Inside Scoop: Air Traffic Controllers
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The Radar Center Trainee
I’ve been in training 2.5 years at a radar center, but I have over fifteen years of experience in the military and the control tower environment, so I’m mid-career right now. Still, coming from a control tower, you have a pretty localized view of everything. When you go to a radar center, you become responsible for just a huge amount of information, more than you had to know previously. Maybe 100 times the information than you had to know before. And it comes at you rapid fire.
We do tons and tons of on the job training. We have simulations, but they can only be so realistic. There are things you cannot be taught on a computer and you have go out in the real world and deal with.
With all the retirement, There are people coming in and not enough people to train them, so we end up having this huge lag time in training. We’re supposed to replace this person who’s checked out on all the positions we have at the center, and knows everything there is to know. And then someone like me comes in and checks out on 2 out of 10 positions, and I sit there and rot for a few months because they don’t have anyone senior enough to train me on the other positions.
The FAA says they have X amount of bodies coming in -- yes, the bodies are there, but they’re lounging. And the training is backed up.
I’ve had two near mid air collisions happen when I was training in radar.
One time, I’d been working overtime for months and months, I was exhausted, and I gave the pilot the wrong altitude and he refused the clearance. I had a small airplane that was turning underneath an airliner, and I gave the airliner a descent that would have put it into conflict with a small plane. Thankfully, the airliner had a collision avoidance system – he said there was traffic and he wouldn’t descend. In my fatigued state, I had issued him one altitude and not another. But you know what the FAA says? That ‘failure to rest is not a reason to call in sick.’
The big thing is the loss of experienced people - so many guys are saying it’s not worth it anymore. And the kids who are coming in are really inexperienced - you just can’t replace the veterans with them.
I used to be a really calm flyer. Now I get in an airplane and I think, “How much experience does the guy handling me have? The guy in the tower sure sounds young.” I worry about these things.
It’s not a job where you can walk in off the street. Most of the time, trainees come as a feed from the military. But this is how bad the FAA is hurting for people -- they’ve had ads on MySpace, Craigslist, and on the sides of busses. People are showing up fresh out of high school. We had two guys who were working in a video store and saw an ad. They showed up at our facility and said, “Hey, we’d like to be air traffic controllers.” Six months later, they’re through the academy. We have people who come in and don’t know the difference between small planes and jets -- it’s comedy.
I got flushed through the system in a sense, too, and realized I was certified in positions where I didn’t know things. The experienced people are leaving and you have the rookies, and soon I will be teaching rookies -- and I am rookie myself.
Some guys are really good and get it really easily, but still they can get in a situation where they just don’t have the experience. Case in point, one kid issued the wrong altitude to a really big jet with another big jet coming right at him -- we’re talking 500 people on board. They were closing in at 500 mph on the same altitude, and the big jet finally said “I’m climbing.” You have to ask yourself, how close was that to a midair collision -- to what we call ‘aluminum showers with intermittent falling bodies’? Our supervisor saw what happened and said he was going to make sure he never flew on the same day that kid was working, just to paint you a picture of what goes on.
I’ve seen a lot of things that made my heart jump. The scariest thing, I had this little airplane that just showed up out of nowhere and was tracking up toward this really big airplane -- it scared the living daylights out of me and the pilots. The pilots ascended, but I still have my conspiracy theory that there are guys up there flying routes trying to figure out how to get to our jets.
All that said, it’s an awesome job. There’s a lot of gratification. Every time I have a complex situation and work it all out, there’s five minutes of sheer adrenalin that everything worked out well. It’s so much fun, when you get away from the fact that I’m working six day weeks and don’t get to see my family. But the stress is beyond imagination sometimes.
I think the flying public should be very wary about flying.
It’s only a matter of time before something very serious happens. I know if I ever got two together -- a collision -- there’s no way I could ever go back to the job. It enters into every controllers mind. Nobody wants to be that guy. But we all have the suspicion that someone’s going to mess up, and God forbid it’s one of the new guys messing up due to the fact that they’re not familiar with what’s going on. I just dread that thought, and that’s part of the reason I have trouble flying.