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Confessions of a New Corporate Pilot
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In the Citation III Confessions of a New Corporate Pilot
Life would be sweet, I thought, now that I’d successfully passed my Cessna Citation III (CE-650) type rating check ride (this was a few years back). It meant I’d be flying my first swept-wing jet. Surprisingly, my first day at the new job at Chicago Executive Airport (PWK) would also be the first time I’d been up close to a real Citation III since all the training and even my check ride happened in FlightSafety’s full-motion simulator.
From my research, though, I knew the 650’s cabin was roomy enough for eight, and its rocket-like performance was nothing short of spectacular with a VMO (maximum operating Mach) of Mach 0.85 and 39,000 feet on a standard day. In its day, M.83 was pretty fast. That meant we could make the West Coast out of PWK with four people in the back. I learned quickly, too, that the 650’s awesome performance meant I needed to stay much farther ahead of the airplane than I’d had to in the much slower Citation II (CE-550) I’d been flying in a 12-pilot charter department.
A privately held corporation owned this Citation III and I was the junior of three pilots. The chief pilot, my new boss, brought experience from several other flight departments, while the other pilot, I’ll call him Tom well, I was never really too sure where Tom had come from because the guy kept to himself as much as possible and wasn’t the chatty type. That made three-hour flights long when the entire conversation at FL390 ended with an occasional shrug of the shoulders.
But who cared what one guy acted like, I thought. I was there to learn how to fit into a flight department that needed another pilot on their team. Just like in charter flying, my job was to keep the people in the back happy. I came to know these passengers much better than we ever did in the charter world. These folks sometimes invited the flight crew to their home on Nantucket when we overnighted there.
The Interview
Looking back on this job now though, I guess the 10-minute interview the chief pilot and I engaged in before he offered me the job should have been a tip-off that maybe something was a little odd. But with a four-year-old daughter growing up at home, the chance to dump my charter department pager that always seemed to ring at 2 a.m. beckoned hypnotically.
Cessna Citation CE-650 Corporate line training began right away with me flying in all kinds of weather, where I regularly rotated flying left seat with the chief pilot and Tom. Having flown left seat on the Citation II, I wasn’t brand new to jets, just speedy ones.
After a few months, however, I began to notice a few operational oddities that started making me a little uncomfortable. Some sketchy flight planning and questions I asked were sometimes answered with annoyed expressions. If I appeared not to agree, someone might ask if I’d finished all the Jepp revisions (In those days there were no electronic subscriptions. Updates were handled by hand). I found the best solution for getting along seemed to be to just shut up and fly the airplane. Ignoring those distractions did help me pay closer attention to the little things that made my flying the jet smoother.
Then again … On one flight back from Cincinnati (CVG), I was flying left-seat with the chief pilot in the right. I wanted to add fuel before we left since the Chicago weather was questionable, but the boss overruled me explaining, “We’re fat on fuel.”I didn’t say anything. As we approached PWK, the ATIS reported the weather had worsened, considerably. The Swiss cheese holes began to align when Chicago Approach dumped us early. We ended up burning more fuel than planned. I flew the ILS right down to minimums, but my scan uncomfortably included the fuel gauges every few seconds. After a safe landing, we taxied in with 700 pounds of Jet-A, not much for an airplane that burns 1,800 pounds an hour down low. What if we’d missed at Chicago Executive Airport and needed to run for Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport I wondered? We’d have arrived on fumes. The boss looked at me after we shut down. “Don’t tell me that whole thing bothered you. It all turned out fine, didn’t it?” (more…)
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Remembering Gordon Baxter: Bax Seat was a Flying Magazine Reader Favorite
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(Reposted by request)
Each time I stand near my desk, my eyes naturally focus on the framed cover of the August 1983 Flying magazine. Below it is page 100, the “I Learned About Flying from That” (ILAFFT), where my first column appeared. On it, the author of Bax Seat, scrawled in brown ink, “To my friend Rob Mark. His story, my push. Gordon Baxter, August 5, 1983.”
Many months before, Gordon Baxter had given me the Flying editor’s phone number. When I rang with my brief pitch, all I heard was “yes.” I suddenly had an assignment for my first column. That 1983 issue was the first, but not the last, time my name and stories appeared in the aviation industry’s iconic magazine. That same issue also ran a pilot report about the then-new Cessna Citation III, an aircraft I later added to my list of type ratings. Looking back, there were so many aspects of my aviation career that came to life around Bax and that August 1983 issue, not the least of which was that we became friends.
Gordon Baxter, Bax as he preferred folks call him, helped shape my career as an aviation journalist like no one before him and only a few people since. The author of 13 books, Bax’s own magazine writing career at Flying spanned 25 years. His monthly column, Bax Seat, focused on vivid descriptions of his adventures. It was known simply as “Bax Seat.” Did I mention he was also a long-time radio personality in Beaumont, Texas, another interest we shared.
A Bit of Bax’s Background
I first met Bax in the mid-1970s. He brought his show, his act, or whatever the heck he called his evening of storytelling, to the Stick and Rudder Flying Club at Waukegan Airport. I was a tower controller not far away at Palwaukee Airport. Having been an avid Flying reader since high school, I switched shifts with another controller so I wouldn’t miss the event. Bax captured the audience for over an hour with stories from his flying career and his columns that often alternately “em rollin’ in the aisles” with gut-wrenching laughter and an emotional Texas-guy style that also brought tears to many an eye. Another way to think of Bax’s storytelling night was like an evening of improv but all about flying and airplanes.
Born in Port Arthur, Texas, he learned to fly after World War II following his stint as a B-17 turret gunner. Bax was no professional pilot—just a guy with a private certificate, an instrument rating, and eventually his beloved Mooney. On the back cover of one of his books, appropriately titled Bax Seat, Flying’s Stephan Wilkinson said “Bax tries to pass himself off as a pilot, but don’t believe him. He never could fly worth a damn. But Gordon feels airplanes, loves and honors them in ways that the rest of us are ashamed to admit. And he’s certainly one of the few romantics who can express what he feels so perfectly.” I couldn’t have written that myself, but I, too, felt it.
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Making the Brazilian ATR-72 Spin
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Note: This story was corrected on August 10th at 10:23 am, thanks to the help of a sharp-eyed reader.
Making an ATR-72 Spin
I wasn’t in Brazil on Friday afternoon, but I saw the post on Twitter or X (or whatever you call it) showing a Brazil ATR-72, Voepass Airlines flight 2283, rotating in a spin as it plunged to the ground near Sao Paulo from its 17,000-foot cruising altitude. All 61 people aboard perished in the ensuing crash and fire. A timeline from FlightRadar 24 indicates that the fall only lasted about a minute, so the aircraft was clearly out of control. Industry research shows Loss of Control in Flight (LOCI) continues to be responsible for more fatalities worldwide than any other kind of aircraft accident.
The big question is why the crew lost control of this airplane. The ADS-B data from FlightRadar 24 does offer a couple of possible clues. The ATR’s speed declined during the descent rather than increased, which means the aircraft’s wing was probably stalled. The ATR’s airfoil had exceeded its critical angle of attack and lacked sufficient lift to remain airborne. Add to this the rotation observed, and the only answer is a spin.
Can a Large Airplane Spin?
The simple answer is yes. If you induce rotation to almost any aircraft while the wing is stalled, it can spin, even an aircraft as large as the ATR-72. By the way, the largest of the ATR models, the 600, weighs nearly 51,000 pounds.
Of course, investigators will ask why the ATR’s wing was stalled. It could have been related to a failed engine or ice on the wings or tailplane. (more…)
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How the FAA Let Remote Tower Technology Slip Right Through Its Fingers
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In June 2023, the FAA published a 167-page document outlining the agency’s desire to replace dozens of 40-year-old airport control towers with new environmentally friendly brick-and-mortar structures. These towers are, of course, where hundreds of air traffic controllers ply their trade … ensuring the aircraft within their local airspace are safely separated from each other during landing and takeoff.
The FAA’s report was part of President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act enacted on November 15, 2021. That bill set aside a whopping $25 billion spread across five years to cover the cost of replacing those aging towers. The agency said it considered a number of alternatives about how to spend that $5 billion each year, rather than on brick and mortar buildings.
One alternative addressed only briefly before rejecting it was a relatively new concept called a Remote Tower, originally created by Saab in Europe in partnership with the Virginia-based VSATSLab Inc. The European technology giant has been successfully running Remote Towers in place of the traditional buildings in Europe for almost 10 years. One of Saab’s more well-known Remote Tower sites is at London City Airport. London also plans to create a virtual backup ATC facility at London Heathrow, the busiest airport in Europe.
A remote tower and its associated technology replace the traditional 60-70 foot glass domed control tower building you might see at your local airport, but it doesn’t eliminate any human air traffic controllers or their roles in keeping aircraft separated.
Max Trescott photo Inside a Remote Tower Operation
In place of a normal control tower building, the airport erects a small steel tower or even an 8-inch diameter pole perhaps 20-40 feet high, similar to a radio or cell phone tower. Dozens of high-definition cameras are attached to the new Remote Tower’s structure, each aimed at an arrival or departure path, as well as various ramps around the airport.
Using HD cameras, controllers can zoom in on any given point within the camera’s range, say an aircraft on final approach. The only way to accomplish that in a control tower today is if the controller picks up a pair of binoculars. The HD cameras also offer infrared capabilities to allow for better-than-human visuals, especially during bad weather or at night.
The next step in constructing a remote tower is locating the control room where the video feeds will terminate. Instead of the round glass room perched atop a standard control tower, imagine a semi-circular room located at ground level. Inside that room, the walls are lined with 14, 55-inch high-definition video screens hung next to each other with the wider portion of the screen running top to bottom.
After connecting the video feeds, the compression technology manages to consolidate 360 degrees of viewing area into a 220-degree spread across the video screens. That creates essentially the same view of the entire airport that a controller would normally see out the windows of the tower cab without the need to move their head more than 220 degrees. Another Remote Tower benefit is that each aircraft within visual range can be tagged with that aircraft’s tail number, just as it might if the controller were looking at a radar screen. (more…)
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Does Airline Safety Correlate with a Diverse Pilot Population?
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Capt. Beatty A disinformation campaign falsely links “DEI” to airline accidents – let’s check the facts.
By Capt. Jenny Beatty
There is no extant literature examining this question, so I accessed various sources to compile available data. I researched U.S. scheduled air carriers from the earliest days of aviation to today, including the composition of the airline pilot profession with regards to white, Black, male, and female-identified pilots and statistics on passenger and crew fatalities from scheduled air carrier accidents (those from intentional acts were omitted).
Scheduled flight operations have carried the U.S. mail since 1911 and passengers since 1914, but records of scheduled air carrier accidents and fatalities were not kept prior to 1927, as far as I could determine. What the available data does show is that fatal accidents were fairly common for the nascent airline industry. However, scheduled air carrier flights were few, and the aircraft carried small numbers of passengers. For example, from 1930 through 1939, there were a total of 94 accidents resulting in 349 fatalities.
The Data
The fatal accident rate was also relatively high in the 1950s through the 1970s, as jet aircraft were introduced that carried larger numbers of passengers Pilot training and procedures did not keep pace with advancements in technology and operations. From 1970 through 1979, there were 56 accidents resulting in 2303 fatalities.
As for the airline pilot profession, it was all-male and all-white for the first six decades of air travel, with the brief exception of one white woman pilot hired in 1934 who ended up quitting when she wasn’t permitted to join the pilot union or to fly in adverse weather, despite being as qualified as the men pilots.
In 1963, an airline hired a Black pilot for the first time, and he joined the 18,310 airline pilots and flight engineers employed by all the U.S. airlines at the time. Within two years, there were a total of four Black male airline pilots. The profession remained virtually all-male until 1973 when four white women pilots were hired by four different airlines in the same year. In 1978, when the first Black woman airline pilot was hired, there were approximately 110 Black men and 77 white women airline pilots among the 35,768 airline pilots and flight engineers.
Today, U.S. airlines continue to grow and hire qualified Black and female pilots. However, the representation and rate of hiring are not as high as many perceive it to be. The profession is currently estimated to be about 92 percent white and 95 percent male. Black women airline pilots are scarce; my independent research estimates that their number are 120 in total or about 0.1 percent (one-tenth of one percent) of all U.S. airline pilots. (more…)
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How the FAA Let Remote Tower Technology Slip Right Through Its Fingers
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Ed note: With all the 2025 chaos in Washington focused on saving money and streamlining ATC, let’s see if anyone at DOGE again notices this time that the FAA completely blew past an opportunity to engage some new technology while saving millions by NOT replacing old ATC control tower buildings. There’s still time to fix this problem. Rob
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In June 2023, the FAA published a 167-page document outlining the agency’s desire to replace dozens of 40-year-old airport control towers with new environmentally friendly brick-and-mortar structures. These towers are, of course, where hundreds of air traffic controllers ply their trade … ensuring the aircraft within their local airspace are safely separated from each other during landing and takeoff.The FAA’s report was part of President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act enacted on November 15, 2021. That bill set aside a whopping $25 billion spread across five years to cover the cost of replacing those aging towers. The agency said it considered a number of alternatives about how to spend that $5 billion each year, rather than on brick and mortar buildings.
One alternative addressed only briefly before rejecting it was a relatively new concept called a Remote Tower, originally created by Saab in Europe in partnership with the Virginia-based VSATSLab Inc. The European technology giant has been successfully running Remote Towers in place of the traditional buildings in Europe for almost 10 years. One of Saab’s more well-known Remote Tower sites is at London City Airport. London also plans to create a virtual backup ATC facility at London Heathrow, the busiest airport in Europe.
Max Trescott photo A remote tower and its associated technology replace the traditional 60-70 foot glass domed control tower building you might see at your local airport, but it doesn’t eliminate any human air traffic controllers or their roles in keeping aircraft separated.
Inside a Remote Tower Operation
In place of a normal control tower building, the airport erects a small steel tower or even an 8-inch diameter pole perhaps 20-40 feet high, similar to a radio or cell phone tower. Dozens of high-definition cameras are attached to the new Remote Tower’s structure, each aimed at an arrival or departure path, as well as various ramps around the airport.
Using HD cameras, controllers can zoom in on any given point within the camera’s range, say an aircraft on final approach. The only way to accomplish that in a control tower today is if the controller picks up a pair of binoculars. The HD cameras also offer infrared capabilities to allow for better-than-human visuals, especially during bad weather or at night.
The next step in constructing a remote tower is locating the control room where the video feeds will terminate. Instead of the round glass room perched atop a standard control tower, imagine a semi-circular room located at ground level. Inside that room, the walls are lined with 14, 55-inch high-definition video screens hung next to each other with the wider portion of the screen running top to bottom.
After connecting the video feeds, the compression technology manages to consolidate 360 degrees of viewing area into a 220-degree spread across the video screens. That creates essentially the same view of the entire airport that a controller would normally see out the windows of the tower cab without the need to move their head more than 220 degrees. Another Remote Tower benefit is that each aircraft within visual range can be tagged with that aircraft’s tail number, just as it might if the controller were looking at a radar screen.
Why Erect a Remote Tower?
Cost, for one.
A Remote Tower system can be constructed for a fraction of the dollars required to erect a traditional tower. No bricks, no mortar, no glass, and hence much less labor to make it all operational. That makes them a perfect fit for airports that need to replace their current aging towers or for low-to-medium traffic airports that might currently have no ATC operations at all. Do the math and it’s pretty easy to see that the dollars saved from that $5 billion allotment each year to create a Remote Tower would be significant.
Another benefit is that a Remote Tower can be constructed and become operational in much less time than it takes to build a traditional control tower. This makes a Remote Tower system easily applicable to small airports that might benefit from ATC services but not have enough traffic to warrant controllers living locally to staff the facility. Thanks to the technology involved, a Remote Tower’s video feeds can be piped into a control room located any distance from the airport. The room could be across the runway, across the road, or across town. That’s why a remote tower could fit well at those low-traffic volume airports.
Of course, there’s a but coming.
Remote Towers are not yet certified by the FAA in the US.
Saab engineers were in fact, close to receiving that needed approval earlier this year until the FAA in June pulled the plug on the test site located at Leesburg Executive Airport (KJYO) just outside Washington D.C. A Saab partnership spokesman explained the choice of JYO as a test site. “We zeroed in on Leesburg because of its complex airspace and the amount of traffic, recognizing as a risk-reward issue here. Every time we briefed somebody about the system, they would say, Oh, yeah, but you’re only doing 15,000 to 20,000 operations and it’s in Sweden. So, we picked the busiest airport we could find in the Northeast US. That became our benchmark.”
When the FAA explained the end of the Remote Tower at Leesburg, they pointed the finger at Saab for failing to prove the efficacy of their Remote Tower system. After diving into the available public documents about the Leesburg Remote Tower, they seem to tell a different story.
As Sherlock Holmes, the world’s greatest consulting detective would say, the game’s afoot.What Happened at Leesburg
Back in 2015, Saab approached the town of Leesburg in search of a US test site for their then-new Remote Tower technology. If Saab’s test was successful at the non-controlled JYO, that airport would soon begin receiving actual air traffic control services in place of pilots making calls in the blind while attempting to avoid other aircraft.
At the time, Saab again already had several remote towers in operation at airports in the UK and Sweden. London City Airport a busy single runway airport, is now operated completely using the Remote Tower concept. LCY has a rich mix of business aviation and airline traffic in excess of 80,000 takeoffs and landings annually.
As a precursor to installing that full Remote Tower system at Leesburg, the FAA in 2016 wheeled in a portable control tower staffed by contract controllers who began offering ATC services in the newly named Leesburg Maneuvering Area that sits beneath Washington’s Special Use Airspace. Most of the construction costs for the remote tower were covered by Saab. Once the Remote Tower system became operational at Leesburg, the ATC control room was actually operated from an unused airport conference room.
Following FAA guidelines outlined in an Advisory Circular, Leesburg’s Remote Tower ran through a range of increasingly complex tests between 2016, 17, and on into 2018. Early on in the evaluation process, the FAA told Saab in a memo, “that all safety performance targets have been met through all periods of operational use of the Saab, Inc., The Saab RT system is approved for provisional ATC services at JYO.” The FAA did however restrict the Remote Tower operations to single-runway airports like JYO with a runway length of no more than 5500 feet.
Local Leesburg users enthusiastically greeted the airport’s new Remote Tower ATC operation. Before system testing began, annual traffic counts at JYO hovered around 53,000. By the time the Remote Tower system’s plug was pulled in June of this year, air traffic had climbed to 79,000 takeoffs and landings, a 45 percent increase. JYO is home to two FBOs, five flight training operations, five flying clubs, and two additional aviation businesses. Leesburg Airport’s manager Scott Coffman said many new aircraft have chosen JYO as their base, including several jets.
In September 2021, the FAA decided it was time to move the Remote Tower certification up the agency’s food chain. It was about this time that the Saab partnership learned the next group of people at FAA who would be helping to certify the Remote Tower system were engineers in the agency’s Tech Ops division. These people are the ones who normally certify new aircraft and new aviation technology. Saab said as it turned out, “Many of them [Tech Ops engineers], admitted they hadn’t dealt with air traffic systems before.”
Prior to the day when Saab and the FAA began to butt heads at Leesburg, Saab engineers had been working to meet the criteria the FAA had earlier provided them. Then on February 18th, 2022, the FAA published a new advisory circular titled ”REMOTE TOWER (RT) SYSTEMS FOR NON-FEDERAL APPLICATIONS,” in which the agency altered the requirements Saab would need to meet in order to have its system certified.
Essentially, the FAA moved the goalposts on the engineers at Saab. A Saab spokesman said the remote tower at Leesburg, “wasn’t designed with some of these [new] technical requirements and design verification requirements. If we were starting a brand new development, sure we could comply with what they’re asking for. But to reverse engineer our former design processes … got to be more and more burdensome.” Saab said the company believed reverse engineering the current design might have consumed an additional two to three years and many millions of additional dollars.
In a letter to the FAA from Saab dated Feb 7, 2023, Michael Gerry, VP of surveillance systems said, “Saab, Inc. has been working on [the] Remote Tower with the FAA, Leesburg Airport, and the State of Virginia for eight years. Over the last two years, we have been engaged with the FAA Technical Operations Team to achieve System Design Approval (SDA) for the Saab Remote Tower system. We concluded detailed reviews of three key planning documents that were first submitted in early 2022: Systems Engineering Management Plan, System Safety Plan, and Software Approval Plan. We appreciate the FAA support and the effort of your team to help us learn the approval process for non-Federal systems. Given our better understanding of the newly defined SDA process as captured in the February 2022 Advisory Circular, Saab will no longer pursue approval of the system currently baselined and operating at Leesburg. Instead, we will focus our efforts on assessing the impact of the SDA requirements on our future system offering, which will form the basis for a possible technical refresh of the Leesburg system baseline. We expect this assessment to take several months, after which time we understand that we will need to resubmit our SDA application to the FAA, along with the appropriate intake documents, to reflect our updated system baseline.”
Despite the years of error-free ATC operations using the Remote Tower system at Leesburg, the FAA also demanded Saab build another version of the Remote Tower at the FAA’s Technical Center in Atlantic City. How this new site at a completely unrelated airport would assist the FAA in certifying the Remote Tower was never explained.
In an attempt to salvage the operating Remote Tower at Leesburg, Saab petitioned the FAA, “to consider any and all means to extend the operational viability decision for the current system, including potentially providing a limited SDA, which would allow the current ATC services at Leesburg to continue.” The agency politely declined.
Adding salt to the wound, On February 21, 2023, the FAA made a presentation to the Leesburg Airport commission, explaining the specific mistakes Saab made during its efforts to gain system design approval for the Remote Tower. The agency said, “Early FAA efforts on Remote Towers determined the approval and operation of these systems should be handled under the contract tower program due to their potential safety impacts, like hazardous and misleading information being provided to controllers and the legal liabilities the airport sponsor and the FAA could be in for if there were any accidents of incidents.” Again, in the five years of testing, no ATC errors were ever reported. The February meeting also detailed the next steps required to archive the Remote Tower project files, in addition to disposal instructions for what it considered unnecessary Saab documentation.
In early March of this year, the FAA sent a confusing, almost contradictory letter to Leesburg mayor Kelly Burk explaining that, “We at the FAA understand and appreciate your frustration with the decision to cease remote tower services at JYO, but for safety reasons, there was no other choice to be made. JYO has a solid safety track record operating as a non-towered airport, and we expect that to continue.” How the agency expected to maintain the airport’s safety record after ATC services were withdrawn was also not explained at the time.
A British Airways Embraer with a tower in the distance So why pressure Saab to pull the plug on a system that was working well at Leesburg by creating unrealistic demands for the company? No one is completely certain of the FAA’s motivation, but that 167-page guide to building brick-and-mortar buildings may have been involved. About 18 months ago, the FAA also held a webinar explaining the agency’s process to begin replacing those old towers with the more environmentally friendly ones. They also introduced the architects the agency planned to use for the work. I asked the FAA employee in charge of the session if the agency would be considering Remote Towers as a tactical alternative. My question was met with a resounding no. The woman told me Remote Tower technology was not mature enough, a rather odd assessment despite the operational record at Leesburg. Surprisingly, the FAA’s FY23 business plan mentions the Remote Tower idea in a few places such as noting an internal target to update an operational safety assessment in April of this year, just a few months after the agency had made the decision to shut down the Leesburg experiment. The plan also strangely calls for the agency to update Saab’s Remote Tower Compliance Matrix by the end of September, again something unlikely to occur now that the JYO project was halted.
The Aftermath
In February of this year, the Town of Leesburg issued an update on the Remote Tower’s status. The document confirmed that the FAA was canceling the RT program at JYO despite providing ATC services to airport users 10 hours a day since June 2018. The RT shut down completely in the middle of June 2023. That’s when most local users learned of Saab’s reluctance to continue dumping cash into the Remote Tower project when they didn’t believe the FAA would ever certify the system. They also learned Leesburg was at significant risk of losing all ATC services. A Saab spokesman said, “I do think they [the FAA] came at this from a safety standpoint. But they look at it in a very rigid, very limited way. You’ve got a group here that’s not used to certifying this kind of system. And they said, here’s what we require. And until you do that, it doesn’t make it through. We don’t care, because our goal is to make sure everything is 100% or 110% safe.”
An important update to the Remote Tower project appeared in a recent edition of the Reason Foundation’s Aviation News Policy newsletter, written by the foundation’s director of Transportation Policy, Bob Poole. He said, “The Town of Leesburg, VA, has reached an agreement with FAA for continued air traffic control tower operations at the busy general aviation airport. Leesburg will rent the current mobile tower through June 2024, and FAA has agreed to pay the salaries of air traffic controllers operating from that facility for the next five years, while the town begins planning for a brick-and-mortar tower to replace the mobile facility.” The airport manager at Leesburg told me he hopes the FAA will have the new brick-and-mortar building in operation no later than 2030.
Saab hasn’t given up on Remote Towers entirely, however. The company has managed to install several at airports served by the airlines where the facilities serve as an airline’s ramp control towers. The Saab spokesman said leaving the Leesburg remote tower behind, “wasn’t something we took lightly. We feel obligated to help the airport. We want to see the product work, we want to be successful. We put in a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to even get to where we were at Leesburg. We hope this isn’t the end. Certainly, this is a product that is very important to us, around the world outside of the US and inside the US. It’s a market that is still of interest to us.”
Just because the FAA said no to the remote tower idea for now doesn’t mean other countries haven’t embraced the benefits of the technology. Bob Poole also noted that on the other side of the Atlantic, London’s Heathrow Airport plans to build that new Virtual Contingency Backup ATC Facility, replacing the remote operation NATS first created in 2009. NATS is the UK air navigation service provider (ANSP). That original contingency operation, designed to handle about 70% of LHR traffic, was the U.K.’s first remote air traffic control tower and is located off-airport.
Heathrow says their new remote tower backup facility for Europe’s busiest airport will be operational by 2025. Initially, it will use newer technology to provide the same 70% capacity, but a planned second phase would bring it to 100%. It will be interesting to see if, by 2025, Leesburg and the FAA have even broken any ground for their brick-and-mortar facility.One last note. There was another remote tower test happening in Loveland, Colorado at the Northern Colorado Regional Airport (FNL) using Searidge Technology. Searidge is wholly owned by NATS. A statement from Searidge said the company is not expected to consider the FAA’s requirement to move its test site to Atlantic City.
Here in the US, Raytheon Corporation is said to be teaming up with an Austrian company for a future RT project, so remote tower operations somewhere may yet rise like the Phoenix from the ashes. Reportedly, Raytheon is willing to construct a remote tower test site in Atlantic City, although no timeline for that project has been announced.
A Final Thought
One thing has been gnawing at me since that FAA webinar 18 months ago and after reading through the 167-page guide to building new control towers the agency published a few months back. Building a control tower, or dozens of them actually, especially when the agency has $5 billion each year to spend, represents a whole lot of materials and jobs, unlike a Remote Tower. I have no proof of course, but I’ve seriously wondered if there might not be some subtle connection somewhere between the agency’s plan for constructing all those new control tower buildings and the seeming demise of the Remote Tower concept.
In the end, this story does highlight, yet again, what FAA controllers have known for years, that the agency is far behind the rest of the world when it comes to employing new technology for ATC.
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Asking Why After an Accident? Consider the Source
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The online magazine AvWeb published a poll on Monday asking readers whether “armchair accident analysis” has gotten out of hand. With slightly more than 600 people responding, readers said it absolutely is out of hand because “it leads to misinformation and conspiracy theories.”I disagree, at least a bit. But not because I endorse conspiracies. I’m actually fascinated by a juicy theory like claiming a particular accident was caused by the Russian covert introduction of rogue squirrel fur into jet fuel production (I made this up).
When I joined the aviation industry decades ago as a wannabe, I was fascinated by the final blue book accident reports the NTSB published. I read them cover to cover and always put them down, wondering why. “Why would a pilot or crew do what they did … or why did they skip some step along the way in a particular checklist?” Little did I know then that I was leading myself to a lifelong curiosity about human factors analysis. Of course, I always told myself I’d never repeat that mistake when I flew.
Over 50 years, I’ve been lucky enough to be part of the industry in various jobs: first as an air traffic controller, then as a flight instructor, then as a charter and business aviation pilot, and now primarily as an aviation journalist. Along the way, I also had an opportunity to spend five years as an adjunct staffer at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where I learned the importance of being able to present my ideas to a group of people. Each role added another perspective on the industry I’d come to call my own. All this said, my inability to hold a job should be viewed through a special lens … that of a guy with an insatiable curiosity. And you know what the world thinks about that.
It was 1598 when the English poet and playwright Ben Jonson conjectured that “curiosity killed the cat.” In other words, being too curious about something might land you in serious hot water. Being born a few centuries later, I’d learn later just how right Jonson was. I was in high school when I first began reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I’ve lost track of how often I’ve reread many of those stories. I always wanted to know what happened and why. I can’t help myself. But letting my curiosity create a conspiracy theory to create a click-bait story … nope. Not me.
Curiosity
NTSB’s Recreation of TWA 800’s fuselage. I like to think my curiosity has never been focused on publicity. I’ve never believed I was superior to the experts, the dedicated individuals at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). I’ve been fortunate enough to know several current and former Board members personally. Years ago, Nancy and I visited the NTSB training center in Ashburn, Virginia, when the recreation of TWA 800 was still an intact exhibit. Learning how the staff recreated the fuselage of that Boeing 747 was nothing short of awe-inspiring, especially when you can see how one NTSB investigator determined where a three-inch square piece of metal recovered from Long Island Sound fit into the original structure.
I have enormous respect for the Board. That doesn’t mean that my knowledge and experience are of no value, however.
What has always been important to me are the educational aspects of accident investigation. What information can I share with my own students to prevent them from committing the same, often fatal, mistakes as a crew I’d read about? Over the years, I came to realize that there were plenty of working men and women in the world who were just as curious as me about an accident like the horrible ones we’ve experienced recently in DC, Philly, and Alaska. These people seldom asked me for the technical details about TCAS, DEI, prevailing visibility, or to define lord knows how many dozens of industry acronyms. They asked me to explain the details of an accident in layman’s terms. They didn’t ask me to stretch my brain for the probable cause, so I seldom have.
For instance, when someone asked me how the door could have fallen off that Boeing 737 early last year, I was as honest as I could be based on what little we knew then. Common sense and logic told me there must have been some manufacturing or maintenance mistake along the way. My many years of immersion in the industry pretty much do the rest. I offer readers or listeners a “maybe” to hang their hats on. And I’m perfectly happy to wait for the NTSB to generate their final report.
Human Factors
Does all this make me an armchair aviation detective? Maybe. I like to think of myself as an educated reader and consumer of media about an industry I’ve been immersed in my entire life. But I believe readers of any text surrounding aviation accidents must take a little responsibility for some of the crazy conclusions promoted on social media and TV. My theory is simple, “Consider the Source.” No matter what the source, readers/listeners of any story, aviation, politics, or economics, must engage a pretty well-oiled BS meter during our 24/7 news cycle. Conspiracy theories are usually generated by people with some axe to grind. Crazy theories are spread by people who read and accept the words without question expecting someone else to handle all the critical thinking for them. This must stop.
My advice … check out the writer’s bio before you believe anything you read or listen to. If the writer doesn’t have one , I’d steer clear and suggest others do the same.
Fly safely.
Rob Mark
