Posts Tagged ‘ FAA ’

FAA, Where are You? Clearly Air Traffic Control is Oxymoron

March 24th, 2011. By Hunter West

Now, wouldn’t that make a great reality TV series? Modeled after ‘Car 54 Where Are You,’ only in this scenario the two cops are replaced by two bungling air traffic controllers who don’t bother to answer when a pilot coming in for a landing, radios the approach tower at a major airport and gets no response.

Wait a minute—that would be incorrect. Because apparently there need be only one air traffic controller on duty…late at night…when things are quiet and it’s easy to nod off.

We don’t know if that was the case in the wee hours of yesterday morning when not one, but TWO incoming flights had to make do with input from regional towers and land at Ronald Reagan National Airport using unmanned airport protocol.

But this is bloody serious. Utter negligence. A lawsuit in the making, and a juicy one at that, had anything more serious happened.

According to a report yesterday in The New York Times and a compelling treatment on NBC‘s ‘Today’ this morning, an American Airlines Boeing 737 from Dallas approached the airport around midnight Wednesday but aborted its landing and circled the airport after pilots got no response from the tower. About 15 minutes later, a United Airlines Airbus 320 from Chicago also tried unsuccessfully to establish contact with the tower.

The controller in the tower at Reagan apparently re-appeared and all was well after that. The ‘Today’ show reported this morning that the controller who was on duty has an unblemished record (ps, the controller’s since been suspended, thereby blemishing that unblemished record).

Fine and dandy. But hey, FAA, why is it okay to have just one person in the tower? Would it not, Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Air Traffic Control, FAA, Ronald Reagan Airport
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