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Posted By:
Hal Brown
Date Posted:
Apr 9, 2007
Description:
The Potomac TRACON is hidden back here. It's a consolidated TRACON, combining the areas that used to be served by four or five ordinary ones.
They very kindly opened it up for visitors this day. Alas, no cameras, no cell phones with cameras, no nothing like that--so this is the best photo I could get.
It's a new facility with all-new equipment. But they still keep it dark inside. I asked and one controller said, 'I like it this way,' but declined to say why.
I listened in for a while on a conversation between two controllers sitting at adjacent stations. They were chatting about the weekend plans, women, lots of things like that, but every so often one or the other would say something to a pilot. I never saw them key their mikes in the darkened room, so it was just a bit spooky. There was no way to tell when one began speaking whether he was going to address the guy next to him or someone in an airplane, and I kept wondering how they managed to keep track of what was going on. As if controlling air traffic wasn't enough, they had to take care of each other's personal lives too.
They all seemed terribly competent. But most of them seemed to have no conception--that I could notice--of how their work looks to pilots who are flying in the area, especially those flying into the DC ADIZ. To the controllers, the ADIZ and all seemed to be about as complex as a shopping mall parking lot. (I think shopping mall parking lots are places of peril.)
Date Taken:
Apr 9, 2007
Place Taken:
PTO TRACON
Owner:
Don Maxwell
File Name:
PTO_TRACON_3014.jpg - Photo HTML
Full size - <img src="/show.php?splash=SZV930000h">
Medium - <img src="/show.php?splash=SZV930000m">
Thumbnail - <img src="/show.php?splash=SZV930000s">
Category:
23, Max Pix
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Click on photo to view the original size. |
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Read what others had to say:
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Larry J. Reynolds - Apr 10,2007
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Don, I used to feel the same way when I visited our police communications center in that I could not tell who they were talking to at any one time. Dispatchers keyed the mike with their foot and were so accustomed to multitasking that experienced dispatchers could easily carry on a conversation with someone in the room and pay attention to the radio at the same time.
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John Spratt - Apr 10,2007
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'Pushing Tin' starring John Cusak, Billy Joe Thornton, Angelina Jolie, Cate Blanchett...etc. is a funny movie about air traffic controllers and what they do at work and their time off.
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