I told Leela I'd write about the Comair 5191 crash on Sunday at Blue Grass Airport. There is a story in the Cincinnati Post titled FAA: Control tower was undermanned.

Since I work by myself in the tower at night, my perspective is this:

If you're working by yourself in a safety-critical job, even when it's boring, you'd better be paying attention. If you're goofing off, you need to be prepared to face the consequences - in this case, 49 dead people.


"[The controller] cleared the Atlanta-bound plane for takeoff and then turned his back to handle some administrative work.

"At that point, he was doing a traffic count," National Transportation Safety Board member Debbie Hersman said Tuesday evening at a press briefing in Lexington."

Okay. Traffic counts are simple data entry. I'm assuming Blue Grass is a 24 hour facility, so that's 24 entries per day. There's 11 categories of traffic, so the largest possible traffic entry the controller could have would be 24x11=264. That's a maximum of 264 1-, 2-, or RARELY 3-digit numbers the controller would have to enter.

Here's how the process works in Juneau. Every time an aircraft operation (landing, takeoff, touch-and-go, overflight, etc) occurs, the responsible controller clicks the appropriate button on a counter (again, eleven possible categories here). At the end of the hour, the numbers from the counter are copied by hand onto a traffic count form on a clipboard next to the position. At the end of the day, I doubleclick the shortcut to a custom Excel spreadsheet on the computer's desktop and copy all the handwritten numbers from the clipboard into the appropriate spots on the worksheet. I hit Ctrl+P, Ctrl+D, Ctrl+S, Alt+F4. The worksheet tallies up the traffic, prints two summary pages, clears itself, saves the blank version, and closes. I take the top summary page off the printer, and double-click the desktop link to the traffic count input page online. I put in the username and password, click "OK", click "OK", click "Traffic Count Input", type in eleven numbers (the day's totals from all eleven traffic categories), type in my initials, click "Save", click "Transmit data", click "Yes", click "Logout", click the X to close Internet Explorer.

This process, from start to finish, takes about four minutes without rushing. What I'm trying to outline here is it's not a particularly time-consuming or difficult job. Even if there's a deadline the facility had to meet by having the count done by a certain time, it's not a life or death task. Separating aircraft is, and always has been, a controller's #1 priority. The excuse, "Oh, I was too busy doing this really important admin work (a secondary, SUPERVISORY job)to watch the plane take off (THE PRIMARY CONTROLLER'S JOB) so it's the FAA's fault for not having two controllers on duty..." is absolute horse manure.

That being said, have I always been 100% focused on doing my job every single minute of my workday? No. My supervisor has even said in a 1-on-1 briefing, that it is PERFECTLY FINE for me to read a book, do a crossword puzzle, knit, crochet, browse a magazine, etc. as long as I put it away when I get busy. My personal standard is if I'm not alone in the tower (there's another set of eyes working) I'll read sporadically if I'm talking to one or two planes, and I'll watch them on departure and final approach. More than two, and the book gets put in my drawer. If I'm by myself, that rule changes, and I don't read if I'm talking to anyone - period. I'm pretty sure other people do (and watch TV, play computer games, etc) on their closing shifts, but I'm not comfortable explaining why I didn't see that airplane crash while I was screwing around in the back of the cab.

I'm not trying to be mean about it, but we're being paid very very well to watch planes out a window. There is almost always more than enough time to do the admin work at a safe time when nothing else is going on (or there's staff available to do it) and even if it's done late, the FAA understands that a controller's first priority is the safe, orderly, and expeditious flow of traffic.

So while the FAA may be partially to blame for not having two controllers as required per letter of agreement/memorandum dated November 2005, and the pilot made the mistake of taxiing to the wrong runway and departing...

***DISCLAIMER***
What follows is my opinion, based solely on my experience as an ATCS at Juneau Tower, without any knowledge of the actual events surrounding the Comair 5191 crash or routine operations at Blue Grass Airport Traffic Control Tower.

...as I see it, the controller shares equally in the blame by abandoning his post at a time when his observation and invervention were critically needed. And with a few minutes' inattention, he contributed to the unnecessary deaths of forty-nine people.

That is all for now.