9/11 Remembered – The Heroes of United Flight 93
On 07/10/2011, in Anniversaries, by steve
On 11 September this year the US and in fact much of the world marked the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC. As we all know, there was also a fourth hijacked aircraft, United Flight 93, most probably assigned to crash into the Capitol where the House and Senate were both in Session. This part of the design of the terrorists never came to pass however. As the result of the heroic acts of her crew and passengers, the plane crashed just 20 minutes by air from the target in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The ceremonial gateway to the memorial
What a curious twist of fate that we should be talking about a crash that took the lives of 40 passengers and crew as a lucky circumstance… But those 40 people gave their lives so that others, many others, may live.
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Margaret Sanders, ATCO – An example to follow
On 13/05/2011, in Women in ATC, by steve
When I first embarked on our project to collect information about women in air traffic control in general and then about the first women air traffic controllers in the US, I did not think about a fact of life that is the other inevitable thing besides taxes… Many of those first pioneering ladies have flown West now and I am almost too late for collecting their stories to share with you for the enjoyment and education of us all. Luckily there are still many controllers who have worked with them or met them later in life and I am getting a lot of support from them in the form of written accounts and relics of all kinds.
This time I am bringing you the story of Margaret Sanders as told by our contributor Virginia. She in turn used Margaret’s obituary for some of the detail. Margaret passed away in June 2009 but if you read her story you will see just how resilient and flexible controllers really are.
Margaret Arlene Sanders was born in Canton, Kan., to parents Laura and Joe Anderson on Nov. 16, 1910. As her older brother, Curtis, used to say, “She is much smarter than I am, so she too must go to college.” Her father relented and Margaret graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in journalism.
After graduation she began a series of careers writing. She wrote a column for a newspaper under a man’s name, wrote advertising for department stores and the newspaper. She wrote a national award-winning ad campaign for the Kansas State Fair in the early ’30s, but when it came time for the award to be presented in Washington, D.C., her boss, a man, was sent to receive it. Margaret was the first woman to work as a “utilization specialist” for the Rural Electrification Administration, “selling” farms on the idea of using electric appliances in their homes.
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SWIM and WikiLeaks – do we need to worry?
On 05/01/2011, in SWIM, by steve
For all those who are even a little familiar with the System Wide Information Management (SWIM) concept the recent publication of thousands of classified diplomatic documents must have come as a shock. If secret diplomatic correspondence can be hijacked and made public with such ease, what hope do we have of keeping the commercially or otherwise sensitive data that will be shared in the air traffic management environment confidential? Will anyone still be willing to share their sensitive data?
To give an answer to this question, we have to examine how those secret, electronically stored documents got into the wrong hands in the first place.
For many years the United States government was being lambasted from all sides for being a dinosaur in the information age. Adoption of electronic government functions, long commonplace in countries of far lesser sophistication, were being introduced at a painfully slow rate, if at all. Significantly, the 9/11 commission report charged that computers in the various government departments could not share information and that this contributed to the terrorists being able to conduct their preparations unnoticed.
In other words, Uncle Sam was badly in need of a healthy dose of SWIM. As we know, System Wide Information Management ensures that everyone has the data they need in a timely manner and in the quality that meets their requirements. SWIM also ensures that the confidentiality of information passing through it is rigorously protected.
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Safety briefing – the missing element
On 28/01/2010, in Battle stations, by steve
This blog is about air traffic management. But, by the nature of our business, we tend to travel more than the average citizen and the pilots among us spend half their life strapped to the aircraft that carry us around. So it is appropriate to say something for once as a passenger rather than the ATM expert I often claim to be.
I am one of those passengers who actually follows the safety briefing, checks the location of the emergency exits and who has actually studied the operation of the damn things. I would hate having to read the opening instructions with smoke filling the cabin… I never take off my shoes until we are at cruising level. And yes, I do check that my life vest is under my seat and yes, I did find an empty container once and complained before we were airborne.
Recently however I started missing something from the safety briefing. If you look at the statistics, the likelihood of needing my life vest is distinctly lower than the need to know what I should do in case the chap or gal sitting next to me turns out to have explosives in his or her pants and decides to use it too.
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Same time, same place, same level…15
On 09/11/2009, in Same time, same place..., by steve
Security and its guardians – Part 2
A phone call is enough…
Some people must have realized years ago just how easily the fear of god can be put into an airport by the simple impediment of a telephone call. If you were a safety official, what would you do if someone were to call at three in the morning, saying that Flight so and so will have a bomb on it? As likely as not, you would order a search of the aircraft, an extra careful check of passengers and luggage and, having turned up nothing suspicious, you would just sit back with your fingers crossed until the threatened plane arrived home safely. But you would never, not once, treat the telephone calls as not being for real. A lot of money and time is being wasted as a result of these telephone nuts, for less than a fraction of one percent of such telephone calls actually have a real threat behind them.
The telephone exchange at our airport had the disconcerting habit of regularly putting through callers to the control center’s extension whenever they could not make heads or tails of what the caller wanted. It was only natural that a call starting with the words “bomb” or “explosives” should end up ringing the supervisor’s line. Over the years most of us had the good fortune of talking to these nameless people cheerfully promising to blow up everything from aircraft to radar installations and from the catering kitchen to cars in the parking lot. While we chatted away, technicians desperately tried to trace the call, mostly ending up at a coin-box, long deserted by the time the police arrived.
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Terrorism – The Threat of Possible Attacks
On 04/09/2009, in Battle stations, by krisztian
The word “terrorism” is used in so many security related issues, that the true meaning of it has gone lost. If we look up terrorism in the dictionary the following is displayed:
Cambridge Dictionary of American English: “Violent action for political purpose”
The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) is one of the largest institutions fighting terrorism and describes terrorism as follows:
“The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
In the course of history the definition of terrorism has changed and things were added to it. As terrorism has been around since humans could walk it is not a new phenomenon. However it has become more public, more violent and focused on one certain perpetrator and one certain target.
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Teach for the future
On 24/07/2009, in Battle stations, by krisztian
In every conflict, be it in business, world clashes, local disputes or the upbringing of our children, we have always said: “learn from the past.”
Learning from the past
For this reason even military academies study ancient wars and tactics used therein to teach their future military leaders. In my domain, security, we do the same. We base our training on the past, scenarios that we have seen, that our instructors have lived are replayed and countered in order to make us ‘ready’ for what awaits us.
This sounds logical; we can only learn from our mistakes and praise ourselves over our victories. And to a certain level this is true. We do need to learn from our mistakes and use the past to shape the present. However, it is exactly in this last sentence that we make the biggest mistake.
As we live in the present and head towards the future, the enemy of the present lives in the future, a step ahead, always.
Look at 9/11. Aviation security has changed since those events, some might argue for the better, some might say for the worse, but is has changed. We have adapted our security measures to something that has happened in the past. We have made it virtually impossible for terrorist organizations to perpetrate such an act again. But the terrorists know this, and they will counter us using our biggest weakness, the fact that we live and train for the present.
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