Screen Clutter

(Screen Clutter)

Most people know what a traditional radar screen looks like. An operator sits at a station and watches return. On the screen are the symbols for air traffic in the area, including airline, flight number, altitude and speed. Other contacts are other airplanes, and the same data is displayed. If one wanted an ideal picture, look at the Alex Haley novel/movie Airport, where air traffic control and flight operations were able to operate despite a once every ten years snowstorm and a bomb going off on a Rome-bound flight.

However, that ideal is not necessarily the case. Airport was re-leased in 1970. In the years since, the development of air travel proceeded apace. The government agency most involved in this process has been the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The Agency has a dual role in promoting Amercian air transport but also to regulate it after an accident would require a design change to an aircraft.

That being said, the FAA, like every other federal agency, is subject to the same bureaucracy and inertia. The core mission of the Agency was necessarily expanded to reflect the expanded to better mirror the social justice priorities of the Biden Administration. Hundreds of air traffic controllers were summarily dis-missed or released over covid concerns. A consequence of this new direction was tragically demonstrated last week with the collision of an American CRJ and an Army Black Hawk just short of Reagan National Airport (DCA). 

Under normal circumstances, DCA would have a fully staffed control tower, at least one controller would be handling arrivals and another with departures. On the night in question, only a single controller was on duty in the tower, and as traffic was one aircraft was departing and the approach of the Army UH-60 and the American CRJ. When the contact happened, what was the picture in the tower ?

The other controller that had also been on duty had departed at the end of his shift. In the approaching aircraft, fixed wing and rotor, how were they in contact with the controller ? What frequencies were each aircraft using ? If only one controller was present, but on two separate channels, it would have been problematic for the lone controller to communicate with both aircraft before the crash.

What then is the remedy ? Each air disaster results in countermeasures, so the tragedy does not repeat. One thing that could be done is to re-call the latent air controllers to return to control towers and traffic centers. Anyone who flies today oftentimes experiences delays, some of excessive duration. The shortage of air traffic controllers has been a contributing factor.

Air travel has never been a laboratory other than safe transport. Attempts to make it otherwise amounts to nothing more than screen clutter.