Consolidated TRACON Operations Room to begin his workweek, he felt as though nothing and everything had changed. He flashed his key card at the scanner mounted outside the door and flinched like always as the annoying, high-pitched beep sounded, signifying the reader had recognized the chip embedded inside his ID card and he was permitted to enter. A tiny LED on the card reader changed color from red to green when the chip was recognized, and Nick had always thought that visual signal should be enough.
The door swung open noiselessly, and Nick stepped into the massive room. Built in 2004 to house four separate radar approach control facilities, the building was currently home to just two--
the controllers formerly quartered at Logan International Airport in Boston and those from Manchester-Boston Regional Airport in Manchester, New Hampshire. This meant that the majority of the radar scopes placed side by side around the outside of the room--
shaped more or less in a fair approximation of a giant Roller Derby rink--were unmanned, giving it the look of an air traffic control ghost town of sorts.
Glancing to the right as he entered, Nick saw the controllers in the Manchester Area, at the moment operating with three radar sectors plus a flight data position. Each controller sitting at a scope was responsible for his or her own sector within the Manchester airspace; that is, a slice of the airspace "pie" belonging to Manchester was delegated to each position.
The flight data controller answered landline calls, handled coordination for the radar sectors when they were too busy to do it themselves, and took care of paperwork. Controllers rotated among positions and most tried their best to avoid flight data, which was almost universally considered boring.
Nick walked toward his own area of specialization: the Boston Area, located in the rear of the Operations Room. At the moment it was running with five radar sectors plus one flight data position.
Within the giant oval of the Operations Room was what controllers referred to as the Inner Ring--a console built approximately ten feet inside the room, running in a complete circuit around the oval like the radar scopes but with five openings, each roughly four feet in width, allowing people access into and through the Inner Ring.
The Inner Ring was where management generally congre-gated. The workspace for each area's watch supervisor was inside the Inner Ring, and the traffic management coordinators--tasked with the responsibility of ensuring a smooth flow of traffic into and out of the facility's airspace--worked inside it as well.
As Nick walked toward the back of the Ops Room, skirting the Inner Ring, he glanced at the giant plasma screens placed high on the walls above the radar scopes circling the room. Displayed on one screen was a depiction of the equipment monitoring the status of all the approach aids serving both major airports in the airspace, Manchester and Boston. On another, a real-time display of all the traffic inbound to each airport from across the country and overseas, and still another screen showed the status board indicating which runway configurations were in use at each airport and what pertinent NOTAMs, if any, were affecting the daily operation.
NOTAMs, or Notices to Airmen, were constantly updated bulletins intended to keep pilots and controllers abreast of the latest information affecting aviation--from equipment outages to weather alerts regarding pending thunderstorms or turbulence or airborne icing--applying to specific areas of the country.
To the uninitiated, the darkened Ops Room looked impressive and intimidating, with its electronic equipment and flashing lights and buzzers and alarms. Even to people who moved thousands of airplanes through a congested chunk of airspace every day, it was pretty impressive when you actually stopped and thought about it, which controllers rarely had the time or the inclination to do. The Ops Room was just
The door swung open noiselessly, and Nick stepped into the massive room. Built in 2004 to house four separate radar approach control facilities, the building was currently home to just two--
the controllers formerly quartered at Logan International Airport in Boston and those from Manchester-Boston Regional Airport in Manchester, New Hampshire. This meant that the majority of the radar scopes placed side by side around the outside of the room--
shaped more or less in a fair approximation of a giant Roller Derby rink--were unmanned, giving it the look of an air traffic control ghost town of sorts.
Glancing to the right as he entered, Nick saw the controllers in the Manchester Area, at the moment operating with three radar sectors plus a flight data position. Each controller sitting at a scope was responsible for his or her own sector within the Manchester airspace; that is, a slice of the airspace "pie" belonging to Manchester was delegated to each position.
The flight data controller answered landline calls, handled coordination for the radar sectors when they were too busy to do it themselves, and took care of paperwork. Controllers rotated among positions and most tried their best to avoid flight data, which was almost universally considered boring.
Nick walked toward his own area of specialization: the Boston Area, located in the rear of the Operations Room. At the moment it was running with five radar sectors plus one flight data position.
Within the giant oval of the Operations Room was what controllers referred to as the Inner Ring--a console built approximately ten feet inside the room, running in a complete circuit around the oval like the radar scopes but with five openings, each roughly four feet in width, allowing people access into and through the Inner Ring.
The Inner Ring was where management generally congre-gated. The workspace for each area's watch supervisor was inside the Inner Ring, and the traffic management coordinators--tasked with the responsibility of ensuring a smooth flow of traffic into and out of the facility's airspace--worked inside it as well.
As Nick walked toward the back of the Ops Room, skirting the Inner Ring, he glanced at the giant plasma screens placed high on the walls above the radar scopes circling the room. Displayed on one screen was a depiction of the equipment monitoring the status of all the approach aids serving both major airports in the airspace, Manchester and Boston. On another, a real-time display of all the traffic inbound to each airport from across the country and overseas, and still another screen showed the status board indicating which runway configurations were in use at each airport and what pertinent NOTAMs, if any, were affecting the daily operation.
NOTAMs, or Notices to Airmen, were constantly updated bulletins intended to keep pilots and controllers abreast of the latest information affecting aviation--from equipment outages to weather alerts regarding pending thunderstorms or turbulence or airborne icing--applying to specific areas of the country.
To the uninitiated, the darkened Ops Room looked impressive and intimidating, with its electronic equipment and flashing lights and buzzers and alarms. Even to people who moved thousands of airplanes through a congested chunk of airspace every day, it was pretty impressive when you actually stopped and thought about it, which controllers rarely had the time or the inclination to do. The Ops Room was just
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