In Place of Praise
On 12/01/2012, in Tower chronicles, by lajos
The end of 2011 is in fact the end of an epoch in the history of Hungarian air traffic control. I do not want to qualify this epoch, future generations might do that in the fullness of time. The fact remains, an important generation of controllers have retired. I call them the “beat-generation”. About 40 people have, willingly or reluctantly, chosen for retirement in 2011 mainly to avoid the consequences of the altered pension rules kicking in this year.
They were lucky in this also, like in so many things during the past 40 years. Our generation will miss out on any favorable terms of retirement, exactly because of the huge numbers in the “beat-generation” causing the strain on the State retirement fund to grow exponentially. This is why the age limit for retirement is being raised, a fact that affects our generation especially hard since the age limit is climbing in front of our very noses.
The “beat-generation” was lucky also in arriving at the airport at just the right time. With low traffic, they did not take long to learn the tricks of the trade. I have heard from them many times that they became air traffic controllers more or less by accident, they were working at the airport where they heard that aircraft could not only be flown but also controlled… Of course as time passed by, they grew with the traffic. They had another ace up their sleeves. In those decades, controllers were still a team, they knew how to stand together and protect their interests. This was the case when we came home from the ATC course in Riga after almost three years. They knew that our knowledge was superior to theirs (not only because of Riga) and they responded by simply closing ranks. At the courses held on home base they were present as instructors and they did their best to make us hate this business and to discourage us from trying to be more clever than they were.
Click here to read the full article
Winter season survived at Ferihegy
On 11/05/2011, in Tower chronicles, by lajos
It would appear that we have survived the 2011 winter season without major hiccups. Events arose only when a bored office-bug decided to fabricate an elephant from a flea… Luckily either they were not bored enough or there was a lack of fleas but the number of overblown events were also thankfully low.
What was completely unique in my 28 year career (my goodness, 28 years?) is the fact that we had not a single day of freezing rain, this great enemy of controllers and pilots alike. Freezing rain makes the snow clearing brigade shiver also, making their work totally useless. When freezing rain strikes, they can spread all kinds of miracle substances on the runways and taxiways but the effects are short lived and within 10 minutes or so they can start all over again. But luckily we did not have any of this during the past winter season.
What we did have was a meeting of the group leaders, we practically started the year with that. Two noteworthy items were on the agenda: one concerned the reduction of paperwork the other an effort to achieve more uniformity in our work. In respect of the former we got the usual promises from our bosses who stated that the “project” was shaping up nicely… A bit more patience and it will be the end of paper journals, daily reports and paper incident reports (of which there are at least three kinds), everything will be done electronically. After two months I took the liberty to enquire: how was the project progressing? Because we always get briefed about everything except the important things, I mean the things important for us… And I think this is where the problems are, in Hungarocontrol ATC has been relegated to the peripheries. The office bugs who know nothing of the trade are working (?) so hard, they have practically overshadowed the real stuff. Even in higher management the number of real professionals has dropped to almost zero and the few Indians still holding out seem to have some difficulty in remembering where Ferihegy Tower is… But we do have scores of projects… As expected the reply to my question was, please have a bit more patience, the project is advancing but there are still a few administrative obstacles to be eliminated.
Click here to read the full article
Changes are coming to a tower near you – the Distant Aerodrome Control Service
On 04/03/2011, in Life around runways, by steve
DFS, the German ANSP will be introducing its Distant Aerodrome Control Service for the first time at ATC Global Amsterdam (8 to 10 March). Using the Distant Aerodrome Control Service, aerodrome controllers can switch between the display of visual information and sensor data. They are no longer primarily reliant on the direct out-of-window view. Aerodrome control is now possible both from distant locations as well as under poor visibility. What’s more: DFS is also showing its modular PHOENIX Tower Automation Suite and additional ATM solutions.
The distant aerodrome control solution provides the controller with a combination of visual data on the one hand, as well as instrument and sensor data on the other. This combination allows the controller to readily review the air and ground traffic situation at the airport and in its vicinity. High-resolution pictures from video cameras installed at the aerodrome deliver an artificial real-time view. By means of a monitor wall attached above the regular console screens, the controller can track aircraft on the apron and runway as well as zoom in as necessary. The real external view is replicated as precisely as possible.
Click here to read the full article
The long and winding road – women in the cockpit and the control tower
On 27/12/2010, in Women in ATC, by steve
To-day, nobody bats an eye at the sight of a four-striper with long blond hair and lipstick hauling her flight case like her male colleagues do. Even an all female crew in the front office is commonplace these days. A female voice on the control frequency is also quite normal now in most of the world. But this was not always so and in some countries the going was more difficult than in others.
Even after female pilots on commercial flights were no longer a rarity, public reservations resulted in Air Inter telling the passengers of its Paris-Nimes flight on 7 February 1985 that it had been operated by an all female crew… only after they landed! This was a historic event, an absolute first in France.
Perhaps the most convoluted story comes from Hungary where girls had to put up a fierce fight to be allowed a shot at the microphone in international ATC service.
Back in the 70s and 80s Hungarian labor law had a list of professions that were not open to women. These concerned mainly work requiring a lot of physical strength but for some reason, “air traffic controller” was also among them. When asked why this should be so, some kind of weird explanation was given about women having fewer red blood cells that effectively prevented them from working in ATC. The fact that women in other countries were getting licensed and worked to everyone’s satisfaction did not seem to change anything. Hungarian women, apparently, were different…
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
The tower with a soul… 13
On 06/05/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Ten years on the job
The old approach unit...
Ten years on the job! I can say that the first ten years passed quickly but on occasion time seemed to be crawling. Under the previous protocols, someone with a 10 year old license would have already made it to approach control. I read somewhere not so long ago that hires in the “beat generation” in the 60s and 70s became tower controllers almost off the street and approach controllers after a mere five years. This was considered normal back then. Work in the old tower coupled to low traffic did not demand a lot of professional skill. In that system it was logical to have the beginners start in the tower and then get promoted to approach control.
Things changed with the new tower, after all, the area of the airport increased threefold with all that this entailed. Traffic had to be organized across many more taxiways and operating two runways also required more concentration and experience. This was also the reason why it looked like a good idea for the approach controllers to come out to the tower one by one for a stint of a few months. As I mentioned before, this idyllic state of affairs did not last long and the old practice of promoting tower controllers with the most experience to become approach controllers with no reverse flow of any kind continued. Unfortunately the tower complement did not get new hires either so our numbers shrunk while those of the approach unit swelled. This meant of course that after a time we could no longer be “promoted” as the approach control unit had more than enough controllers and with no reverse flow, the average age of the tower controllers started to climb inexorably. We were getting old… This had the consequence that soon controllers in the tower were no longer just bright young titans, we too matured into ripe stingrays with muddy eyes. The relationship between the two units also changed. We, tower people no longer took the abuse lying down that was regularly meted out by the approach controllers and through many confrontations we forced them to accept our unit as their equal.
Click here to read the full article
A tower with a soul…11
On 12/04/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Small planes, small airports
The change of political system in Hungary was the main driver behind the presence of an increasing number of small aircraft, more and more people chose this way to visit the country. Since there was only one international airport, Ferihegy in Budapest, every plane had to land there to complete the immigration and customs formalities before being allowed to fly to their actual destination. The Air Traffic and Airport Administration (LRI), recognizing the possibilities, soon established air traffic services at the small Balaton Kiliti airport near Siofok, the capital of the Balaton Lake district. We started receiving planes there from the fall of 1989. At first our traffic consisted only of the foreign planes flying over from Budapest and the few planes in Hungarian ownership. This meant just a few planes a day and we were seriously bored most of the time. We spent the hours from opening to closing of the airport in a small wooden barrack and the only excitement was provided by the police helicopters which came to visit occasionally.
Scarce traffic or not, this new life around small aircraft had a charm and novelty for us. Working at the big Ferihegy airport we talked to the pilots only via the radio, at Balaton Kiliti we got to meet them in person. A whole new world opened for us and I for one liked this direct contact very much. I might say it was a much better feeling being able to go out to the plane and do a bit of hell-raising if the pilot did something silly. At Ferihegy this was impossible, everything happened in a much more regimented manner.
Balaton Kility from the air with Lake Balaton in the background
Yes I liked this rural life and was among the first who applied also for the 1990 season. By May of that year, LRI had a kind of terminal built at Kiliti for an exorbitant price. Since they never bothered to consult us, this new building turned out to be of doubtful value. The tower cab on the top was a hothouse in the summer and by midday everyone had to escape or risk a heat stroke. We soon gave up experimenting with that thing and simply stayed downstairs, working from what was meant to be the reserve radio room. It had a terrace and we talked to the planes from there. The building also housed our living quarters, so for four days at a stretch we usually did not set foot in the outside world. This was both good and bad. Tired by evening, we usually stayed put when in fact a bit of night swimming in the lake would have been a good thing.
Click here to read the full article
The tower with a soul… 9
On 18/03/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Parties then and now
As I said earlier, the tower was standing in the middle of the prairie. This was both an advantage and a disadvantage. Very little of the dirt and mud throwing that went on in the main building actually reached the tower. At the same time most decisions were made without our involvement, we had practically no chance to influence our own fate. You will also remember that the tower had no appointed boss and some of the division heads just used their positions to climb higher and avoid ever having to come back to the tower. But there were other colleagues also who worked hard to attain prominence via ways other than their professional performance. They were focusing on a party career…
They had two great ways of avoiding work, the Communist Youth Federation (KISZ) and the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP). Both
organizations had their offices in the main building and they held their meetings during working hours, mainly at times of highest traffic… Members used the services of Sanyika (you remember him? Sanyika with the Barkas body…) to ride to the main building and they attended the meetings as long as it took for the busiest traffic to subside. Then they returned, exhausted and worked without much enthusiasm until it was time to go home. The saying “errors will only be made by those actually working” had its origins in this strange setup. Since those party members always managed to abstain from heavy work, it was us who were left to fill in for them that made the smaller and bigger mistakes that are unavoidable even at the best of times. Guess who were eventually designated as poor controllers in the eyes of top management?
Click here to read the full article
The tower with a soul… 5
On 10/02/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Flying over the cuckoo’s nest
A really cute novelty was the cuckoo act. This was the art of working during the night shift while being in deep sleep at the same time. I did not have much of a need to spend whole nights wide awake before coming to ATC… I mean, even in the military when doing duty in a guard tower I was able to nap a little (my gosh, I have just divulged a military secret).
The system worked like this. At around 11 p.m., most of the people on duty would depart for the rest areas with only two persons, the cuckoos, staying in the tower cab. In those days almost all traffic was gone before 11 p.m., so two controllers were more than enough to keep their eye on things until 0600 in the morning. The two guys were designated cuckoo one and cuckoo two. Number one was expected to be awake and available at an instant’s notice while number two was the back-up. In theory. In practice things sometimes worked out very differently, as we will see later.
Click here to read the full article
The tower with a soul… 4
On 29/01/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Wrestling with the “furniture”
The huge control panel for the various ground lights, like the taxiway lighting, was next to the ground controller’s console. The control
panel was teeming with various switches used to turn various sections of taxiway lights on and off. The panel was variously nicknamed Christmas tree and railway shunting-yard. The multitude of small LED’s presented an impressive picture when night fell. There was only one problem with this panel, and also the panel used to switch the runway lights… you could operate the switches only through a very specific movement of your hand, something that needed to be learned separately. Not infrequently, the first attempt had to be followed by a second one… For some colleagues the frustration was too much with the result that we had to call the maintenance crew to restore certain broken parts…
Click here to read the full article
The tower with a soul… 2
On 11/01/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Envy and other incomprehensible things
We were off to a turbulent start when the “old-timers” discovered that our starting salaries were the same as the salary of a controller after one year… we were certainly not to blame for this disparity but took all the flack nevertheless. Some of the more senior colleagues from the approach control unit had a few axes to grind also… it took a few years for me to find out why.
Flack or axes, we loved the tower work. There were four teams and I was in Team C, together with my friend ZG. This was a good arrangement, it was easier to make time pass together and we made fun out of just about everything. There were things most controllers hated to do. Like for instance having the flight progress strips torn off and inserted in their holders.
This had to be done the night before the strips would be used and the complement was for the whole day (we did not have just in time strip printing back then). So we started the night shift with attending to the strips while the “big” guys worked. Why they hated doing this so much was a mystery but for us it was a perfect opportunity for a fun competition. Who was the fastest at tearing the strips and inserting them individually into the holders? We timed everyone and we had everything from individual records to world records… Another activity apparently below the dignity of more senior colleagues was exchanging the soda bottles. The tower was supplied with a few crates of sparkling water and the empty bottles had to be taken to the terminal where they were exchanged for filled ones. This “catering” duty was just one more occasion to have some extra fun, for us anyway. Some colleagues back then would not be seen dead with one of those crates. Why I could never understand.
Click here to read the full article
Aerodrome control towers of the world – Vancouver Harbour, Vancouver, BC, Canada
On 10/12/2009, in Towers of the world, by steve
For some reason, the height of air traffic control towers has become almost a matter of competition between airports and even countries. With some very nice new airports popping up in exotic places, new and ever taller towers seem to be a requirement not to be ignored.
Of course the height of the tower is (or should be…) determined primarily by the need for controllers to see all the runways and associated taxiways properly. Build the thing too high and in some places with lots of fog and low clouds controllers will have to manage in IMC even if the rest of the field does not appear to be socked in… Of course, modern electronic wizardry enables controllers to see even when conditions are otherwise poor. This in turn begs the question: why do we need ever taller towers? But that is beside the point. National pride and who knows what else all play a role and let’s be frank: those new towers are nothing if not beautiful.
In our series on the aerodrome control towers of the world, we will now introduce to you the tower that is the tallest in the world. Ah, Kuala Lumpur with 130 meters (425 feet) I can hear you say… Wrong.
Click here to read the full article
Aerodrome control towers of the world – Budapest, Ferihegy
On 10/11/2009, in Towers of the world, by steve
The origins
The Budapest area has had three airports before operations moved to the current location, Ferihegy. The first Hungarian aviation pioneers tried their wings at Rakosmezo, a forlorn and ill-equipped pasture where enthusiasm was the only thing that kept those daring souls in the air. The first “real” airport was at Matyasfold, the second at Budaors on the other side of the Danube. This was a singularly poor choice for an airport, frequent fog and low clouds, combined with hills in almost every direction left many a pilot sweating before their plane bounced on the nicely trimmed grass.
The idea to build a new airport came in 1938 and the tender for the new airport terminal was published in September 1939. The result was announced in December of the same year. The winning design was that of Karoly David jr. who had a truly unique idea: the building, when viewed from above, would resemble a twin-engine propeller aircraft.
Click here to read the full article
New series on Roger-Wilco – aerodrome control towers of the world
On 25/10/2009, in Towers of the world, by steve
Your input is also needed!
Many articles have been written about aerodrome control towers and with their wealth of data and nice pictures, the articles are certainly interesting and enjoyable. In our new series on the towers we want to do something different. Nice pictures and some basic data like height will be there but beyond that, we will dig for the lesser known facts related to these imposing buildings.
They all have a story to tell beyond wanting to be the tallest in the world. Things that happened during their design or construction, things that happened after they were commissioned, things that happened to the people working in them.
We will be reviewing the air traffic control towers of the world through those special stories, presenting a picture probably never before seen.
Please help us to create this new view by sending us your data, information, stories or suggestions relevant to the tower of your choice! Email us here.
Thank you!
Show me your tower, I tell you who you are
On 16/10/2009, in Life around runways, by steve
Show a pilot or air traffic controller a photo of a control tower with nothing else visible on the picture and they will say the name of the airport almost without thinking. This happens every time, no matter how little known or exotic the airport may be. This is no accident. The tower is the symbol of the oldest place from which airport traffic was first supervised and controlled, an edifice that stands tall over the rest of the field, commanding attention not unlike the circle and star on a Mercedes automobile.
At first, towers were simple affairs reflecting the relative simplicity of the operation in those days. Over the years they became taller and more imposing, uniting functionality, architectural proves and local pride in about equal measure.
Click here to read the full article
Same time, same place, same level… 8.
On 30/09/2009, in Same time, same place..., by steve
View from the tower
There can be little doubt that an airport looks its best from the control tower. True, pilots may lay claim to this, insisting that nothing equals the view from the front office window of an airplane in the final stages of its approach, but for earthbound controllers, the tower is absolute tops.
The panorama afforded by the wraparound windows set at 60 or more feet above ground level is nothing short of breathtaking and the sight of the tiny airplanes, ground vehicles and people moving far below transports one back right into our childhoods’ dream world of model railways. In addition, there is very little happening at an airport without the tower people being aware of it and this tends to impart a sense of power. It is only natural that controllers in the tower should have their share of stories to tell.
Click here to read the full article
