Leider kann man ihne online nicht lesen, daher habe ich mir die Unverschämtheit erlaubt, ihn zu scannen.
Ich hoffe, ich werde wegen copyright jetzt nicht des Forums verbannt.
Was wir lernen können aus diesem Artikel? Enorm viel! Wir sehen einmal in die Gedankenwelt der Lotsen und ebenso wie wir Piloten auch auf sie wirken können.
Wie man sieht, beide Seiten haben noch massenhaft zu lernen, obwohl ich dazu neige zu behaupten, dass aus meiner Erfahrung und aus diesem Artikel eine Seite wohl etwas mehr Aufholbedarf hat...
Aber man kann auch die Grenzen des Möglichen sehen, aus Gründen, die die andere Seite teilwiese gar nicht nachvollziehen kann.
quote:
Circle of JerksOne thing I noticed when I was an air traffic controller was that I was one of the few pilots in the building. Some of the guys had licenses but hadn't flown since Amelia disappeared - or around then. There were very few others but they didn't talk about it, and showed almost no interest in aviation.
I found it very hard to control my enthusiasm for airplanes, even though it ticked some of the older guys off. I knew from early on that I wanted to be one of the best controllers out there, ready to help pilots as much as I could. It wasn't hard to be that way at first, but as time progressed some of the older guys made my life more difficult. Even though away from work they were great people, when they were talking to pilots it was like Dr ]Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Normally happy-go-lucky guys became tyrants behind a microphone, and I found myself regarding them as a bunch of jerks. As time passed, it seemed to me this circle of jerks was getting bigger and, as much as I tried to fight it, I could feel myself getting sucked into the vortex.
While training on the more challenging positions, I found many of the controllers who were watching me to be quite intolerant of anything a pilot wanted. No deviation from the norm was allowed. At first I would just go along with it because it was the instructor's 'ticket'. But after a while I started to resent the way pilots were treated, because I still considered myself one.
Late one evening I was in the tower. Traffic was light and I noticed a United flight on the radar inbound from the north. We were on a northwest runway operation, so I called Approach and told him a straight-in from the north was approved. The guy working Approach said OK, then vectored him all the way around the airport to land on Runway 32 instead of allowing the straight-in to 14 as I had suggested. The approach controller never considered it because it wasn't his idea and he didn't need it. As usual I kept my mouth shut.
Another afternoon I was training on east arrivals which owned quite a bit of air space. There were scattered thunderstorms everywhere. All the controllers, except for me, had the weather suppressed on their radar.
On the radar of that period, if you showed all the weather it was hard to see the targets. You could see the secondary targets, the computer-generated transponder ones, but you could not see primaries, the skin paint. Effectively all the controllers activated the weather suppression to better see the airplanes they were talking to. I didn't care much about the primaries and I wanted to help pilots around the weather.
Only a short time had elapsed since my previous life as a pilot flying light twins with no weather radar. Some of the controllers were helpful but some were not. I was always grateful for any help they gave me then, and I was determined to never forget that.
Rick Shabsin was watching me work that day. He was a laid-back, Bob Dylan look-alike, who played his guitar in the break room. An easy-going instructor who provided meaningful feedback, Rick generally let me do whatever I wanted. Although not a pilot he was one of those controllers who bent over backward to help them. Rick was definitely an outsider; not in the circle of jerks. He didn't mind me leaving the weather displayed, whereas most guys would have activated the CP (circular polarization) without asking, or telling me for that matter.
During the session it became quite busy, and much of my time was spent providing vectors around the weather. I didn't have many airplanes, but I was working my butt off. At the end Rick said something about learning to temper my enthusiasm for helping pilots with providing separation services, our primary job function.
A few months later it happened. I found myself entering the circle and becoming one of them. Then I was quite far along in my training and very close to receiving my facility rating check, but that event seemed to be a moving target. The closer I came, the farther it would move away. I knew my job reasonably well, so most people let me do my own thing and said very little at the end of a training session. But still, I wasn't making progress.
One night I was working an arrival sector with one airplane, an Allegheny DC-9. He wanted a straight-in, opposite direction to our runway configuration. Without calling anyone or even thinking about it I said, "Unable."
A few days later in the tower a similar incident occurred, with a pilot requesting something out of the ordinary, which I promptly rejected. Suddenly I noticed my training reports contained almost no criticisms, and the tension I previously felt while being watched was gone. Laughter had returned to the job.
A few days later, working in the radar room, along with everyone else I had all the weather suppressed. Pilots asked for help around the weather and I gave the canned response of the day, "Sorry, I have my weather circuits off, I'm not painting anything." I had become a fully-fledged member of the circle of jerks.
I had learned the only way to make it over the fence was to prove to these guys which side I was on. Even though I held a pilot’s license, when I entered the building I was an air traffic controller. My job was to separate airplanes and everything else was secondary. As long as I could remember that essential, I was ready to be on my own.
Shortly after I became facility-rated I went back to my old helpful self-but not completely. I had learned that if I was too friendly with pilots I could end up actually screwing up big time. Vectoring airplanes around the weather could distract me long enough to experience a target merge. Shortcutting procedures could lead to something being forgotten just long enough for disaster to strike. I learned the hard way what everyone from day one was trying to teach me: which was, be as helpful as you want but don't forget your primary job. The guys watching me had to be sure I was capable of being a jerk, for the occasion when I was required to be one
Working radar one night the flight data guy put an inbound strip in my bay for a Cessna twin whose call-sign ended with '3CT' (the letters being my initials). I pointed the call-sign out to my hand-off and said, "I like this guy's call sign, I'm going to give him whatever he wants."
As soon as he was on my frequency I pointed him toward the field and told him to let me know when he had the airport for a visual. The controller working final changed things on me, and it appeared Three Charlie Tango would end up following a couple of other aircraft lining up from the south. As a result, I ended up taking him about 10mi (16km) farther south than he should have gone. The pilot started yelling at me, saying that I should have told him to slow down earlier so he wouldn't have had to go so far out of his way. He went on and on, telling me how incompetent I was. I felt pretty bad about it, but said nothing as I handed him off to the next guy.
What that pilot didn't know was that I had burned his call-sign into my brain and held it there for many years afterward. It never happened, but I knew if I ever worked that airplane again, the pilot would find himself right smack dab in the middle of a circle of jerks.
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erstellt am: 10-26-2006 10:28 AM
