Thursday, April 14, 2011

Sleeping ATC: Yeah, That'll Fix the Problem!

First comes the ritual firing "resignation to spend more time with the family:
The official in charge of air traffic controllers for the Federal Aviation Administration resigned Thursday after a series of episodes in which controllers across the country slept as airplanes landed.

Henry P. Krakowski, the chief operating officer of the F.A.A.’s Air Traffic Organization, tendered his resignation one day after the agency changed its policy of having a single air traffic controller on duty at each of 27 airports across the country overnight. Each of those will now have at least two controllers at night.
If you have read any of the ATC blogs over the last few years, two things will come as no surprise to you.

First, the FAA has relationships with its controllers that are about as friendly as those between the Germans and the French Resistance in 1943.

Second, the FAA has cut every position that it can. So in places where they have a 24/7 control tower and yet very little traffic overnight, they put one controller on duty. I'm pretty certain that they don't allow that controller to read novels, surf the Internet or watch TV.

So assume, for the sake of argument, that you have the 11PM to 7AM shift in a tower that, between midnight and 5AM, may see three or four airplanes come in. When nothing is going on, you can't do anything beyond look out the windows.

What do you think is going to happen? The controller is going to fall asleep.

By the way, let's get the "zOMG!!!1!!!!, the controller was asleep!!!1!" bullshit. Most airports in this country don't even have towers and, given the low amount of traffic where the controller was snoozing, I wonder if the better choice would be to just shut down the tower for the overnight shift.

That's done at a lot of smaller airports with towers. The tower frequency becomes the local "common traffic advisory frequency". Pilots would just say something like "Reno Traffic, Citation ten miles east, landing Reno" and then, at each step in the approach and landing, they'd announce their position. The runway lights would be tied into the radio; seven quick clicks of the microphone key would turn them on for fifteen minutes.

Adding a controller may be an answer. So is shutting down the tower overnight.

3 comments:

  1. Just as planes can turn on the runway lights from the cockpit, why not enable them to set off the alarm clock next to the controller? Problem solved everybody can go back to short changing ATC.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You're absolutely right. We're not allowed to do anything at all while we're in the radar room or tower cab.

    No:

    * Music via mp3 players or radio
    * Internet surfing
    * Talking on or use of a cell phone
    * Outside reading materials
    * IPad or other electronic devices such as a Kindle or Nook
    * Outside hobbies (like, say, a guitar)
    * Movie watching on a DVD player or laptop
    * Handheld video games

    Nothing at all to keep your mind stimulated.

    I understand the need for minimizing distractions when there's a lot going on and a lot of traffic to work. But, without them, it's a heck of a lot harder to keep focused when the traffic dies away.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Could be wrong here but I don't think anyone has ever accused bureaucrats of thinking all the way through a multi-step, multi-outcome problem. I'm sure somewhere this has been done but from the output of all the bureaucratic organizations I've seen, not so much.

    ReplyDelete

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