Factor
Woodstock, VA
Male, 65
My life in ATC began with 4 years Air Force then another 30 years with the Federal Aviation Admin. working tower & radar at some big international airports. I fought in the 1981 war with PATCO, survived the strike and kept a job that was just too exhilarating to walk away from. While there was nothing better than working airplanes, I did move on through several air traffic supervisory and management positions. It was a long, crazy career but I wouldn't trade a moment of it for love or lucre!
Wow! That’s the hardest ‘easy’ question I’ve had yet! Here’s the easy part of my answer. By international agreement, English is the global language of aviation and, with few exceptions, must be used between pilots and controllers, regardless of nationality. Air traffic facilities and pilots around the world must have enough basic English skills to communicate with one another. The reason? There needs to be a language standard so that, no matter where you flew or what your nationality, you and the local ATC folks would be able to communicate. It is also important to understand how critical it is for all pilots on the same control frequency to be able to understand what other pilots are saying. It helps them keep that important “big picture” of what’s going on around them. If, for example, one pilot warns of the severe turbulence he just experienced on final approach; other flights following that aircraft will be interested in knowing so they can be ready for it. But what if that warning was broadcast in Chinese?
The hard part of my answer relates to the quality and clarity of the English used by other nationalities. I worked at a couple of big international airports with lots of foreign air carriers flying in and out. The pilots always spoke English to the best of their ability but that wasn’t always good enough for us to understand. They didn’t always understand us either. Talk about a recipe for disaster! Or, at least, a severe headache!
There are no translators in our ATC facilities. The only time I ever saw a translator position in a control tower was when I was an Air Force controller stationed overseas. It was a joint-use military base where hundreds of student pilots from the host country’s Air Force learned to fly high performance fighter jets. They were controlled by ATC personnel also from their host country, in their own language. We controlled all U. S. and other English speaking flights. The translator was supposed to keep us informed of what the other guys were up to and vice versa. It was a fiasco. I attribute many of my gray hairs to those days. If interested, check my Blog (the link is in my profile above) for an entry from March of 2010 titled “Desolation Tower.” You’ll see what I mean.
Thanks for tuning in!
Factor
Share Answer: 
Hi Kayla. I’m glad you are enjoying my Jobstr Q&A. How interesting this forum is depends largely on the quality of questions received. I’ve been lucky so far and your question is another great one! While I can’t speak for all controllers, I can tell you that work habits and attitudes followed me and many of my coworkers out the door after each shift (usually to our favorite watering hole, then home).
The hyper-vigilance you mention is an essential on-the-job skill that controllers must master if they are to succeed. We refer to it as “scanning” or “situational awareness.” Without it; we can make a mess of things pretty quickly! Controllers must be able to focus on several immediate situations simultaneously and resolve them safely. At the same time, they must anticipate what will need to be done within the next few minutes and come up with a plan. The best controllers not only handler their own traffic but are able to keep an eye and ear on the other controllers working around them. You can even learn to read changes in the pace and pitch of a coworker’s voice that indicate trouble. ATC is a ‘team sport’ and the ability to recognize when a teammate needs or will need help is the first step in providing assistance. This is a great skill to bring along into those “other aspects” of life!
Controllers are generally an impatient bunch. Impatience is another survival skill at work and you draw from it so often that it eventually starts seeping into your personal life. If you were already the impatient type going in, ATC work will amplify the trait over time. Controllers rely on near instant compliance with their instructions to make the overall traffic picture work. A time lag in pilot compliance or from a need to repeat instructions can have a ripple effect; especially when the controller is very busy and has already accounted for every second of the next few minutes. We get impatient knowing that a beautiful plan is fragile and can fall apart with one, seemingly insignificant delay or distraction. However, the rest of life is rarely so urgent.
Although impatience and a constant sense of urgency keep things moving at work, they are not necessarily good things at home. Fortunately, the further I got from ATC after retiring, the more patience I was able to regain. On the other hand, heightened vigilance and situational awareness are always useful. They were post-ATC keepers and I would recommend them to anyone; both on and off the job.
Thanks for writing!
Factor
Share Answer: 
That’s a fair question but I’ll have to give you a kind of unfair answer in response. I do hold a commercial pilot license so, if I absolutely had to, I’d give it my best shot! Of course success or failure would depend heavily on what kind of plane it was and the destination weather conditions! I’d be more likely to succeed in a smaller plane during clear weather conditions. But if I was sitting at the controls of a B-747 and the weather was horrible? Well . . .better hope everyone else on board had their affairs in order!
You never know what you’re capable of though! Several years ago, as a newly hired controller, I heard something that taught me a lot about hidden potential. I was working in the tower one afternoon, when we all heard an obviously panicked woman calling on the emergency frequency. She was the only passenger in a small, twin engine plane. The pilot had suddenly gone unconscious. Terrified, she didn’t know what to do. A controller who was also a licensed pilot began talking to her. He took her calmly, step by step, through all the things she’d need to know to land the airplane. Meanwhile, other controllers radar identified the plane. The guy talking to her explained how to turn the airplane and maintain altitude.
I’ll make a long story short. With the controller’s help, she flew the plane to the nearest airport and landed safely – having never piloted a plane before in her life. It wasn’t a pretty landing but as they say; "any landing you can walk away from is a good one!"
It was determined that the pilot had actually died during the flight.
Thanks for writing!
Factor
Share Answer: 
This is an important question. I’ll attempt to answer it with callous objectivity - tainted by a sprinkling of subjective sentiments and a smidgen of erratic rationale. Always the controller.
The Country actually needs more controllers at the busiest FAA facilities and fewer to none at the less active locations. I would suggest a redistribution of resources except for the fact that controllers from the closing towers are not FAA employees. They work for private air traffic control services under contract to the FAA; the same FAA who pays them around a half million of our tax dollars per year, per tower. The airports these contract controllers work at did not meet the threshold in air traffic volume to justify an FAA tower. While I hate to see anyone lose their job; I’d say that closing these towers is “a healthy trimming of fat.” They are a legacy of better times.
The “scary reduction in safety” card is being played mainly for political purposes. One Congressman stated; “Closing control towers is equivalent to removing stop lights and stop signs from our roads...” This is not only a bad analogy but isn’t even amusing hyperbole. Closing those towers will be more like adding a few small speed bumps to air traffic operations. While some operations at these airports may be slowed down a bit; safety won’t be compromised. I’ll note here that all pilots are trained in how to conduct flight operations at uncontrolled (no tower) airports. Controllers are too. I worked at two busy radar facilities that had control jurisdiction over dozens of towerless airfields. Operations were conducted efficiently and with no derogation of safety.
Closures are slated to occur at low density airports with less than 150,000 takeoffs and landings per year. Doing the math; that amounts to a little over 400 aircraft movements in a 16 hour day (assuming no midnight shift) or about 25 takeoffs and landings per hour. In comparison, Atlanta Hartsfield Airport averages around 2,500 operations a day. If airport operators, users and other interested parties feel strongly enough about keeping their particular tower open, I suspect they could approach their State and/or local government about funding it.
Cheers,
Factor
Share Answer: 
Stand-Up Comedian
What types of crowds are the worst for you to to perform for?
Professional Bull Rider
Have you been seriously injured while bull-riding?
Waitress
What types of customers are the worst tippers?
Blair, I am so glad to finally hear from you! Your first question gives me the chance to tell Jobstr readers all over the world just how badly I suck at math. It’s true. It took me months to learn that milk plus cereal equals breakfast! Learning algebra, like learning to play a musical instrument, may be useful in your future and you should learn both. However, neither will do you much good as an air traffic controller.
Controllers must employ several skills that are hard to teach in schools. They must be able to think on their feet, have excellent short term memory and the ability to concentrate in the middle of a dozen distractions. They need to be able to assess situations and know how they will evolve over time. Keep in mind; controllers are dealing with machines that travel at hundreds of miles per hour. Take a snapshot now but you can bet the picture will have changed dramatically in two or three minutes. Understanding how it will change helps controllers in their planning. It’s never enough to simply keep up with the traffic. You need to stay way ahead of it. Oh, and the ability to work well with others and keep calm under pressure are big assets!
There is also plenty of book learning involved. Making it through ATC school is similar to learning another Country’s language and the laws of their land. It was bewildering to me at first. Learning the language of aviation, its many rules and occasional exceptions took time and I spent a lot of that time memorizing things. By the time controllers actually begin to work with live traffic, their heads are packed with national ATC rules and regulations, aviation weather, aircraft flight characteristics, plus volumes of information specific to the site where they’re working.
It’s a complex career field that is constantly evolving and improving. Rarely boring, the job is different every day. To me, it is the best job there is! Here’s a bonus. Become a professional air traffic controller and you can still learn to fly airplanes on your own time. I did and was much better for it. Flying is almost as much fun as ATC and it broadens your understanding of the aviation community.
I wish you all the best Blair and hope you achieve your goals! Let me know how it works out.
Cheers,
Factor
Share Answer: 
Stories I can share? Hmm. I suspect this forum is rated “G” or, at best, “PG-13” so sharing the craziest stories from my Air Force days might get me thrown off “Jobstr!”. There are a lot of interesting memories though; several of which you can find on my blog (click the link on my Profile above). Once there, search the “Tags” section for “Desolia” and click on it. You’ll find three blog entries about my time at an overseas Air Base I’ve named “Desolation” to, errr, protect the innocent. My tour of duty there definitely ranked high among the crazier times.
Thanks for writing!
Share Answer: 
Thanks for your questions! I was still onboard when Uberlingen happened. As you can imagine, controllers are always fascinated by aviation accidents – especially those involving air traffic control. That’s why you’d find copies of the latest National Transportation Safety Board accident reports in many controller break rooms. We’d talk about each accident; attempting to reconstruct the events and decisions leading up to it in a way that might change the outcome. Sometimes 15 or 20 minutes of second guessing and saying things like “I sure wouldn’t have done anything that stupid!” or “Why didn’t they do (whatever)?” had the effect of distancing us from the reality that it could have happened here.
Midair collisions, or “aluminum showers” as we called them, are a controller’s worst nightmare. Uberlingen was the embodiment of that nightmare. Sure, there were contributing factors such as how the flight crews should have reacted to their TCAS (collision avoidance) alerts, contrary instructions from the controller, etc. To us though, the real issue was having two aircraft on converging courses, at the same altitude. That’s a bad setup and one that should be avoided whenever possible. If unavoidable, it must be monitored continuously to ensure that one plane either passes well ahead of, or behind the other. And if the controller becomes distracted by other duties? That’s how the nightmare begins.
The fact that there were two controllers on duty but one was sleeping made us squirm in our seats. The practice of allowing one controller to sleep for the first half of a midnight shift then swap with whoever worked that half was common practice at many facilities.
As to lessons learned? Not much. I already mentioned the bad setup of two converging flights at the same altitude. In converging situations, the best controllers always try to build in some altitude separation. It’ll save the day if they become distracted. The fact there were two controllers on duty but one was absent from the control room reminded me of my early years in ATC. It seemed safe after midnight, when there was very little air traffic but there’s no doubt an extra set of eyes can prevent a catastrophe.
I doubt there were any new training or procedural initiatives taken because of this accident. For controllers, there were existing directives and good operating practices already in place that would have covered a Uberlingen type situation.
Thanks for the interesting questions!
Factor
Share Answer: 
-OR-
Login with Facebook (max 20 characters - letters, numbers, and underscores only. Note that your username is private, and you have the option to choose an alias when asking questions or hosting a Q&A.)
(A valid e-mail address is required. Your e-mail will not be shared with anyone.)
(min 5 characters)
By checking this box, you acknowledge that you have read and agree to Jobstr.com’s Terms and Privacy Policy.
-OR-
Register with Facebook(Don't worry: you'll be able to choose an alias when asking questions or hosting a Q&A.)
Browse Jobs
Host a Q&A
Search
Submit Your Question
Host a Q&A
Last 7
