off on a school trip to the small covey of nuns staring quietly at a changing list of arrivals and gate assignments. Laughter drowned out by the public address system or farewell hugs interrupted by final boarding calls ~ it was all there. And outside the terminal building's tall windows was a web of taxiways leading to runways that pointed to the rest of the world. To me, it all represented the core value in what I did for a living.

To this day, Big Time Airport remains a megalopolis of ramps, runways, terminals and taxiways. Yet somewhere out there; beyond all the Federal Aviation Regulations, Air Traffic Control Procedures, Letters of Agreement, computer systems, communications networks and emerging technologies you can still find the basics ~ like a windsock swaying in the breeze or a rotating beacon scanning the night skies. On Saturday afternoons you may find a group of plane spotters parked along the airport's perimeter road. Inside the terminal buildings, people still wait for friends and relatives to arrive. Others scramble to find a window where they can watch a loved one's flight take off.

As evolving and sophisticated as the aviation system is these days, it remains unchanged in many ways and surprisingly simple. As it was from the very beginning, flight is a personal experience. You can verify this by visiting any airport and watching the people.

© NLA Factor, 2010

The First Time

2010-03-16T08:22:00.002-04:00

Its a place we rarely think about and are even less inclined to forget. Most of us have been there at one time or another in our lives. If you are a controller, its likely you've been there much more frequently.

Maybe it was the first time you leapt off the far end of a high diving board or lifted off a runway without your instructor. I once had a neighbor who was a Cardiac Surgeon. For him it was the first time he held a living human heart in his hand. If you're like me; this one was an experience both dreaded and eagerly anticipated. In retrospect, it was simultaneously one of the toughest and easiest times I ever spent.

I'm talking about those great leaps of faith we take in ourselves. Unsure whether we can do it but dead certain that we must; we seek empirical proof of our ability. There's only one way to get it. Restore the human heart you're holding to health and put it back where it belongs. Take to the sky on your first solo flight and land safely. Or perhaps plug a headset into the sky and use your skills to ensure that everyone under your aegis lands safely.

With the check-ride behind me; today would be another of those first time experiences. I would work the Final Control sector sans the safety net of my instructor. A day would dawn when I'd become blasé about working this or any other Big Time radar sector ~ not necessarily a good thing. But I wasn't there just yet. Today I was appropriately apprehensive.

Walking across the TRACON, I could see it wasn't going to be easy. My head was filled with every mistake I'd made, every word written on my training reports and every insight my instructors had given me ~ once they calmed down. "What's past is prologue." History repeats itself and influences the present. If William Shakespeare was right; I could be in for trouble. I attempted to brush these thoughts aside but it wasn't going well.

Completely absorbed in their traffic, teammates working other radar positions didn't even notice as I passed by. The controller I was asked to relieve was just ahead. She too was so immersed in her work that I went completely unnoticed until I plugged in. With a quick glance over her shoulder; "Hey" was all she said. Turning back to her traffic for a few more vectors and an approach clearance, she gave me time to take it all in.

The localizer was loaded ~ from the runway threshold to the far reaches of the sector, nearly twenty-five miles away. Both the left and right downwind legs were full of airplanes and the approach guys had a lot more coming. I had hoped my first time would be in decent VFR weather conditions. I had hoped the traffic volume wouldn't be too heavy. I had also hoped I wouldn't feel like throwing up. Strike three.

Claire pressed the position relief button and I heard her voice in my headset. "Oh boy!" she exclaimed. Then, in obvious reference to it being my opening performance as a solo act on the position, she added; "My first virgin!" This evoked a nervous chuckle. Claire was the only woman on our team at the time and one of just two working at Big Time Tower. Tough and at the top of her game, she held her own in the Frat House atmosphere that was Big Time in the Seventies. "Okay, here's what's happening..." As she started the briefing I watched her traffic; thinking about what needed to be done next. I already knew the weather was crap and that we were landing on one runway only. What I did not know was that the tower needed five miles between arrivals in order to get a lot of departures out.

So many things hinged on the final controller at Big Time. Running the traffic with too much space between would back the arrival sectors into a holding situation. Running things too tight meant the tower wouldn't be able to get a departure off between each arrival. "One for one." as we'd say. Either way; the Final sector could trigger delays and make a lot of people angrier than an air carrier pilot on his third go-around.

Claire pointed at two data blocks on downwind; small turboprop commuter flights. "You'll need to build a big hole for these guys...they're slower than hell." I followed her index finger around the sector as she described her plan and suggested mine. By now I was high on epinephrine and actually anxious to take the sector. Claire finished up her briefing with; "Have fun!" She meant it too.

With that, I was on my own. Like my first solo flight, taking off was the easy part. Now it was entirely up to me to get all this traffic around the pattern and down onto the runway. I wasn't exactly holding a live human heart but there were a lot of people out there among those tiny radar targets. In the way an air traffic controller does; I was holding each of their lives in my hands. Claire lingered for a few moments; watching and listening. Already bent to the task, I never noticed her leave.

Once I had made enough of my own decisions and issued enough instructions to actually become a part of the picture, I had no time left to be nervous. Minutes passed quickly and in an hour or so I was relieved. It hadn't been pretty. Finesse takes time. Accordingly, my work at this sector wouldn't get "pretty" for several months. It was safe though and nobody was delayed. All in all ~ pretty good for the first time.

© NLA Factor, 2010

Great Balls Of Fire!

2010-03-15T13:32:00.003-04:00

Anybody know what Jerry Lee Lewis did for a living before his career in Rock & Roll umm....took off?

Desolation Tower

2010-03-13T07:45:00.003-05:00

It was Spring of 1968. The Air Force had summarily plucked me from my idyllic stateside assignment and transferred me to the control tower at Desolation Air Base; an obscure address in one of the Universe's least understood Zip Codes. I'll call it The Republic of Desolia. It was a country carved out of nothing by wind-driven things that stuck in your eyes and stunk in your nostrils. Although our military must have had some peculiar interests in Desolia, they were never evident to me.

I was to spend the last half of my Air Force career here, along with hundreds of other bewildered airmen. I should have gone to Vietnam and fully expected to. Back then, everybody was going to Vietnam. But the day my stateside boss came up the tower steps with my new orders, he had an uncharacteristic smirk on his face. "Airman, you're going to Desolation Air Base. That's over in The Republic of Desolia. Its even worse than Vietnam! They don't shoot at you there but you'll wish they did!" He added dryly; "At least then you could shoot back."

I suspect he was just pissed because I was the only one in the tower not going to Southeast Asia. Apathetic to the whole idea, I sold my car, packed my duffel bag and shipped out.

The control tower stood somewhere in the lower left hand corner of Desolation Air Base; near a wide and aged expanse of acutely cracked and tilted concrete. The locals proudly referred to this area as the itinerant parking ramp. Airplanes were rarely seen on this particular "ramp" but every now and then, like crickets in the night, faint ELT signals could be heard on the guard channels. My theory was that several parked aircraft had long since rolled off into the ramp's gaping chasms, where they were quickly forgotten - buried under the rapid accumulation of dust and debris indigenous to this part of the world. This theory was buttressed whenever American flights landed at Desolation. They always parked on a distant taxiway rather than risk the perilous consequences of ramp parking. I should note that American aircraft rarely landed here. Having fled the traffic pattern in alarm and confusion, most American flight crews would rather have landed into the side of a mountain than to suffer the uncertain fate meted out by Desolation's air traffic control.

Air traffic control. You know...there are functioning mechanisms out there that make Rube Goldberg's most elegant and ingenious inventions look like a pile of cinder blocks. On encountering one such unlikely combination of illogically assembled parts ~ I had to wonder. How can it possibly work? Through the years I learned that, in some cases, it simply doesn't. Such was the inexplicable air traffic control mechanism known as Desolation Tower; which was, to the naked eye, merely a loose assemblage of cinder blocks. But it was so much more than that.

Imagine a control tower with two local control positions. Oh, there's nothing too uncommon about that ~ but now imagine the two local controllers operating simultaneously and in different languages. Same scenario with the two ground and non-radar approach control positions; each pair running on their own language and sounding like pure gibberish to the other. The only shared assets would be the traffic pattern, the single runway and a few meandering taxiways. It was in these shared spaces where everything came together ~ literally.

There was one additional shared asset; the services of Mr. Fye. Whatever occurred in and around the tower often depended on or could be attributed to this man. You see, Desolation Tower was staffed by both American and Desolian Air Force controllers. It was actually two towers in one. Divided down the middle, each side was a mirror image of the other. Desolia's Air Force controllers worked their own planes on their own frequencies and we did the same from our side. The success of this arrangement depended solely on our Desolian interpreter; Mr. Fye, who sat in the middle of the cab.

Fye would sweat continuously. This may have been due to his incredible corpulence, the inoperative floor fan or perhaps the anxieties of someone in touch with their acute incompetence. He combed his hair like Elvis and complained incessantly about the women in his life. Apparently they were all competing for his affections and conspiring to take his money. As he sat, expounding on his misfortunes, we could hear the Desolian controllers chattering frantically at their traffic.

As it turned out, Desolation Air Base was a training facility for their Air Force's student pilots. There must have been a hundred F-84 Thunderstreaks stationed there. They'd taxi out by the score each day, then fly off to run inadvertent sorties against our itinerant arrivals and departures.

In time, our side of the tower learned to recognize the signs of imminent trouble. Mr. Fye would stop talking about his personal woes, turn his head toward the Desolian controllers and actually listen. I could hear the urgent sounding chatter on their tower frequency. His face would flush. Then he'd point toward a window, waving his hand vigorously ~ like he was trying to shake a scorpion off his index finger. "They're coming!" he'd exclaim. "A flight of four ~ ten miles out on the beacon (NDB) approach!" Okay, no problem. I had a C-130 ready to depart. There'd be plenty of time.

I cleared the Hercules for takeoff. The airplane rolled onto the runway and surged forward. I searched the final approach area for that flight of four. Not in sight. Life was good for a change. The C-130 was now airborne and climbing through 500 feet. I looked again. Still no sign of those F-84s. Great.

Suddenly Fye began yelling at the Desolian controllers in their native tongue. He was waving his right hand furiously. Then the C-130 pilot was yelling; "Where'd these fighters come from???" I looked in the direction where Fye was pointing. There was the flight of four ~ approaching the airport on a course perpendicular to the runway and about to intercept the Herc from its left. The aircraft's nose came down as the pilot arrested his climb. Just in time. Those F-84s passed directly over him by about 100 feet.

Actually out of his chair by now, Fye looked like he'd just tried to swallow an artichoke. Red faced, he was sputtering and waving both arms over his head. The Desolian controllers sounded angry but we had no idea what they were shouting about. The C-130 pilot sounded angry. My Sergeant sounded angry. He was hollering at Fye. The Hercules resumed its climb and was disappearing into the haze. Before it vanished the pilot said he'd be calling our commanding officer as soon as he got to his destination. Mr. Fye never said another word for the rest of the shift.

I came to work the next day expecting to hear that Mr. Fye was either dead or dying. Much to my surprise, he was seated at his post in the center of the tower cab. A dozen Thunderstreaks were on their way out to the runway and several more were moving on their ramp. I noted three arrival strips on our console as I listened to Fye grousing about his new girlfriend to another airman. She'd taken the keys to his car and refused to give them back until...

The Desolian Local Control frequency blared away behind him. It was so loud that Fye had to raise his voice to be heard. The first of our Air Force inbounds, a C-141, called on the approach frequency. He was over some fix at some altitude and needed a descent clearance ~ so I needed traffic information from Fye. Meanwhile, the F-84's were taking off in pairs and turning in every direction the compass had to offer. Already sweating copiously, Fye fanned himself with his morning paper and blabbered on. Another action-packed day was underway at Desolation Tower.

© NLA Factor, 2010

Pyrrhic Victory

2010-03-09T17:27:00.003-05:00

Ed was actually threatening to kill me - or worse. It was a red faced, white knuckled threat and I might have taken it more seriously if I didn't know Ed so well. I was on my way to work, an evening shift at Big Time Tower, and had just arrived at our parking lot entrance. I stopped at the security gate to swipe my badge and enter the code. There stood Ed, glaring at me through the window. His eyes, well past their flash point, were now in a full burn. His voice sounded high pitched and strained; like an animal caught in a trap which, in a sense, he was. His breath, as he leaned on my car door, was unavoidable...and smelled of beer.

Behind Ed, crowded together like a bunch of red carnival balloons, were a dozen other faces I recognized. Most of the guys had been friends, trusted coworkers and confidants. I knew their wives and their girlfriends. I knew how much they could drink before they fell and how much pressure they could take before they cracked. But now they were all clutching signs, chanting and punching at the sky with clenched fists. It was the very same sky wherein they had once plied their trade. The sky no longer their limit; things were different now.

It was a Summer hot, sooty and stinking airport afternoon in late September of '81. The air smelled of bus exhaust and jet fuel as a B727 swung low over the lot, landing gear extended, on a visual approach to one of the runways. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization – PATCO – in what may have been one of the worst miscalculations in the history of organized labor, had, on August 3rd, lead nearly 13,000 of its members off the job and up the gallows steps; even helping them with their nooses. Then, standing together defiantly, they waited for President Ronald Reagan to pull the lever.

Reagan was pissed. He saw the strike as an illegal act. Whether it was or not is, to this day, a subject of debate. If nothing else, it was to default on the oath we all swore to when we signed onto the job. That was enough for me.

It was also a threat to public safety and an already fragile economy. Reagan wanted to fire the strikers immediately but was convinced to give them 48 hours in which to return to work. Good advice. About 1200 came back under the deadline. The rest who walked out the door were never to be allowed back in again.

Annoyed, I reached around Ed to swipe my badge. Two local Police officers leaning on the hood of their nearby cruiser watched indifferently as I pushed on the keypad. Since the strike, both police and angry strikers were regular fixtures at the entrance to our parking lot. The police would only sit and watch unless things seemed to be getting out of control. Things occasionally did get out of control but not at our parking lot.

The gate opened and I went to work. It was going to be another exhausting night.

When PATCO struck on August 3rd, the rest of us, supervisors, staff members and a few non-striking controllers were immediately thrown into an adrenaline fueled rush through extended shifts and expanded work weeks. It was a test of endurance. Some guys eventually stopped going home after each shift because it wasn’t worth the long drive for such a short time there. They brought bedrolls to work and slept in the break room. Nobody complained though. This was some kind of war over the air traffic system and we were just as committed to keeping it moving as those in opposition were to shutting it down.

FAA’s strike contingency plan kicked in smoothly. There was an immediate 50 percent reduction in airline schedules during peak periods, tight control over corporate and general aviation traffic and reduced military activity. Within a week after the strike, several military controllers arrived at Big Time. They brought with them an eagerness to work, a zeal for the cause and a level of commitment to win that matched our own. On their heels came a few airline pilots who had been furloughed from their jobs due to the strike. These were not happy guys but, with their in-depth knowledge of the aviation system, they were soon able to help us by performing flight data functions or clearance delivery. Forced out of their well compensated careers, they too harbored the same "take no prisoners" attitude that got the rest of us through each day. Since I was a training specialist, I was temporarily removed from shift rotation and returned to the training department to start giving these people the basics they'd need to begin their tower and TRACON training. Between classes, I’d go back to the control rooms to help provide meal breaks. People were growing fatigued but no less motivated.

Meanwhile, out on the street - In hope of gaining negotiating leverage, PATCO held news conferences and tried frightening the public by predicting chaos in the sky. “Aluminum showers,” (the popular “insider” euphemism for midair collisions) and other mishaps would soon happen due to the unqualified and inexperienced workforce. To the union’s chagrin, such things never occurred. Almost perhaps - but not quite. Reports of intimidation and interference with the system by strikers began coming in from across the country as PATCO grew more desperate. The FAA refused to negotiate with the union as long as the strike continued.

At Big Time, threats and intimidation were nearly routine. Controllers reported being followed home after evening shifts. The purpose? Just so you knew that they knew where you lived. Spouses sometimes received anonymous late night phone calls and were told things like "We know where your kids go to school." It was all part of the game and not taken too seriously. However, the game was taken to a much higher level at other locations. We were advised to be alert for "phantom controllers."

This game needed only one unemployed and irrationally committed controller with nothing more than a portable, aviation band transceiver and a decent view of the airport. With just one well timed transmission on the tower frequency; an aircraft could, for example, be instructed to "Go around" or "Cancel takeoff clearance." Depending on what else was happening at the time, the result could be anything from a costly inconvenience to a catastrophe. Their brief but effective work done, the phantom controller would simply vanish...till the next time.

Inside the tower, time passed quickly. Within weeks we were providing on-the-job training to the pilots and military controllers and they were becoming qualified on more and more positions of operation. Eventually, most of the military folks became certified on all tower and TRACON positions. It helped a lot - keeping in mind they were only on loan to us and that new FAA recruits were still many months away. Still...traffic volume grew back to and beyond pre-strike levels at an alarming rate. Everyone was getting tired but their determination never diminished. In fact; each trip though the parking lot picket lines, being mocked, threatened and cursed at, seemed to energize an otherwise flagging workforce.

In time, the picket lines gradually dissipated and the system came back together. Soon the traffic volume was higher than ever and, unlike our workforce, was growing steadily. Like many others; I was exhausted, burning out and in need of a change of pace. Every now and then we'd get updates on what some of our former coworkers were now doing. One had become an auto parts salesman. One was working for a roofing company. I never heard what became of the rest but I missed them. I missed them all. I suppose we had won the war but, in many ways, it was a pyrrhic victory. Much was lost. Good friends, actually lost well ahead of the strike, were now gone without a trace. Missing along with them was their irreplaceable depth of experience. The drive for victory had left my personal life in turmoil and ironically, most of the FAA's pre-strike problems remained.

So Ed wanted to kill me. Had I known on that hot September afternoon in 1981 what I would know a few all consuming years later; I might have told him not to bother – I’d probably end up doing it myself.

© NLA Factor, 2010

Does Size Matter?

2010-03-06T08:14:00.002-05:00

How big can a combined tower/TRACON facility grow before becoming too big for its controllers to handle? In an arena where the players are always presumed to be at the top of their game; how many control positions can someone reasonably be expected to maintain proficiency on without a decline in performance? Rhetorical questions, of course, to which I have no answers. But I thought about them a lot during my FAA years.Consider a TRACON with several busy radar sectors; some that change size, shape and complexity according to the primary airport's landing direction. To that, add an entirely different set of skills needed to handle the various tower positions. Throw in a steady upturn in the daily traffic count. Shake well and let stand for a year or so. Sooner or later, someone will suggest adding one or more new control positions to better distribute the workload; a short term solution with long term limitations. You end up with even more positions to stay current and proficient on. In time, another sector or tower position may be needed. What then? Something's got to give. With luck, it'll just be a dip in the quality of anticipated service but there are obvious "worse case scenarios."

Would splitting the facility so that controllers worked exclusively in either the tower or TRACON help? How about excising the TRACON from your facility altogether and consolidating it with other approach controls elsewhere? More short sighted solutions with long term limitations? I'll talk about that some other time. For now though, I'd better stay with what I started before I confuse myself.Let me set the "Wayback Machine" to 1966, when I began my military air traffic control career. I was assigned to the control tower at Myrtle beach Air Force Base. It was the only place I worked. I drove across the base each day, parked in front of the Operations building, climbed the tower steps and signed on. Others in my barracks worked in the RAPCON or 'Radar Approach Control.' It was the only place they worked. The radar troops queued up at Base Operations too, but only to catch another ride. The RAPCON was located on the other side of the airport, adjacent to the runway and only accessible by Air Force van.

In my time at Myrtle beach, I grew comfortable with tower operations. There were only three operating positions; Flight Data/Clearance Delivery, Ground Control and Local Control. In a one-runway operation, things were pretty straight forward. I learned the necessary skills and performed them every day. With only three positions to work, maintaining proficiency was never a problem.

It was pretty much the same when I was transferred overseas. The base sported both a control tower and a mobile radar unit called a GCA (Ground Controlled Approach). The GCA was located in the middle of the airfield and controllers rode an Air Force van to get there. Since I had stateside tower experience, I was assigned to the tower here. With four operating positions, including a non-radar approach control, tower operations were vastly more complex than at Myrtle beach, Still, I was in my element and able to become certified much quicker than if they'd assigned me to the GCA unit. Even with four tower positions, staying proficient was not a problem here either. So I sharpened my skills, grew increasingly comfortable in the tower environment and daydreamed that one day I'd go to work for the FAA. That dream became a reality in 1974.

On arrival at Big Time I learned it was an "up and down" operation. That is to say controllers were required to certify through all tower and TRACON positions. Even though Big Time's Tower was far busier and more complex than anything I'd seen in the Air Force, there was a note of familiarity to it and I was able to draw heavily from my Air Force experience. That greatly facilitated my progress toward tower certification, which still took nearly a year.

The day I was tower certified, my supervisor congratulated me and said; "The hard part is over." He wasn't kidding but I couldn't take him seriously. Looking ahead at learning radar operations for the first time and having to check out on nine sectors plus the associated handoff positions seemed daunting. I wished I'd had even a little prior radar experience.

It was hard and often humbling work but I eventually did certify through the TRACON. That's when "the hard part" my supervisor had mentioned started all over again. The hard, nearly impossible part was in trying to stay proficient on all five tower positions. Once TRACON certified, a controller was rarely sent to the tower. If I was sent upstairs it was usually to work with a tower trainee for a couple of hours. After that, I'd be sent back down to the TRACON.

Supervisors, who had even less "hands-on" time in the tower than us journeymen, understood our situation. They'd usually try to send us upstairs for proficiency time when traffic was relatively light. If traffic was heavy and/or conditions bad; we were needed in the TRACON. Actually...tower-certified trainees were the best people to have upstairs when the place was rockin'. They worked in the tower every day and, in significant ways, were better at it than the journeymen.

You see; there is a rhythm to the tower - and any good tower controller knows how to keep time. Scanning the square miles of airfield, monitoring the arrival flows, assessing the departure lineup at each runway, deciding which ones can go immediately, positioning the airplanes, scanning again, seeing the most recent arrivals off the runway and clearing the next departures for takeoff, always scanning...looking for what needs to be done next. Miss a beat in the tower and you've probably missed an opportunity. Keep scanning. Someone could have departed or crossed an active runway or simply have been moved into position to hold. The whole thing makes sitting in front of a radar display almost seem claustrophobic.

After years of working mainly in the TRACON, there were few things more daunting than being sent to the tower during peak traffic periods. Having worked there only sporadically over the previous months and under relatively light demand, I could become overwhelmed quicker than you could say "Hold short!" This, of course, was great entertainment for the trainees who essentially lived in the tower. It was their home court. For me though, it was an away game. Minus the self-assurance and alacrity I once had up there, all I could do was muddle through safely; albeit sluggishly and sloppily. The tower operation was like finding my way around an unfamiliar city during rush hour. I still knew how to drive a car but kept missing the turns and getting lost. The rhythm of tower operations gone; my domain was now the radar room.

The reason for my weak tower performance was the same reason I gave up instrument flying. I had a hard time keeping up with the currency requirements and couldn't do enough instrument flying to feel comfortably proficient. I wisely gave it up before I killed myself. Of course...giving up the tower was not an option.

There are still plenty of "up and down" facilities across the country. From a controller's standpoint they're small enough to remain manageable yet large enough to provide consistently good service to the aviators. I'm sure there are other combined facilities that are taxing the capabilities of their staff every day. People ask; should they be expanded or somehow divided up?

Big Time was nearing a tipping point. Traffic was on the rise. Those who owned and operated the airport were planning to construct another runway. There was talk among Big Time's staff about adding tower and radar positions. Most of us were just trying to keep up with what we already had. To be sure, size matters. Would Big Time be too big to fail...or was it becoming too big not to? And how do you measure success or failure in an ATC facility? That can be a pretty subjective process, depending on where you sit. As a controller, I wanted to feel good about my performance, no matter what position I was assigned to. If I couldn't, if my coworkers couldn't; that had to qualify as a sign the facility was failing.

© NLA Factor, 2010

Overtime - Over Time

2010-03-03T09:11:00.005-05:00

Overtime! Who could resist the allure of getting more money for less time off?

There's no way to sugar coat it. I never liked working overtime. It wasn't just because it stole much of my leisure and robbed me of the time needed to finish a few six-packs. Important as indolence and beer were, there was a lot more to my overtime aversion than that. The five regularly scheduled shifts were usually bad enough but tacking on that sixth day was more painful than putting out a toenail fire with a hammer. Oh I couldn't complain about the extra cash but it was scant compensation for what I went through to earn it.

At Big Time Tower, the difficulty of an overtime shift depended partly on who was in charge. Some supervisors had the crazy idea that a controller on overtime should get relatively easy duty. After all; it was their sixth day on the job. Under this doctrine, I could expect to be assigned menial TRACON duties such as strip stuffing - or even be sent to the tower. There, I'd invoke the gods of gridlock on Ground Control until the supervisor came to his senses. Then I'd quickly be shuffled over to work Clearance Delivery and update the ATIS broadcasts for the remainder of the shift. You've gotta love it when a plan comes together.

Other supervisors shared more practical views on overtime. Their belief was that, since I was making more money than anyone else on duty, I should do the heavy lifting. This often meant working combined positions so that more members of the 'home team' could go to the break room. Or perhaps they'd have me work with their most maladroit and erratic trainee until I was as short on patience as he was on skills. No matter what fiendish plans they had in store, I knew I'd finish the shift with an attitude any axe murderer would be proud to call his own.

But supervisors weren't the only factors to influence the size of my overtime headache. Back in those days, Big Time ran on a three-team schedule. Each team had its own personality and annoying idiosyncrasies. One team, we'll call them the "Law Abiding Citizens," would embrace local and national directives as though they were an addendum to the Ten Commandments. If you practiced a more pragmatic credo toward working airplanes, you'd be in trouble with this team. Standard operating procedures were the safety rails that kept them from falling out of their cribs. Step out of line and they'd look at you incredulously and ask; "What are you doing???" Or they'd sneer and say; "We don't operate like that on our watch." I'd go home from a shift with these guys feeling like I'd just spent eight hours with an IRS auditor.

Another team, the "Carefree Crew," would be known for its free-wheeling style. As long as the pilots didn't squawk or scream and the controllers could keep track of what was going on; all options were on the table. If you came from the "Law Abiding" team, you might be in for eight hours of terror with these guys. Sector boundaries were like the dashed lines in a passing zone. Free-wheelers generally stayed in their lanes unless they saw a way to speed things up by using yours. Oh you'd eventually get a pointout; just so you wouldn't feel totally excluded from the fun. If I made it through the shift without soiling myself, I'd rush home feeling like the clay pigeon that somehow managed to dodge several rounds of buckshot.

Then there was the "Timid Team." They always crept through their shift like cats in a kennel; wary of surprises and uncertain in their approach to handling them. I suspect some of those guys would actually have fallen down stairs or off a cliff in slow motion. And just as over-winding a clock won't make it run any faster, pent up air traffic demand wouldn't make the Timids pick up their pace.

The slightest deviation from the norm would upset the delicate balance of things; sending everyone into a hybridized version of the other two teams. They'd work by the book until the book didn't seem to be working anymore, then improvise frantically until everyone (especially me) lost the picture. At that point; everything would stop until they regained their footing and were able to return to a "book" operation. After eight hours with this team I just felt like breaking something. Maybe I did break something.

No...I never liked working overtime. Over time, the added shifts incrementally attenuated what was already my frail grip on acceptable behavior. If only I had the self discipline to save all the extra lucre earned, I might have been able to afford the psychiatric help that working overtime left me in need of. Oh well.

© NLA Factor, 2010

Terrains, Dopes And Aeroplanes

2010-02-27T12:13:00.003-05:00

The ink was just beginning to dry on my Private Pilot's License when I got the urge to take a long cross-country flight. It was early August, the skies were gentle and I had two week's of annual leave approved. The Cherokee I'd used throughout most of my flight training was available and adventure beckoned us aloft. My wife and I spent hours poring over maps in search of interesting places with nearby airports. We finally agreed we would head eastward, turning down the coast toward Myrtle Beach, Charleston and maybe into Florida. Hence, early one sunny morning, bags packed, we drove out to our local airdrome, loaded the Cherokee up and taxied out. With winds wafting straight down the runway, we rolled off and drifted skyward. This was the halcyon beginning of what would later become a harrowing journey...but this day was perfect. The world at our feet, we set a course for our first fuel stop in Pittsburgh.

Arriving over Myrtle Beach, it was obvious we were going no further. Rain and thick haze ringed the Grand Strand; concealing a line of thunderstorms moving in from the West. Inexperienced as I was, I still knew the safest place to ride out such conditions was on the driver's seat of a rental car. The airplane secured at North Myrtle Beach Airport, we drove off to find a hotel and some dinner.

Did you ever consider the imaginary world depicted in VFR Sectional Charts? All blues, sunshine yellows and magentas; they depict a bucolic realm of Spring green countrysides and beige ridges; belying the darker realities that may await those who lack the capacity to see them. As I blundered blithely along, the VFR Sectional would lull me into a state of aesthetic complacency. But not just yet.

In the coming days, we made two attempts to reach Charleston but were never able to get much further than Georgetown. Sooner or later we'd always encounter the ubiquitous clusters of clouds that seemed to roam the coastal lowlands every day. Too tall to top, too wide to skirt and way too menacing beneath; they'd eventually convince me to just turn around. By day three we gave up trying and decided to enjoy Myrtle Beach for the rest of the week.

By Saturday morning, we were ready to head for home. Our route would take us just west of Wilmington, N.C. and northward toward Gordonsville, Va. From there we'd overfly the Linden VOR and land at Front Royal for fuel. Things went well through most of the flight. Although a bit hazy, it was still decent VFR flying weather at 4,500 feet. My wife got bored with looking out the window and eventually fell asleep.

Then, somewhere near Gordonsville, I took the Cherokee down to 2,500 feet because of some low-hanging cumulus clouds. Visibility was still good as I looked down on the Virginia countryside. The descent was nearly a fatal error but I flew on obliviously. Somewhere south of Linden and tracking inbound, I noticed my flight visibility decreasing somewhat. This didn't concern me though because I still had good visual contact with the ground. If I'd kept better visual contact with my VFR Sectional I might have noticed the rising terrain ahead and the clearly marked minimum safe altitude for this area. But no.

Near as I can tell, I was in the vicinity of Sperryville and Washington (see chart below) when the cloud bases sunk even lower. I descended to stay below but could see ahead that it was getting worse. That's when my situation became copiously clear. I was headed into an area of increasingly high terrain and was having to descend to stay below the clouds. My wife slept on as panic crept in. I glanced left and right; hoping to find a way of turning around. By now I could barely see a mile in any direction so a turn could have simply been a quicker way of running into something. I realized there was only one remaining option. I had to get the Cherokee up to 3,500 feet as quickly as possible.The Linden VOR was still somewhere off the nose of the airplane, along with the mountain range it sat on. Cloud bases were immediately above me. Fragments of my Private Pilot training came back to me as I pushed the throttle forward and pulled back on the yoke. My eye went immediately to the attitude indicator. I was climbing - good. Airspeed was well above a stall - good. Wings remained level - good. Outside the window was nothing but gray - frightening.The altimeter slowly added to my last known altitude. Although I was climbing, I had no idea how close I was to the surrounding terrain. Now above 3,000 feet, I remained in solid IFR conditions. If I made it to Linden and was still in the clouds; what would I do next? I had no clue.

At 3,500 feet I was as yet alive and climbing when I noted station passage over Linden. Front Royal Airport would be somewhere off to the left but I was afraid to descend. Should I continue climbing, in hope of punching through the cloud tops? And how far up would that be? My hands were soaked in sweat. The gray outside the windows grew brighter. Then, in an instant, I was in full sunlight and could see for miles. Just ahead, the airport was clearly visible. I woke my wife up and told her we'd be landing in a few minutes.

There isn't much more to say about this. Every mistake I made was a stupid one and every break I got was a lucky one. I'll never know just how close I came to shredding that airplane as it sliced through the treetops and hit the mountainside. I do know this flight could have ended up as a kind of 'Ground School' for dopes - the kind nobody ever walks away from.

© NLA Factor, 2010

You Can't Win 'Em All

2010-02-24T07:11:00.001-05:00

It was a tricky game, requiring highly skilled players with a well honed sense of timing and an unwavering commitment to win. It was a game where the pieces moving across the field of play actually stood to lose more than the players themselves. Believe it or not, this was also a game where our opponents weren't even direct participants. The game gained national prominence in 1976; the year when PATCO insisted on higher pay for controllers via reclassification by the Civil Service commission. When the CSC denied most reclassification requests, PATCO called for a "work-by-the-book" job action; a proper sounding euphemism for the air traffic slowdown that followed.

The idea behind a slowdown was simple. If users of the air traffic system experienced enough capricious delays and attending financial penalties, they would apply pressure on PATCO's key adversaries - FAA's local, regional and/or national management. Since management, in theory, had no effective means of thwarting a slowdown's unpredictable tactics; they'd eventually have to cede the game to PATCO rather than suffer the incessant complaining and criticizing by the users.

Rules of this game were intentionally vague, which made it an all the more effective way to slow things down. The crux of any slowdown (there were others) was to penalize the flying public in order to achieve the desired result. It was similar to taking hostages and demanding a ransom, except that the likelihood of an FBI sniper team showing up to shoot air traffic controllers was practically nil. Unless, of course, the airlines had their way...

So...just imagine you were a loyal PATCO foot soldier in 1976. Oh sure; you'd be caught up in all the excitement of the Bicentennial celebrations. You would also be watching the reclassification negotiations from afar and becoming frustrated by the apparent lack of progress. Your local union representative puts the word out. PATCO is calling for a slowdown. What did you do? Although there were several variations of the game, we'll examine just one of them here.

If you worked in a radar facility, you might have considered a slowdown variation called 'Spin Em.' A perennial favorite, it was a costly and effective gambit. As I indicated earlier, timing was crucial but I suppose anyone able to throw a bowling ball into the open window of a speeding train could probably play 'Spin Em.' The question was; would they want to?

To play, you needed two controllers, one interfacility airspace boundary and one airplane full of hapless pawns. The airplane must be in handoff status to the receiving controller and approaching the boundary - hopefully at a good clip. If you are the receiving controller you must appear to have simply missed seeing the attempted handoff until such time as the transferring controller starts to turn the flight around - or 'Spin Em.' Transferring controllers would usually call on the handoff line, but only (and this is important), only after turning the aircraft away from the interfacility boundary.

No one ever expected their call to be answered promptly. In fact; it shouldn't have been! Finally, when the aircraft was clearly into a turn away from the boundary, the handoff could be accepted...but never soon enough for the aircraft to avoid having to make a complete 360 degree turn or two. Then, with the artistry and aplomb of a seasoned thespian, the receiving controller added to the stratagem of this scenario by picking up the handoff line and apologizing profusely for not taking the handoff in time.

Time lost, fuel wasted - score one point for Team PATCO.

Repeating the 'Spin Em' ploy arbitrarily though out the day and in dozens of radar facilities across the country would, hopefully, weaken your opponent's will and, perhaps, strengthen PATCO's hand at the bargaining table. User outrage over the minutes added to flight times and increased fuel costs would bring the union closer to winning the game.

Another dimension could be added to this scenario by getting the tower engaged when a round of 'Spin Em' was under way. They'd be told when a particular traffic flow was 'spinning' and be ordered to stop any additional departures headed that way. Even a brief stop could spread havoc right down to the taxiways and send the supervisors into a tizzy. Great fun! Well...not really...not for me anyway.

When the slowdown began, I had just completed my training at Big Time and was anxious to work airplanes. The constraints associated with a job action were as appealing to me as suffocation - but I played along. While a few of the old-timers could thumb their noses at peer pressure, it was nearly impossible for a rookie.

Participation was not always voluntary. Whether you were eager to play or not; the same erratic attributes that made a slowdown effective evoked difficulties for even the most experienced and willing participants. In the 'spin em' scenario, for example, there was no way of knowing which flights would be affected. As you drove your traffic toward the neighboring boundary, you couldn't know whether you'd end up spinning or not. You might actually have several flights, in trail, headed for the same handoff point. Spinning the first flight would probably result in having to spin the others. Things could get out of hand pretty quickly.

PATCO ultimately won this particular game of slowdown. Jerry Ford's administration supported a reclassification but CSC delays held the raise up until January of 1977. Impatient, PATCO told the CSC to hurry or there'd be another job action that would affect the upcoming inauguration of Jimmy Carter.

That was not the final curtain call for slowdowns. PATCO played the slowdown card once more in 1978. The outcome wasn't so good. This time, they wanted an expansion of the FAM Trip program; to include more overseas flights. Three air carriers (Pan Am, TWA & Northwest) balked at the idea, thus becoming specific targets in the ensuing mayhem. John Leyden, PATCO's President at the time, was quoted as saying the airlines "can allow us a free seat or spend some money burning fuel."

This time, the union overplayed their hand. The Air Transport Association brought legal action against PATCO. A federal court found controllers in violation of a standing injunction against slowdowns and ordered the union to pay a hundred thousand of their dues payer's dollars to the ATA. Cash wasn't all that was lost. As the story goes, there were several Congressmen and other high-rollers delayed by the slowdown. Their displeasure cost PATCO a lot more currency... of the political kind.

They said you can't win them all. Or was it "Quit while you're ahead?" I can't remember but I suppose PATCO must have realized they'd need a weapon with more shock and awe than a slowdown the next time.

© NLA Factor, 2010