Very nice article.. I am sure it brings back memories for Al :) BAHA Fan of all the controllers out there doing a great job. ----- Original Message ---- From: Bill Hough <psa188@xxxxxxxx> To: AIRLINE@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Friday, December 16, 2005 10:43:19 AM Subject: SFGate: Tower of power/SFO air traffic controllers' job is plane balletic as they coordinate takeoffs and landings =20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SFGate. The original article can be found on SFGate.com here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=3D/c/a/2005/12/16/PNG4PG56R9= 1.DTL --------------------------------------------------------------------- Friday, December 16, 2005 (SF Chronicle) Tower of power/SFO air traffic controllers' job is plane balletic as they c= oordinate takeoffs and landings Janet Somers, Special to The Chronicle All seemed relaxed on a recent morning at San Francisco International Airport's "cab," the octagonal room with the shaded windows at the top of the tower where air traffic controllers do their jobs. Light rock music emanated softly from a boom box, and the six controllers on duty seemed to be just hanging out. Possibly, they were bored: The job has been described as "hours of pure boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror." Radar screens blinked. A few of the controllers paced slowly, tethered to headsets; some joked around. Thousands of lives depend upon the ability of these individuals to do their jobs and stay cool under pressure. The 1999 film "Pushing Tin," with Billy Bob Thornton, depicted air controllers who worked in terminal radar approach control (TRACON) facilities, cavernous, windowless buildings where hundreds of air-traffic controllers handle planes beyond a control tower's jurisdiction, as competitive stressed-out characters who suffer nervous breakdowns and throw themselves in the wakes of moving planes. But on this foggy day, the cozy, 20-by-20-foot tower at SFO seems to be nothing like that. It is a room with a view and a staff of about 30 controllers, six to eight of them on duty at a time. All are veteran controllers, and some have worked at the tower for a decade or more. Cindi Trahan, 47, has been a controller for 23 years. Davi Howard has been at the job for 27 years, starting at age 20 in the Air Force. Dave Caldwell and tower supervisor Rolf Knaack, in addition to years as controllers in the military and elsewhere, have worked together at the SFO tower for 16 years. "It's like a family," Caldwell said. On this particular morning, as on many others, fog erased the view and limited the number of takeoffs and arrivals. "It's pretty quiet right now," Knaack said. "We had the Honolulu departure push, and then the departures lightened up. After around 9:30, it gets heavier on the arrivals." Knaack answered a telephone call from the Norcal TRACON in Sacramento, wrote down the call signs of three incoming aircraft that were low on fuel and gave the list to Howard, who was working the radar coordinator position (the controllers swap positions frequently during their eight-hour shifts). Part of the radar coordinator's job is to manage arriving planes, and Howard knew the planes would require special treatment: no planes in front of them and no circling. If necessary, he would re-sequence other aircraft to accommodate them. "We get the other pilots on board with the situation," he explained later. Standing to the left of the other controllers, Keith Kizziar, working the clearance delivery position, was printing out 1-by-8-inch strips of thick, off-white paper called flight-progress strips, each of which bore a barcode, a departing airplane's call sign, destination, route, altitude and speed. He cleared the pilots to their destinations, assigned them "squawk codes" -- transponder codes that make the planes identifiable on radar -- and slid the glossy slips along the console to Keith Wahamaki on his right, working ground control. Wahamaki gave the pilots taxi instructions, time-stamped the strips and passed them to Howard, who scanned the barcodes over to TRACON and waited for departure releases. Finally, Trahan, working the local control position, cleared the pilots for takeoff, time-stamped their strips again, resolved any potential collisions with nearby aircraft and handed the planes off to TRACON. From there, depending on their destinations, the planes would be passed to a series of air route traffic control centers, of which there are 21 in the United States. Arriving planes were handled in reverse, minus the strips: As they showed up on radar, called in on the radio and landed, Wahamaki logged them on a piece of notebook paper. An Oct. 31 New Yorker magazine cartoon depicted an air traffic controller saying to a pilot, "I don't know. What do you want to do?" But wishy-washiness in a controller won't fly. Besides having to make split-second decisions, coming off as indecisive can cause problems. "The pilots read your mood and your attitude," Howard said. "If you don't sound confident, they won't feel confident. They'll have a tendency to question things that you tell them to do." Air traffic controllers at SFO earn $114,978 to $160,969 per year, plus a 10 percent Controller Incentive Pay for working in the Bay Area. An ATC applicant, who cannot be older than 30, must have a bachelor's degree in air-traffic control from an FAA-approved college (an exception is made for people with military air-traffic-control experience) and pass a rigorous pre-employment exam. Those who make the cut go through four months of training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, and then further training occurs on the job. Controllers must pass certification at each new facility. There is a "mandatory separation" at age 56. At that point, controllers can go into management, but they no longer can juggle planes. Trahan said: "Our union has reminded the FAA over and over that trainees needed to be hired as at least half of us are eligible to retire starting the end of 2006 and in 2007." According to Walt Smith, the FAA recently has said it would hire 12,000 new controllers over the next 10 years to replace the controllers who will retire during that period. The FAA exam includes screening for memory, concentration, decisiveness and strong judgment, said Smith, San Francisco International's Air Traffic Manager and district director for all Bay Area control towers. "We screen, test and hire specifically those kinds of personalities, and then we put them in a small room together and say, 'OK, now get along!' " Getting along seems to be no problem for the controllers, who pass conversations to each other as easily as they pass strips. "We're all here for each other," said Brian Fisher, whose well-modulated bass voice is often recognized by pilots. "Yeah, we all back each other up," said 18-year veteran William Pong. "S= ay I'm working ground control and Brian's working local control, which is the one that's controlling the runways. What I do will depend on what he's doing, and vice-versa. So if I'm aware of what he's doing, then..." "We can affect each other's..." Fisher said. "You try and keep that awareness so that everything keeps flowing, you know, the planes keep moving," Pong said. "You make one mistake, and everything comes to a grinding halt." Radar software acquired about five years ago helps predict and avert ground collisions, and "grinding halts" are rare. Controllers are practiced in dealing with any close calls that do occur. Recently, Howard had to delay the landing of one plane because another one failed to make it across a runway in time. "He (the landing plane) was getting closer and closer, and this guy still hadn't cleared," he recalled. "I just sent him around. And that's a normal thing." Wahamaki once had a trainee who inadvertently instructed a pilot to taxi onto a runway where another plane was on final approach (Wahamaki got on the radio in time to prevent the collision). And he remembers the time a pilot taxied onto an active (in-use) runway after being told to wait. None of these controllers have experienced a collision. "This job is all about communication," he said. "We look out the window, we see the situation, and we issue the instruction. We need to be clear and concise, and we need the pilots to understand what we're saying and then carry out the instruction. Pilots do exactly what they're told 99 times out of 100. And when they don't, they get corrected and everything goes on. It's like a well-oiled machine." He laughed. "I love this job. I just like everything about it." Controllers and pilots rarely meet. (Trahan is an exception: Her husband, David, flies for American Airlines.) Steve Filson, a senior United Airlines pilot who flies out of San Francisco, said: "It's a whole different world, separated by a lot of space and time." And sometimes, separated by language: An Aeroflot pilot once chatted happily away in Russian, tying up the ground control radio for five minutes in full hearing of all the other pilots, after Wahamaki greeted him with the only Russian phrase he knew: "Happy New Year." The biggest challenge, and one that presents the steepest learning curve, for controllers at San Francisco International is its runway configuration. As a result of scarce land, the airport's four runways consist of two parallel pairs -- runways 28 Left and 28 Right, running east-west, and runways 1 Left and Right, running north-south -- that cross each other almost in the middle. (The numbers come from compass headings.) Except for very heavy aircraft and those heading west over the Pacific, planes normally take off from the 1's and land on the 28's, which are aimed into the wind and help them slow down. To move the maximum number of flights, controllers group planes in pairs on the parallel runways -- called a "sideby" -- unless fog prevents pilots from maintaining visual separation. At peak times, two planes land and two take off every minute, each pair having to wait until the other crosses its runway. "If I want to describe my job to someone who has no clue as to what I do= ," Fisher said, "the best description would be one of those little kids' games with the one number missing, and you try to rearrange all these numbers throughout the day to get them in order. You're shuffling planes around, moving them sideways, up, down, in, out. You go through the entire day making decisions that affect people's lives -- life-and-death stuff -- and then you go home and don't know what you want for dinner. It drives my wife crazy." By early afternoon, the fog had lifted, the strips were coming faster and the planes were doing sidebys. The room buzzed with a lingo that was in English, yet not. "United 93, contact Norcal departure. G'day. United 8168, cross runway two-eight left, contact ground point 8." (Knaack handed off London-bound flight 93 to Norcal TRACON and instructed just-landed flight 8168 to contact ground control on frequency 21.8.) "837 heavy on papa, cross two-eight left, hold short of two-eight right." (Fisher instructed the pilot of a large jet sitting on taxiway P -- "papa" is radio-alphabet letter P -- to cross a runway and wait.) Trahan pointed to the plane, United 837, which started to taxi toward the intersection. "When this guy (United 837) goes through, the other one can start rolling," she said. "It's always a bit harrowing. There are times when your stomach tightens up." As a child, Trahan used to count airplanes from her backyard near a Denver airport. She decided to become an air traffic controller when she heard it was a job where "you get to play with planes." Howard, now working ground control, had 30 strips lined up in front of him. He was talking concurrently to an American Airlines pilot, an AmericaWest pilot, four United pilots and the pilot of a business jet. "Cross runway two-eight right, hold short of two-eight left," he said to one, then added, smiling: "You've been flying long enough, you know there are no free lunches around here!" "Here they come!" Caldwell said, pointing to a caravan of United Express jets. "These little guys tend to travel in packs." He slipped back into a conversation with a pilot. "We can do four or five different things all at once," Howard said. "Talk to several planes, talk to the supervisor, and do it all coherently." "It's compartmentalizing," Caldwell said. "It's being able to sort out what's important now, what will be important a minute from now, and also be ready for the odd things that might occur." Odd things like airplanes, which are physically incapable of backing up, coming face-to-face: "In ground control, the worst thing you can do is get two planes on the same taxiway, nose-to-nose, with no way of getting out," Howard said. "We call it a 'golden towbar,' " Caldwell said, explaining that a truck must be called to tow the planes apart. The two howled with laughter at the inside joke and went back to their radios. The bay was a deep blue; wisps of fog clung to the south San Francisco hills. A ballet of planes moved slowly just outside the tower; others glinted on taxiways and runways in the distance. Caldwell slid a handful of strips over to Howard. A Singapore Airlines j= et took off on 28 Left, heading toward the Pacific. Seconds after it crossed the intersection, two planes did a sideby departure on the 1's, flew over the bay, and went their separate ways. 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