Out Of The Pattern

Spending Time With Air Traffic Control

As an Aviation Safety Counselor volunteer, I am often called in to mediate local problems. (Our FAA flight standards district office is nearly 150 miles away.) I'd heard that there was some tension between the pilots and the air traffic controllers at my local airfield. There had been a couple of incidents and even a violation issued for an airspace incursion. The pilots felt that the tower was manhandling them. I don't like to pass judgment on anyone, especially not without spending some time listening hard to both points of view, so I called the tower chief and asked if he minded having an observer for the morning. He seemed pleased that I was interested in seeing his side of the issue and invited me up.

Watching three guys juggle traffic on a Monday morning is interesting enough for a pilot type like myself, even without the problems that got me into their lair. Short staffed because of recent cutbacks, their camaraderie was admirable. Things went fairly smoothly for the first half-hour or so. The pilots spoke mostly aviation on the radio, the controllers answered, and everyone seemed to do what they needed to do in order to stay safe and get around.

There were, however, a few embarrassing anomalies. One pilot had a propensity for calling his traffic in sight without really having the traffic in sight. Apparently, the pilot was a habitual offender. Calling "traffic in sight" and then reneging doesn't sound like such a big problem-until one day when the pilot decides to turn base and ends up eye-to-eye with the traffic that he didn't see before.

Another pilot made four calls in order to get enough information across to the air traffic controllers for them to issue him a clearance to taxi. Again, this isn't such a big faux pas, except that if things were busier, the radio would have been a mess. This turned out to be the same pilot who routinely forgets to repeat his hold-short and position-and-hold clearances at the end of the runway. That's a lead-in to disaster. Runway incursion problems are on the rise, and history shows us that some of our most devastating aviation accidents came about because of misunderstood or plain old missed clearances.

I watched as the blips of various nonparticipating traffic on the outside edge of the radar screen floated in and out of the radar area. On occasion, a blip would wander too close to the edge of the Class D airspace for the comfort of the air traffic controller. "See that guy," said the tower chief. "He's coming my way, and I bet he won't call until he's in my airspace already." This time the chief was wrong, and the pilot called just as he was crossing the line into the Class D airspace. But he's been right many times in the past few weeks, and I don't doubt that aircraft violate his airspace day in and day out.

I know this because our local airspace is fairly complex. The Class D airspace lies underneath the Class C airspace that protects the nearby international airport. The edge of the Class C airspace conveniently ends at the north shore of a river. This is not true of the edge of the Class D airspace, though. The Class D airspace extends past the edge of the river and into the next town. You have to look closely at the sectional chart, however, in order to see the dashed-blue line (marking the circumference of the Class D airspace) that lies underneath the solid magenta circle of the outer Class C ring. Some pilots miss it.

Remember that guy who didn't repeat back clearances? Just about the time one airplane was cleared for takeoff and another had accepted a land-and-hold-short clearance on the crossing runway, ground control called out, "Cancel your takeoff clearance on Runway 31." Without asking why, the controller on tower duty did so. The ground controller pointed to the pilot who had had difficulty communicating before. He was crossing the active runway without a clearance on his taxi to the end for runup. This astute ground controller caught him and averted disaster. The tower chief picked up the microphone and asked for a phone call from the pilot.

It is a marked increase in just this kind of incident that has his dander up. That combined with minimal staffing is making it harder and harder to avert problems. Even though most of the morning had gone smoothly, it was clear why the tower chief wanted me to run a series of safety seminars reminding pilots about the rules for flying in Class D airspace.

Two hours had passed, and it was time for me to head out to my own job of flight instructing on the other side of the tower windows. I did so with a new respect for the people who work in the tower and a real sense that they are partners with pilots. They have to be if we want to make the skies the safest that they have ever been.