Potomac Tracon Tour

[rsteele]

I was lucky enough to get a tour of the Potomac (Washington DC area) air traffic control center today. It's quite something. If anyone gets the chance to tour such a facility jump on it. I think tours are annouced via email if you sign up for the FAA safety bullitins.

This facility services airspace from Baltimore Md, south to Andrews Air Force base and west to Richmond Va. The center breaks up responsibilities into thee regions, roughly west of DC, northeast of DC towards Baltimore and south. Within the regions air space is broken up so that each controller has repsonsiblity for 20 aircraft. Staffing is adjusted during the day and during the week to keep it at about that level. Aircraft are handed off from controller to controller with a simple but possitive method. The control room is a large circular room with controller work stations lining the outside wall, supervisor work stations are in the next ring inward and the boss's space (don't remember the name of that position, shift supervisor or some such) is in the middle.

Each controller has three computer screens; the main radar screen, and two auxillary screens on which they can display a lot of other info.
The auxillary screens are touch screens while the radar sceen is track ball driven. The radar screen has the sort of map overlays you might expect, each can be turned on and off independently; airspaces, road, rivers etc. I help create these sorts of displays for a living and I can tell you that this is very sophisticated stuff. I don't know what computers are under the covers, but the workstations are first rate.

A few things of note.

They have a very complete database of aircraft at their fingertips. If you get busy during an emergency and need some piece of information about your plane, there is a good possibility the controller can give it to you. This also lets them look up information to help keep seperation and assign altitudes.

They have a database of controllers who are also pilots, so if you need to talk to another pilot for some reason, they should be able to hunt someone down in a hurry and get them on the radio.

An aircraft that is flying at 90 degrees to the radar signal (tangent to a circle surrounding the antenna) may be invisible to radar. This is one reason ATC may ask you to make a seemingly pointless turn.

It takes months to train a new controller. They have simulators there and a student must be able to handle 110% of the maximum work load before being let loose with live data. They must have all the airspace memorized along with elevations and I hate to think what else.

There was a big group of pilots the invaded the facility today while (of course) it was operational. This had to be a big pain for the the controllers working there, but everybody was as nice as could be.

Controllers face mandatory retirement at 56. And I though 60 for airline pilots was bad...

Ron