This is what the barbecue pit looks like. You walk into a darkened room, perhaps 40 feet across. Curving from one side across the front and to the other side of the room is a movie screen. A big movie screen. It runs 180 degrees around the room and curves up from the floor, over your head, and halfway across the ceiling. When Aragon fires up the simulator's three video projectors, the huge wraparound screen flashes to life with a near-perfect three-dimensional animated vista of a major airport spreading out before you from horizon to horizon. The view of the airport, which happens to be Helsinki International Airport, makes you feel as if you are high up in the control tower.
And what a view it is. It's not a 100 percent photographic representation, but it's as true to life as the best video game you ever saw. Truer, even. But believe me, it's no kids toy. Why? Because to run it you need a mainframe computer the size of a toll booth, exactly the kind you'd use to create the special effects in a film like Jurassic Park or Star Wars. The animated images are as intense as those in any Spielberg movie, and when things heat up, it gets scary.
On this particular day, Aragon is conducting a training session with three controllers from Venezuela. They are in Miami for a three-week refresher course. Pan Am International Flight Academy trains only students and controllers from outside the United States. It has no domestic students, which is why the school employs two full-time English teachers.
The controllers sit on the lower level of the room, closest to the screen. At this moment, the brilliant panorama shows a medical helicopter taking off from the ramp, a light twin doing an intersection departure, and, in the distance, a Boeing 727 on downwind for Runway 22, which runs from right to left across the front of the screen. Out of sight, but visible as targets on a radar screen, are several other aircraft, all in various stages of the approach. The three-dimensional images, all the aircraft and ground vehicles, are controlled by Aragon and his assistants (perhaps henchmen would be a better word) from workstations on the upper level. He calls them "pseudopilots." Everyone is on headsets, using assigned "frequencies," and the three controllers are handling their traffic in a combination of English and Spanish - a fact of life in South America. It's confusing, switching back and forth from one to the other, but they do it with ease.
On my left, the ground controller clears an aircraft to push back. She speaks softly into her headset, and in the distance on the giant screen, a Boeing 747 lumbers out to the taxiway. In the center, the data controller handles clearance delivery, makes out slips for each flight that calls in, and passes them to the local controller, who sits to my right, perched on the very edge of her seat. She's got her hands full. There are three aircraft on final, and one on downwind, but they're not just doing takeoffs and landings. They're doing missed approaches, entering holding patterns, and coming back - a nice, if heavy, mix of standard situations. It's just another late afternoon at Helsinki International. It's not too busy, but certainly busy enough, and everything's cool and calm, until Aragon turns up his barbecue.
Abruptly, a Boeing 747 calls in from about 20 miles out. Number 1 engine is on fire; he's declaring an emergency and wants to land right now. That's all they know. The jumbo jet's crew is a little busy and not very forthcoming on the radio. The local controller looks at her radar screen, tells two aircraft to make spacing turns to the right and left (the targets on the screen move accordingly), and the 747 appears off to the right, lights flashing just above the trees on the horizon. Well-learned procedures click in: the ground controller calls out the fire trucks, and darned if they don't appear on the bottom of the screen - three of them, bright red, lights flashing, racing out to take positions at the runway intersections. For some reason, the room seems to get a little warmer.
Aragon turns up the heat a little at a time, but he turns it up just the same. Now there's a light aircraft in the area that they can't seem to contact on the radio. They have no idea where he is. The medical helicopter that just took off wants to land again. The 747 pilot reports that engine extinguishers are inoperative, and the fire is worse. The aircraft currently landing reports severe wind shear at the approach end of the runway. The jet gets bigger and bigger on the screen. Everything is happening on the screen in real time and absolutely to scale. It's getting dark and a little hazy. Aragon could throw a blizzard at them right now, or whatever other kind of meteorological catastrophe he can think of, but mercifully, he doesn't.
The 747 is close now. We can see the flames shooting from the left outboard engine. In moments the jet crosses the threshold and touches down right below us. The fire trucks swing into motion, but stop suddenly, as the jumbo jet blows a tire and begins to slide sideways along the runway. The tension in the "tower" kicks up a few more notches.
"What do you do now?" Aragon demands.
The controller looks out at the horizon, then over to the targets on her radar screen. She's got three heavy jets on final - one of them crossing the final approach fix - but the 747 is completely blocking the runway. Tensely, she begins directing inbound traffic to the crosswind approach on Runway 15, but the pilots start reporting serious wind shear there, too. Just what she needs. Meanwhile, the fire trucks race toward the blazing jet on the runway. She orders a Boeing 757 to go around, and it does. I look up as those billions of bytes of computer power cause it to sail right over our heads.
Aragon comes up with lots of things for the controller to do, all at the same time, and ladles on more unwanted excitement and distraction in one morning than she'd experience in a lifetime at her home airport in Venezuela. Every bit of the jarring experience happens in the finest real-time, high-resolution, three-dimensional, fully rendered images that computer power can provide. The simulator creates an expensive, hyper-realistic barbecue if there ever was one, with your choice of intersecting or parallel runways, as many drastic emergencies as you can dream up, and tons of other special effects that would make the Nintendo people drool.
Soon, thankfully, the session is over. Exhausted, and perhaps a bit shaken, the three controllers take off their headsets and make their way out to the hall for a well-deserved break.
The visual control tower setup costs well over $1 million and can cost four or five times more, depending on your selection of bells and whistles. But the realism of total-environment simulation is perfectly suited for upgrading controllers' skills to handle increasing traffic loads, aircraft density situations, the most extreme emergencies, and hijack procedures. "We want to subject trainees to as much pressure as possible," says Aragon. "If they can handle what happens in here, they can handle anything."
The air traffic control school was added to Pan Am International Flight Academy in 1994, and since then has trained thousands of tower and en route controllers from all over the world. The Academy also trains pilots, flight attendants, and mechanics in its other divisions, all located at the Miami International Airport. According to Tom Jones, director of civil aviation programs, the school owns the only private tower simulator in the United States. "Ours," he says, "may be more flexible than the FAA facility." For example, the system is regularly programmed to use the types of navaids, aircraft, and call signs that students work with in their own countries, no matter where they're from.
"We had a group of students in from Zimbabwe for a beginning training program," says English teacher Gail Reed. "They'd been recruited by the government right out of university, and most of them had never even been on an airplane before. They certainly didn't know what air traffic controllers did until they got here." Fortunately, Gail and her associate in the language school, Karen Fisher, made themselves responsible for helping the young men begin to feel at home as they learned a life-or-death profession in a foreign land.
"In the old days," says Jones, "which aren't really so old, we'd draw an airport layout on a tabletop, and students would walk around the room simulating traffic by holding little plastic airplanes over their heads. The simulator is light years ahead of that. In there, we create a total environment that can duplicate any time of day, any traffic or weather situation, any emergency."
How is it possible? The data processing breakthroughs of the early 1990s have provided trainers with graphic computers that have enough memory and processing power to simulate entire scenarios in real time.
How realistic is it? Aragon gives an example of a control tower trainee who, during one simulator session, had a few aircraft in the pattern, a heavy jet on final, and an airport truck on the runway checking a lighting malfunction. "I created a diversion with a minor emergency at the other end of the field," says Aragon. "She forgot about the truck and cleared the jet to land. The airliner hits the truck, there's this huge explosion - a big ball of fire. She didn't stop shaking for three days."
Another key to the realistic interactivity, aside from the impressive wide-screen video show, is the intercom system. "It's completely digital and completely networked," says Jones. "We can record everything the controllers say in sync to the video, and play it all back for evaluation and critique."
If a good pilot never stops learning, neither does a good controller. Maricielo Ros, a veteran of 18 years as a controller at Valencia Airport in Venezuela, is in Miami to sharpen her skills, and she well understands the value of the experience, even if it does sometimes get a little tense. "At our airport," says Ros, "the traffic is mainly cargo, and it's very light. This simulator gives us the chance to practice handling higher densities of traffic and many different kinds of aircraft."
The million-dollar video game where controllers like Ros get that practice is called a Virtual Tower, manufactured by Raytheon for training facilities all over the world. The default airport happens to be Helsinki because the Finns ordered the very first system. At Pan Am International Flight Academy, there's a "game cartridge" that will put Miami International on the wraparound screen if you prefer.
In a total-immersion simulator like this, the quality of the training depends greatly on the personality of the instructor, and Aragon, as upbeat a person as he is, really knows how to dish out the challenges. Spend some time in his "barbecue pit" and you'll never go back to "Space Invaders" again.
Related Articles
