At the last minute, I was able to add myself to the Oakland Center
tour that Walter arranged with his retiring neighbor.
The short version: It was awesome.
The long version:
I've never visited an ATC facility before, and in my time flying with
NCSA, I've only needed to contact ATC once, back when we tried to do a
transponder check on 81C by contacting Norcal. When Walter sent out
the invite, I couldn't resist seeing the other side of the mic.
ZOA manages airspace from about halfway down the California coast up
to almost the Oregon border, plus a great deal of airspace out over
the Pacific Ocean. When you put in all the Pacific territory, it
manages about 11% of the earth's surface. I was surprised to learn
that missile test launches are routinely communicated to ZOA so they
can vector traffic around splashdown zones.
The highlight of the trip was a chance to talk with controllers in the
sector that handled traffic in the Reno area. The controller working
the Tahoe/Reno sector was not very busy. For quite some time, he had
a few VFR planes doing flight following, a couple of commercial
flights, and some military activity. (For some reason, the F-16s
moved across his scope really fast.) Walter, Terence, and I had a
chance to talk with him for quite some time in between work with the
aircraft in "his" airspace.
Each controller has a primary radar scope. IFR aircraft show up very
clearly, with a flight number and altitude. Computer systems work to
hand off aircraft between controllers and even between ATC centers,
and the computers automate the handoff. When an aircraft is tracked
using only primary radar returns, it's a small blip on the scope, and
it can come and go depending on whether terrain blocks the radar
returns. Sometimes terrain even causes radar returns, so at one point
the controller pointed at a blip on his scope and said "this is always
there, so I think it's a radar return off terrain." The scope did
have outlines for the wave windows near Tahoe, and had lines for the
localizers on each runway at Reno.
To become a sector controller, the training takes more than a year.
Before getting to work on your own, you have to be able to draw the
map of your area from memory, be familiar with daily weather patterns
as well as seasonal variations, and know the major flows through the
sector. Watching controllers at work, their experience clearly showed
through. I found the display to be kind of a jumble, and it was much
easier for me to track transponder returns than primary returns
because the transponder signals are displayed much more notably on the
radar screen. We did ask the controller what we could do as glider
pilots to help him do his job, and he said that transponder-equipped
aircraft are much more visible, and that visibility translated into
better separation. If he sees a glider operating out of Minden
intercepting the localizer to Reno, it's easy to send traffic around
something he knows is a plane at a certain altitude. The example he
gave is that if a glider is at 16,000 feet, he can hold a plane
descending into Reno at a temporarily higher altitude for separation
(17,000?) or give it a slight turn around the glider.
It was a great way to spend a morning (though I'm not sure my boss
would have agreed, which is why I didn't give him a choice). I'm glad
I was able to go before doing my first flying in the mountains this
summer.
Before you ask: there are no pictures. The pictures on Wikipedia are
pretty accurate, though. The lighting is fairly low to improve
readability of scopes, and it kind of reminded me of the way a Vegas
casino tries to keep the same light regardless of the actual time
outside. (Just way more important to life and safety than a Vegas
casino...)
Matthew
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