Air Traffic Control

This Site Is About Air Traffic Control

Perhaps the first question many people ask is, “what's ATC like?” (right after they say, “that must be stressful.”) Click on the “What's ATC Like?” tab in the menu at the left to read my version of an explanation.

I have some good news and some bad news—the bad news is that location identifiers (such as familiar airport codes) are the lingua franca of ATC. To make stories concise and readable, I’ve used them throughout. I almost can’t help myself. The good news is that unless I’ve missed a few here and there, all of them can be decoded by rolling your mouse over the identifier.

At your leisure, you can choose other links to follow to read short tales of people and events I experienced, a longer series detailing my ATC life in controlling traffic in four decades, and why I named this site what I did.

Caveat

Material at this site is based on my experience from April 1968 (when I was hired) and before, until December 1997 (when I retired) and later. I worked at three facilities. I had a fairly thorough working knowledge of those facilities. Things which did or did not happen at other facilities aren't generally part of my working knowledge. This is not a resource site except as it reflects my memory (while usually pretty good, sometimes can be skewed) of what I saw first hand. I found out as recently as late March, 2009, that my perspective of an issue I experienced in 1968 and which I perceived as national in scope, was in fact, local.