The Persistence Of Memory

Those who've been following this Blog understand it's mostly about memories. In the beginning, I was afraid I'd forget the many things that happened before I could capture them in print. You know, before too much time passed. I now understand those memories are persistent, palpable and perpetual. They're always here with me. I can even feel them. Salvador Dali illustrated it pretty well in his masterpiece "The Persistence of Memory." With apologies to Salvador, I flew an airplane into his painting because, to me, the memories of air traffic have a persistence all their own.

Time, on the other hand, is of no real significance. It comes and goes; preceding each passing second and concurrently vanishing; leaving us with a "now" that is just too short to measure. Thankfully, it does leave those persistent memories of ours behind; scattered across the panorama of our lives.   

As to my life, it seems I spent most of it diligently winding clocks and watches, setting alarms or trying to correct the time if it was running fast or slow. According to the clock; I usually ended up being too early or too late anyway. It took a while but I finally figured out that I shouldn't even bother trying to set, sway, speed or slow the hands of time. The Universe calibrated my clock, then synchronized it to my life - and life isn't measured by hours and minutes. It's measured by events and those events always happen precisely when they're supposed to; which could be described as "right on time." I may never have believed my entire life happened on schedule - but it did. Take the early Seventies for example . . .

Life was moving at the speed of continental drift since my departure from military service. My application for an ATC position, eagerly and optimistically submitted, had apparently vanished into some minor FAA functionary's file drawer. I found an odd assortment of menial jobs to keep me busy. If you're interested, they're described somewhere in the back end of this blog. The work kept me afloat financially but my spirit was being swamped by waves of anxiety. I knew it was crazy but whenever my travels took me past the local airport, I'd glare at the control tower,  mutter a few expletives and shake my head. Frustration brought me to a point where I was seriously considering the idea of going back into the Air Force - just so I could work airplanes again. Looking back on life, I have to love that and every other mistake I almost made.

Living high on the extravagances that a minimum wage income allows, I moved into an affordable efficiency apartment on the north side of town. Although the classified ad called it an "efficiency," I referred to it as the "deficiency." There were so many deficiencies that I lost count half way through the list of health violations. Small, slightly smelly and unnecessarily outdated; it was the kind of apartment where police might one day discover 200 cats and a desiccated corpse. It was affordable though - as long as I stuck to my diet of deviled ham and bananas. I worked onward but could never quite reach my future.

Years passed. In the long run, the FAA did make me a job offer. Ironically, I had to think twice about accepting. By then, I'd worked myself into a pretty well paying and enjoyable job. I even had a better apartment! Going with the Feds would mean an initial (and substantial) decrease in pay. There was also a requisite relocation in the deal. The move would put me in an expensive metropolitan area that I couldn't possibly afford on a GS-7's salary. The offer was a "take it or leave it" deal though. I had one week to respond. That wasn't much time but it didn't really matter. My decision was preordained, so naturally I had to accept. There was simply no choice because, by the end of my Air Force career, air traffic control had become a vital organ that I couldn't live for long without.

I remember the subsequent months being a blur. The only time that mattered was my training time. Then, in nothing but an eight month instant, I found myself checked out through all tower positions and working on my radar certifications. Two years from that first foot in the door, I was fully certified at Big Time. Now that wasn't so hard, was it? Looking back, I'd say no. But back then? Looking ahead was intimidating.

It wasn't long before my first round of mids as a journeyman was scheduled. Trainees were always sent to the tower on mid shifts. But now, as a full performance controller, I could pull TRACON duty. Driving in to work, I knew what I would find when I got there. After all, I'd been home all evening, watching the lightning and listening to the din of heavy rain on the roof. I knew the crew on duty was dealing with a mess and that there'd be plenty left for me and my teammates to clean up when we arrived.

Mids, for me, usually began with a touch of circadian sleep disorder. Failing in my attempt to nap that afternoon, I would arrive at work a little out of sorts, off-balance and unshaven. By 10:45, traffic would normally be light and most of the radar sectors combined at two or three positions. Not tonight though. Walking into the TRACON I saw a Supervisor tearing strips off the printer and running them to the sectors. There were five still open and all were busy. Three of the evening shift guys would be held over for a couple hours to help us put a lid on the madness.

My mid shift teammate relieved both departure sectors and combined them into one. I was told to relieve the Final controller and let her go home. Airplanes that had been delayed at their departure points, some of them thousands of miles from Big Time, were only now beginning to show up at our arrival fixes. It was exciting. The approach controllers talked non-stop and their lines of planes stretched more than 40 miles from the airport. Radar vectors were flying in every direction. At least the bad weather had moved out and the field was VFR for the first time since that morning. After a brief consultation with the tower, I tried cutting some downwind traffic in tight on visual approaches. The first two worked nicely so I told the approach guys to start tightening up the arrival sequence. Everything was going well. The departure backlog was gone by 1:00 AM. Our holdovers from the evening shift left at 2:00 but the persistence of air traffic continued till after 3:00. The mid-shift Supervisor sat silently at his desk; counting strips, calculating the delays and catching up on log entries. In the ensuing years, there would be many more such mid shifts.

In sharp contrast with the FAA; I remember mid shifts in the Air Force being abnormally quiet. Still in the early stages of learning how impossible it was for me to sleep during the day; I'd lumber up the tower steps with my mid shift teammate, moving like a reanimated cadaver. Where I was stationed; most of the military air traffic was down for the night before 11:00 PM, so we'd be greeted by a bored looking NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge) who'd dutifully mutter his way through a review of the tower's daily log. I would dutifully nod with feigned interest in what he was saying. He and his evening shift crew would then rush down the steps as though the fire alarm had just sounded. In a moment, my partner Vince and I would be left in the complete silence of an empty tower cab, overlooking an empty runway. It was on such a night that a most incredible thing happened. My memory of it hangs on like the melted clock on Dali's tree limb.

By 3:00 AM, each of us had pretty well covered what we knew of the latest Squadron gossip and were settling into our chairs, feet up on the console, for a little quiet time (sleep). A light appeared across the airfield, just above the the horizon. It was moving slowly in a northerly direction; almost parallel to the runway and definitely inside our Control Zone. Certain it was a plane without a working transmitter; we simultaneously hailed it on both UHF and VHF emergency frequencies while signaling "Cleared to land" with the tower's light gun. As the craft continued north, we could see there were actually several lights glimmering; like the windows of an airliner's fuselage. But unlike the lights of an aircraft, these were indistinct; almost ethereal. They glowed like pale blue neon.

Curious about any sound this thing might be making, Vince dashed down the first flight of steps and out onto the catwalk. I called the radar unit. Did they see a target just Northeast of the field and moving North? I expected a wise-ass comment about flying saucers in the traffic pattern and I wasn't disappointed. Of course, the radar guys saw nothing on their scopes. After listening to the requisite dose of sarcasm and good-natured ridicule; I was told to leave them the hell alone and go back to sleep. Vince returned to report the night outside was as quiet as a crypt. None of the jet or propeller noise we were used to hearing. Nothing. The strange lights soon vanished over the northern horizon.

Me and Vince had an odd feeling about what had just happened. I picked up a phone and dialed the Watch Desk at our local Center. I was afraid that telling this story to anyone else was a mistake but decided it was worth the risk for a chance to have it corroborated.  The Supervisor, clearly much older and vastly more experienced than me, listened to my story. I could tell he was writing things down and figured he was making notes for a future discussion with our Squadron Commander. I'd be in trouble for sure. But no. He said my description of the object, its low altitude, slow speed and direction of flight matched reports some of his controllers had received from pilots flying across the region. Several people claimed to have spotted it but no one ever saw a radar image.

I remember watching the sunrise that morning, making a fresh pot of coffee for the day shift crew and talking to Vince about what we should do. The Air Force had a reporting program in place at the time. Named "Project Blue Book," it was a way of officially documenting what may have been a UFO sighting. Vince and I concluded there would be no report and no further mention of the incident to anyone; especially the incoming day shift guys. Along with the wry ribbing, we'd likely be labeled as lunatics by the Squadron brass; thus hobbling our chances of ever seeing another promotion. It was decided that what we saw that night must surely have been a weather balloon or another of those spontaneous outbreaks of swamp gas. We just left the tower, lingered over breakfast then moved on to the first open bar we could find. By the third round of beers, we were ready to admit what we'd really seen - but only to each other.

Another mid shift sticks in my memory - one clear and very cold night in the 1970s. A Center controller's urgent sounding voice came across the handoff line. "Hey Big Time, you talking to that guy twenty east of MALYN squawking 4543 at eleven thousand?" It was nearly 5:00 AM and for the last hour or so I'd only been talking to myself.  I saw the target he referred to though, so I pushed the handoff line button and responded. The center controller said he'd been working the plane, a Piper Navajo, for the last 45 minutes but had recently lost radio contact. It was also way off it's planned route, now about 70 miles off course and headed toward some very unfriendly terrain. After checking with the other sectors, it was clear the pilot wasn't talking to anyone at the Center. The controller was now calling all towers and approach controls along the aircraft's flight path. It seemed no one was talking to the Navajo, which was still holding its last assigned altitude of eleven thousand feet. The situation would change but as we know; change isn't always a good thing.

I called the tower and, between us, we transmitted on every frequency we had. No joy. The plane flew on and soon left my radar coverage. It wasn't till nearly 7:00 AM that the Center sector called and told me the plane eventually began losing altitude then vanished from his radar screen. Wreckage was never found and we were left with our theories about what happened. The most plausible one was that the pilot had dozed off - his plane eventually running out of fuel. With luck, he died in his sleep. This incident lodged itself in my memory like a fishhook and became a shot of adrenalin whenever I felt myself getting sleepy on mid-shifts or long drives.

I have so many many memories; some good and others, well, not so good. They don't go away though. They accumulate over a long career and, like my old record collection, become disorganized and eventually take up a lot of space. I've put some of them away in storage but still retrieve them now and then for my own enjoyment. In a way, memories are a lot like my old records. They can both be played over and over again. Someone or something just needs to push the right buttons. Case in point; I recently discovered one of my old teammates from the Big Time days, on a social media site. That pushed some long unused buttons and the memories started playing immediately. Like me; this guy was brutally insane in those days. We shared secrets and experienced many control room tantrums, terrors and temptations together. The memories of them persist, even after all this time.

Time passes. I don't even care where it goes. It takes nothing of mine when it leaves but it leaves me with plenty. Those persistent memories; they stay like my skin color. I don't know exactly where each one is at the moment but, like my old Big Time buddy, I'll eventually find them again. 

© NLA Factor, 2013

Summertime

It was Summertime but sometimes the livin' wasn't so easy; especially when I was working the swing-shift. Although seasonal traffic increases were among our daily expectations, thunderstorms were not as predictable. Convective weather often moved in and rained on our parade quicker than you could say; "Wind shear alert."

West Arrival fix - 4:15 PM

If you happened to be in the TRACON around 4:00 PM on a Summer afternoon, you might see the trouble building. Always spoiling for a fight, Pete would already be arguing with The Command Center about arrival restrictions. He knew what we'd need when the impact of those little green specks of precipitation appearing on our radar was fully realized. At the moment, they were relatively innocuous little storm cells but they'd soon begin expanding upward and outward, powered by strong convective currents rising from the overheated landscape. In the time it took for a coffee break, those things could burgeon into 40,000 foot high behemoths that stormed across the sky, spawning severe vertical winds, spitting out lightning and striking fear in all who flew near. They didn't do much for a controller's peace of mind either. Thunderstorms. The worst of them usually formed in the West/Northwest quadrant of our airspace ~ right in the middle of a couple departure routes. It's also where two of Big Time's most active arrival fixes were located. From there, everyone would be taking vectors to one of the approaches in use. Or maybe not.

West arrival fix - 4:30 PM

It was only a matter of time before pilots started refusing the controller's heading assignments. They would either ask for deviations or simply turning on their own and tell us as they did it. For Arrival controllers with increasingly limited lateral and vertical airspace, the situation could become unmanageable pretty quickly. When their airplanes started deviating into adjacent sectors; a whole new set of problems ensued. Someone had to warn the affected controller/s, who were probably dealing with their own weather-related issues. Those guys, who now saw additional traffic being forced into their airspace, had to adjust their own traffic flows to accommodate the unplanned intrusions. Everyone began getting pissed off at each other. Obviously the weather was nobody's fault and neither were the deviations ~ but blaming the guy working an adjacent sector was some kind of convoluted stress relief. A rousing chorus of "Get that fuckin' airplane outa my airspace!" was an appropriate segue to stopping Big Time departures and/or shutting off the arrivals until order was restored.

As weather conditions and controller patience deteriorated, the TRACON became a bad place to be. Phones were ringing at every console. Controllers were shouting at each other or into handoff lines while Supervisors dashed from sector to sector in an attempt to keep anything troublesome or tragic from happening. Watching it all, you'd have thought this was the first thunderstorm we ever had to deal with. For some of us ~ it was.

When my team was on duty, I could see the more subtle signs of tension among those I knew so well. Freddy would stare, unblinking, at his radar display. His left elbow on the console; he would massage his forehead while issuing control instructions in a monotone voice. In his right hand was a dead cigarette butt that he kept tapping and swirling on his ashtray. Chip pumped his left leg up and down, blurting out a few carefully conceived control instructions. At some point, he'd abruptly stand up, as if to get a better view of the traffic. He'd mutter to himself, glance around to see if anyone was watching, then sit back down to work more airplanes. Visibly annoyed, Dick would transmit to a flight, un-key his microphone and, throwing both hands out toward the radar scope, exclaim something like; "Goddamnit Captain! How many times do I have to tell you?" Or ~  "I wish these fuckin' clowns would just stay home when it rains!" Whatever he said; it was loud and loaded with expletives. A moment later he'd key his radio again and make a very calm, coherent transmission. We all had our own peculiar ways of handling the tension. The trick was to make bedlam sound to the pilots like a slow Summertime day in utopia. You know . . . when the fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high.

But really? Out on the airport, departure queues grew long at the runways until a decision was finally made to keep most of them on the ramps. Holding patterns would begin filling with Big Time's arrivals; both at the fringes of our airspace and hundreds of miles away in the ARTCC's sectors. Eventually, the backward tumbling dominoes would fall onto some distant departure points, where pilots were told they couldn't even leave the gate if they were going to Big Time. But for now, unless it became unbearably ugly at the airport, the tower would continue flushing departures out until either the next one in line refused to takeoff or the TRACON hollered "Stop!" Arrivals would continue to be threaded, a few at a time, through gaps in the storm until the gaps closed up.

Tower controllers stood watching bolts of lightning strike the city skyline as airport visibility gradually decreased. Wind directions oscillated and speeds picked up. Pilots were beginning to report turbulence and occasional tailwinds on final. Down in the radar room, controllers could barely hear the incessant rumble of thunder over the sound of our antique air handling system, as it exchanged the stink of cigarette smoke and body odor for the reek of jet exhaust from the ramp. The symphony of swearing and sarcasm kept cadence with everyone's struggle to reorder the entropy in their sector. 

Meanwhile, in an airline cockpit, some forty miles out and several thousand feet up - each transmission emanating from Big Time Approach sounded incredibly normal. It had to. Our "livin' is easy" voices rarely revealed the prevailing control room chaos. You couldn't tell that everyone was running on anxiety, anger and adrenalin. Relying heavily on experience and hoping for the best from our equipment, we were uneasy, unsure and worried. Some controllers would became gruff with Supervisors, who quickly returned the fire ~ even as they stepped in to assist. It was an exhausting environment that persisted until the bad weather either dissipated or moved on.

So, where was I in this messy milieu?  I could have been on Ground Control. There, I'd be fiddling with my felt-tip marker and fielding questions from the crowded taxiways about when departures would resume. In time, a voice from the middle of one queue would announce he had to return to the gate for fuel. He'd have to wait till the line ahead inched along to the next intersection. 

Or I might have been stuck on Flight data/Clearance Delivery. In that case, I was probably working on reroute requests. Damn! Entering new or amended flight plans and coordinating them with the Center usually required more time than it took for the weather to move. Right about the time a reroute was fully coordinated, the pilot's original route might have reopened. If so, the alternate route I had just worked on for 30 minutes (with another bunch of frazzled, pissed off controllers) would now, if taken, lead an airplane directly into the eye of the beast. Plan "C" would be to re-coordinate the pilot's original route. I think my original route into insanity might have started here. All in all, it was more fun than boils on the balls.  

If you had to be in the tower, the best place to work was Local Control. With so many constraints in the system, very few planes were flying in and out. Soon, nothing would be moving but Freddy's cigarette butt and Chip's left leg. As the worst of the storm passed over the airfield, the low clouds and heavy rain made it look like nightfall at 6:00 PM. We'd all sit, staring out into the murk, listening to the shrieking wind and worrying over what sounded like gravel being flung against the windows. 

If I was down in the radar room, I was probably concealing my concerns as best I could - caught up in the moment like everyone else. Maybe the last two airplanes to attempt an approach refused to go any further than the outer marker. Although not uncommon, it was bad news for arrival controllers who probably had a few more airplanes on vectors toward the field. They'd quickly pass the word back to all Center sectors that fed us traffic. There might already be long lines of Big Time arrivals stretching across several states, so the probability of enroute holding was high. The weather would eventually rage across the airfield and bring everything to a halt. We couldn't hear the thunder down in the radar room but could sure feel the floor shaking and see the alphanumerics on our radar displays begin to blink. Emotionally, we'd be shitting ourselves. We all knew that if lightning struck the radar antenna or radio equipment, our entire operation would go down the toilet.

My earliest experiences in the TRACON with this kind of weather were when I was certified only on the Departure sectors. They were usually fun to work ~ unless the weather was like this. To use a sports analogy, I always thought of Departure Control as a kind of "Pitching" position. We were pitching Big Time's departures against another team; that being the enroute Center. If Big Time was dealing with the challenges of convective weather ~ the Center was too. Not knowing much about what was going on in their sectors, there was always the strain of wondering if they'd take our handoffs or, metaphorically speaking, bat them right back at us. Communications between facilities wasn't always so good and, quite often, the first sign of trouble was a refused handoff. 

Once planes left the airport, all a Departure controller could do was provide the spacing they requested, get the handoffs going, then hope for the best. This, as opposed to Big Time's arrival sectors. They were "Catchers" who were expected to accept handoffs from the Center. It was less risky for them because the arrival controllers had a pretty good idea whether they'd be able to get their airplanes through our airspace and onto the airport. But the Center controllers who had all those Big Time arrivals lined up and speeding toward our boundary? Oh, they were probably biting their nails, just like I was, in my little corner of the TRACON. They were pitching at us, and if Big Time "shut the door" on them ~ their traffic picture might go flying apart like a house of cards in a hurricane.

Handoff lines crackled constantly. It could drive you nuts. Under normal circumstances, handoffs were automated and therefore needed little to no actual voice communication between controllers. Convective weather temporarily removed "normal" from our lexicon. Under these conditions, nearly all the handoffs were accompanied by some anxious dialogue on the landlines. 

The suspense that filled the space between initiating and completing a handoff was just one of many factors that contributed to the stress of a stormy shift. There was an ever increasing aura of tension in the TRACON that eventually got thicker than the cigarette smoke. Noise levels ranged from fortissimo to frenzied. Unreliable equipment, uptight controllers, angry Supervisors and apprehensive pilots all contributed to the general aura of angst. It didn't matter where you worked. Whether it was in the Center, Terminal or a cockpit ~ everyone had a long, hard fight getting to the end of their workday. But that wasn't always where it ended. 

Many of the delayed flights, both in and out, didn't start moving till around midnight. The airport could become uncharacteristically busy at 1:00 AM. That being the case, a few of the evening shift controllers were held over for a couple of hours to help the mid-shift crew (two in the tower, two in the TRACON) clean up the mess. After a full shift of what felt like shingles on steroids, a little overtime money wasn't fair compensation for the added agony. The guys would stay though; knowing the mid-shift staff wouldn't be sufficient to handle all that pent up demand. When our carpool finally hit the long road home, we were completely wound down ~ like clocks that had run out of time. Somehow though, we all had enough energy left to relive many of the horrifying highlights of the shift through anecdotes, exaggerations, criticisms and complaints. It made us feel a little better. And up ahead was our favorite bar. That always made us feel a lot better. 

So it was Summertime and the livin' was queasy. It sure wasn't the Ella Fitzgerald, sultry swing of a Summertime that rocked my hammock. Not this one. This one was more of a Janis Joplin, shrieking, soulful kind of Summertime that shook my nerves and scared me shitless.

© NLA Factor, 2012