Bright sunshine from historic Ferihegy
On 30/05/2011, in Flashback, by steve
I guess young people to-day are enjoying their days working at Budapest Ferihegy Airport as we did when we were young and felt that the whole world was ours. There was bright sunshine in those narrow corridors even on rainy days, making even the government-issue gray office doors look somehow inviting.
Of course the sphere came not from the building but the people working there, the people who often did not feel the need to take a holiday because they liked their work so much! We were an enthusiastic lot that is for sure.
It is difficult to pick any one person to write about and not worry that I hurt the others, after all, they all had a story to tell that would deserve a place on Roger-Wilco. Come to think of it though, there are a few who were so well liked and so completely part of the scenery that writing about them would feel natural to everyone else.
The story of Istvan Toth (nickname in Hungarian Totyi) will no doubt bring back memories for most of us old-timers and perhaps give some guidance to those belonging to the younger generation.
Totyi, in the middle up front, circa 1972
Totyi was hired by Malev on 17 December 1969 and he started work in the department that provided the air traffic control service in Hungary. Yes, back then the national airline was running ATC… When the Air Traffic and Airport Administration (LRI) was set up in 1973, he continued there and finally retired on 1 February 2008 from HungaroControl, the ANSP that was formed from the ATS parts of LRI in 2002.
He has spent 40 years and 155 days in aviation and I think that he was one of the best known people at Ferihegy Airport. You know, the kind of guy who, if seen standing next to the pope, would have visitors asking: who is that guy next to Totyi?
Click here to read the full article
Article writing – music by any other name
On 08/04/2011, in Flashback, by steve
Grandad, the composer
My grandfather on my daddy’s side studied to become an architect but after finishing the university, he soon succumbed to his real calling and went on to become one of the best known operetta composers of 20th century Hungary. My dad was an engineer and we all picked vocations that had nothing to do with music. One might think that granddaddy’s talent was somehow lost along the inheritance highway. But looking closer, it is clear that it was not… it only manifests itself in different ways. My brother could tell you his story confirming this but until he does, let me recount how I discovered the presence of this special gift in our family.
Being a Zerkowitz kid in school was not always easy, not least because my music teacher at first was incapable of accepting that I had absolutely know feeling for music and sang in a way for which many will pay… so that I would stop. After a while though she accepted the inevitable but was very nice about it and from then on instead of singing, I had to learn by heart the short life story of selected composers. This was a deal very much to my liking and I played along happily, getting full marks in music class.
Our Hungarian language and literature teacher was also a very nice lady and when she realized that I could throw together a 4 page composition on any subject whatsoever in just a couple of hours, I became her favorite. She took me to author-reader meetings and I think some of the stuff I wrote actually ended up being part of speeches the school principal made on special occasions. But here again I was the cause of endless frustration because of my initial, rather lax, use of the grammar rules. I always felt that my ability to express my thoughts and also abstract constructs like nobody else could in the class did give me some latitude in ignoring certain grammar rules the logic of which always escaped me and which were difficult to remember in any case. I do remember to this day seeing the marks at the bottom of some of my compositions: 1/5 and 5/5. The 5 was for the composition, the 1 for the grammar of course.
Click here to read the full article
With thanks to Susie – wherever she is to-day
On 29/12/2010, in Flashback, by steve
One of these days I will tell you all about my office at BluSky Services, the place from which we run all the operations of the group. But not now. This story is about something totally different. It is about a memory that was triggered by the 1965 edition of the Collins English Gem Dictionary which I came upon while trying to put some order into the books filling the shelves here…
It was in December 1964 that we arrived in Cairo, Egypt and I was all of 14 and a half years old. I spent the next 5 months as a home student, learning stuff from which I would have to take an examination next Summer, upon return for a short holiday in our home country. Come September 1965, I was thrown into the deep water. At Cairo’s St.George’s College I was the first Hungarian they had ever seen… and also probably the first student ever whose command of the English language was just a tad below zero… Father Melody who was the head-English teacher and Josef, the Egyptian headmaster were both very understanding and they even explained to the other teachers why they should be understanding too when I just stared in their eyes in response to even the simplest question. I did not understand a word!
Of course in a situation like this, you learn quickly and within a few weeks’ time I started to catch on and soon could easily differentiate between commands like stand up, sit down and shut up. I owe an awful lot to those great, understanding teachers but the fact that to-day I have a fairly good command of Shakespeare’s language was due to an English gal who was of my own age group and also the only hopeless love of my life.
Cherchez la femme you will say. Indeed…
Click here to read the full article
When things go wrong…
On 15/09/2010, in Flashback, by steve
The aviation industry has such a wonderful safety record that people boarding an aircraft rarely, if ever, think about the possibility of an accident happening to them. Of course the same people will have driven down the highway to the airport similarly unaware that, statistically, they were in a much more dangerous place than on board their aircraft. This is as it should be of course.
But for those of us whose life is dedicated to aviation as pilots and air traffic controllers, incidents and accidents have a different meaning altogether. We train to handle them intellectually and emotionally and we do everything we can to prevent and avoid them. Nevertheless, on occasion things do go wrong and we are in danger of being reduced to mere spectators of the brute forces of physics.
But we fight back, to the last breath, the last instruction, the last pull on the control yoke and never give up. In many cases, this kind of resolve can actually beat the odds and we turn a potential catastrophe into an incident of little consequence.
We all have memories of cases where things had gone wrong. Some were more serious than others, in some friends and colleagues flew west into the sunshine never to return in others some escaped with their lives while others did not.
I will never forget the sight of the blackened vertical stabilizer of the IL-18 that flew into the ground in Budapest in bad weather or the voice of the navigator of a TU-134 who continued broadcasting a narrative of what they were experiencing on board as the stricken aircraft that had lost all instruments in near zero visibility slowly rolled to one side finally hitting the ground with its wingtip…
I was on duty when we got the AFTN messages that a Tu-154 of MALEV went missing over the Mediterranean and the message was brought to the duty supervisor by the tearful wife of the captain of that flight (she was one of the operators on duty in the AFTN centre). The IL-18 that went down while approaching Copenhagen in pouring rain, took off from Budapest while we were on duty in the tower.
Click here to read the full article
Relative secrets
On 22/07/2010, in Flashback, by steve
I have an old book here, entitled “On the highways of the sky”. Published in the 60’s in Hungary and translated from the original East-German edition, it did reflect the spirit of the times but for me at age 13 or 14 it was the most wonderful book ever. It talked about all the fascinating things that were already pulling me towards a career in aviation.
There was a sentence in the book, advising air travelers to pack their cameras in the checked baggage. Of course… making photos from aircraft, even passenger aircraft, must have been anathema to the regimes in Eastern Europe back then. I remembered this sentence every time we flew and as a kid often wondered what the always polite and nice Malev cabin crew would have done had I kept my camera with me. On a flight with Aeroflot with a cabin crew perfectly capable of upsetting the balance of the aircraft had they congregated at the aft galley, I did not even wonder any more…
Several years later my dream came true and I started working at Ferihegy airport. Like all such places, Ferihegy too had its share of old stories and as the new boy in town, I was an avid listener whenever the old hands started to reminisce.
One story had a particular relevance to my earlier experience with the camera…
Click here to read the full article
At least the Red-Arrows survived…
On 14/07/2010, in Flashback, by steve
Concorde, QE2 and the Red Arrows in happier days...
I am pretty certain that few in the travel industry would have believed when this photo was made in April 1985 that the Queen Elisabeth 2 would actually stay in operation longer than Concorde would… Yet that is exactly what had happened.
Concorde’s future was sealed when F-BTSC crashed in Paris on 25 July 2000. Air France and British Airways tried to keep the magnificent bird alive after they re-launched service following modifications to the fuel tanks but the operation simply did not make economic sense any more. The last commercial BA flight on 24 October 2003 marked the end of 27 years of supersonic travel…
QE2 continued to plow the world’s oceans, retiring from Cunard service on 27 November 2008. She was destined to become a floating hotel, moored at Palm Jumeirah, Dubai.
The fate of Concorde, the fastest child of the species that killed the kin of QE2, was a bit like a child dying before the parent. A tragedy that hurts… as did Concorde’s disappearance from the skies.
Luckily, the Red Arrows survived and they continue to claim our place above the clouds.
Train them well… but watch your step!
On 30/06/2010, in Flashback, by steve
During my ATC years and also after, I did a fair amount of training that ranged from ICAO Annex 14 (Airports), radio telephony procedures and ATC automation to HMI design and airspace user requirements in the future ATM system. The students represented a similarly broad spectrum from ab-initio controller trainees to ATC supervisors, engineers and pilots with a dizzying variety of nationalities and classroom customs. I had to learn early that ignoring their sensitivities was not a good idea.
I was reminded of this when our friends in The Netherlands bought a very nice house in the South of France and although they like to stay there as much as possible, during the school year they still tend to stick to rainy “kikkerland”. I am not sure but I suspect that part of the problem is their primary-school son whom they may be reluctant to entrust to the school system in France. He is a bright little guy and there is nothing wrong with the school system in France. But it is different and a kid used to the more free-wheeling Dutch system would need to adapt.
Several years ago a few times a year I was delivering a presentation entitled “Airspace user requirements for the future ATM system”. The course was meant for ATC supervisors who came to the EUROCONTROL Institute of Air Navigation Services in Luxemburg to attend. I held a very similar presentation once a year at ENAC in Toulouse for ATM engineering students whose study language was English and they had to incorporate the presentation material into their final exam papers.
Click here to read the full article
When reality meets your dreams
On 08/02/2010, in Flashback, by steve
Admit it, you too have had dreams of one day coming face to face with a famous actress, or one not so famous but with attributes that made you feel weak inside just thinking about them. Think Pamela Anderson in her early Bay Watch episodes… I most certainly had such dreams but I must also confess that I had dreams also about a different kind of beauty, dating back to the days when the sight of bouncing tits was more cause for giggle than excitement.
I was may be ten when a friend of mine surprised me with a book he found in his grandparents’ attic, entitled “Duel in the sky”. It was a wonderful collection of short stories about aviators in WWI plus a few descriptions of more recent events, among them the story of the historic flight of an Air France Lockheed Super Constellation which was carrying back to Europe the signed copies of the peace treaties terminating WWII. That Super Connie almost ended up in the Atlantic Ocean, treaties and all, due to multiple engine problems… The radio operator on the flight was an ex-pat Hungarian and most of the story was recounted as he saw it from behind his crackling boxes. In the end, they landed safely in Dakar… I do not know how many times I read that story but it must have been hundreds. On each re-read, the Connie crept closer and closer to my heart. We were from different times, never to meet or touch, but she was there all the time.
Then the years passed and, with burning face I have to admit, for a time girls occupied my attention more than airplanes did… Not that much more and only for a time, but still…
Eventually I also learned to accept that those dreams about running into Pamela Anderson on the airport commuter bus were just that, dreams. You do not run into the icons of your dreams in real life. And then it happened…
Click here to read the full article
A venerable old lady – the Ilyushin IL-18
On 14/10/2009, in Flashback, by steve
She was born at a time when glasnost and perestroika were still only words in the dictionary. A four-engine, turboprop transport that was noisy inside and out, was difficult to fly and needed an oil-well to keep her in the air. Yet she formed the backbone of East European air transport for more years than most of us care to remember and, above all, she was beautiful. With perfectly circular fuselage, sleek wings and graceful vertical stabilizer, the IL-18, by appearance, was a queen among aircraft.
But where did this lady come from?
Click here to read the full article
A short left turn
On 01/09/2009, in Flashback, by steve
The arrival of Lufthansa’s shiny new Boeing 727 in Budapest was an event in itself. The flight from Frankfurt was almost always on time, the 727 looking like it had come from Boeing’s delivery centre the day before… We learnt early that she could climb and descend like no other jet serving Budapest and as such she was every controller’s best friend.
Photo Rafael Klöpper
Although one did not play favorites with any airline, it was hard to refuse when an LH skipper asked for a particular runway or other small “favor” pilots sometimes requested. After several months of uneventful operation one morning we noticed that the return flight plan was filed to Belgrade rather than Frankfurt. So what gives?
Click here to read the full article
At the cradle of SWIM
SWIM, well the name that is, was born in the early morning on a misty February day in a hotel room in Luxemburg. It was 1998.The abbreviation of System Wide Information Management, SWIM has now become an integral element of both SESAR and NextGen, the air traffic management development projects in Europe and the USA, respectively. Getting here was not easy.
Following the publication of the first issues of the European ATM Operational Concept Document (OCD) and the ATM Strategy for 2000+ it was felt that the wide-ranging and informal discussions that can take place at a workshop would generate valuable additional information to feed subsequent editions of those documents. The workshop took place in February 1998 in Luxemburg.
The air was pregnant with the need to do something about the horribly inefficient manner the sea of information generated by and consumed in air traffic management was being handled.
Click here to read the full article
My AWACS-story
On 10/08/2009, in Flashback, by jozsi
When we, then young air traffic controllers got to the Hungarian ACC to begin our on- the-job training in mid 1975, it was a very strictly restricted area yet shared the building with the Country’s air defence command positions.
Armed forces of the Peoples Republic’s Army had guarded the entrance since the secrecy of a nation’s air defence system was of strategic importance. This secrecy was however made somewhat obvious to the public by the numerous no parking and no camera signs in the surrounding streets indicating that something must be there.
Then suddenly everything altered in 1992.
Click here to read the full article
C-17s on peace mission
On 28/07/2009, in Flashback, by steve
For those of us who worked at Ferihegy Airport in the 60s and 70s, military service was a simplified affair. Just one month of ground-pounder training (as opposed to the two years meted out on the less fortunate) where after we went back to our civilian jobs of, in our case, controlling aircraft. The assumption was that if NATO came invading Lake Balaton and the Great Hungarian Plain, we would be doing the same job, albeit in uniform…
Training for the worst
As controllers, we were of course aware of the location of each military airport in Hungary, those used by the Russians as well as the few nominally under Hungarian control.
The airport of Papa in the South-West was one of the biggest of the military fields and when the flyboys of that place took to the air, civilian air traffic suffered mightily. Those Migs needed a big chunk of real estate to exercise their skills.
For us recurrent training took the form of a one day briefing given by a bored colonel. He did his best trying to explain why and how the Warsaw Pact armies might need to take Austria (he never used the name though, “enemy” countries were given colours) and what foolproof tactics we would be using but he was no fool. Facing that bunch of pilots and air traffic controllers, he could see the general sentiment that said: the Warsaw Pact armies would probably get bogged down at Shopping City Sud just outside Vienna…
Remembering Papa
A news item on TV last night brought back these memories with a vengeance.
Luckily, we never had to test whether the theory about conquering Shopping City Sud was true, even if Hungarian is the second most spoken language after Austria’s native German at SCS to-day.
The airport of Papa still exists and has just embarked on a new renaissance. The Migs are long gone of course… But yesterday, three Boeing C-17s with Hungarian registration, have taken up residence there to support NATO’s peace missions. The Mayor of Papa was very pleased when he was interviewed on television and his smiles went out to the several hundred flying and support personnel of diverse nationalities who are taking up residence in the area.
I do not know whether our bored colonel is still alive… I hope he is. May be he will also stop at Papa to watch a few C-17s take off and land… then drive on to Shopping City Sud for a beer.
