The media has been having a field day reporting on the incident at Reagan National Airport where an air traffic controller on overnight duty seems to have fallen asleep, although he says the mike stuck.
The report led Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to order 2 controllers at all times at Reagan and has caused many panic stricken newscasts.
But was it really that big of a deal ?
Now as always the disclaimer that I am not an expert in the sense of being a pilot, but aviation is a topic interest to me and I do have some knowledge.
Air traffic control in the US is basically divided into three levels or areas.
Area one is ARTCC or Air Route Traffic Control Center. There are 21 such centers around the United States and they are in charge of monitoring all flights in air and routing planes from place to place and center to center.
So for most of a typical flight you are under control of an ARTCC.
The next level of control is TRACON or Terminal Radar Approach Control. There are roughly 185 of these centers in the US.
The TRACON is responsible for moving a plane when it is within a given range of an airport (or at least a major airport). Usually this range is somewhere around 50 miles.
The TRACON controller will bring a plane into an airport, set them on course for the runway, get them ready for landing. They monitor all planes in their region.
Finally there is the specific Control Tower at the airport which is responsible for the plane within roughly 3-5 miles from the airport and they bring the plane in for the final landing.
Except that last part does not always happen.
Many small airports have no control tower and TRACON works with the pilot (and any other planes in the area) to bring them in for landing.
Many medium sized airports close the tower at night due to lack of traffic.
At larger airports the tower usually has only one controller on duty at night for the same reason.
Just to give you an idea, the night of the incident between 12am and 5am a total of nine planes landed at Reagan.
If you talk to many pilots they will tell you it’s quite common to land without a control tower, indeed it is more the rule than the exception.
Now I am not saying that it was anything short of inexcusable that a controller fell asleep and punishment for him, if not outright dismissal is proper. But to require 2 controllers to handle nine planes or to act like this is going to cause planes to fall out of the sky is nothing more than hype.