In the operations room of Dublin Airport's Air Traffic Control there is a staff bulletin board. Its surface is dotted with union notices, information on Critical Incident Stress Management and all sorts of aeronautical minutiae. But over on the right-hand side is an interesting addition, and it relates to birds.
According to the two-page notice, illustrated with bar-charts and diagrams, bird strikes - contacts between birds and planes - in April have totalled 15 since 1990, or an average of 1.67 for every April in question.
The notice goes on to inform the reader that 61 per cent of these strikes have involved gulls, some of them weighing up to a kilo. Unfortunately, due to his inability to comprehend even the simplest of physics equations, your correspondent is unable to present to the reader the precise nature of the threat posed by gulls to planes. But suffice to say that if something weighing one kilo and moving at, say, 40 miles an hour, strikes something weighing many tons and travelling at 300 miles an hour, the thing weighing one kilo is likely to come off worse but could do some serious damage to the heavier object in its final moments. It is for this reason that the notice concludes with the solemn instruction: "Position yourself on Route 28 access road and harass all gulls relentlessly."
Standing out in the rain and shouting at seagulls is not something that immediately springs to mind when the subject of air traffic control is raised, but gulls, along with rain, wind, sunshine and pilots who insist on playing with the frequency dials on their radios at inopportune moments are all matters of concern to the men and women who are responsible for the safe and efficient management of air traffic at Dublin Airport.
European air traffic is growing at a rate of about 7 per cent a year. Last year, almost 12 million passengers passed through Dublin Airport, a figure that is likely to increase to more than 13 million this year. To accommodate these passengers, there are expected to be almost 200,000 aircraft movements - take-offs and landings - at Dublin. On July 4th last year, the busiest day on record, there were 706 aircraft movements at the airport, or almost 30 an hour on average. If, as anticipated, traffic at Dublin Airport increases by 10 per cent this year, the day is approaching when almost 800 aircraft will use the airport in a single 24-hour period. That they do so quickly and safely will be the task of ATC, an arm of the Irish Aviation Authority.
The backroom job of air traffic control is about to be thrust into the spotlight on the big screen. Already showing in the US, a film called Pushing Tin gives an insight into life at New York's Terminal Radar Approach Control, where 50 air traffic controllers are responsible for launching and landing up to 7,000 flights a day at JFK, La Guardia and Newark airports. As with most Hollywood examinations of unusual jobs, Pushing Tin presents its air traffic controllers as mavericks in the manner of Top Gun's military pilots or Backdraft's firemen: the predominantly male controllers ride motorbikes, insult pilots and take bets on which one of them will be the first to crack under the pressure - or "flameout" - and take a period of enforced mental leave. The title is US ATC jargon for aligning planes for landing and take-off.
What is most interesting about the film is that its primary source material is factual: in 1996, the New York Times Magazine printed an article by journalist Darcy Frey which revealed that air traffic controllers were particularly prone to stress, depression, breakdowns, heart attacks and suicide. The stresses of the job sometimes resulted in the controllers making operation errors, known as "deals". If three deals were made in one 30-month period, the controller was taken off duty and sent for retraining.
"There is a certain amount of fatigue and, yes, it is stressful, but when you've been at something for a long time . . . " Derek McNamee is a senior operations controller at ATC in Dublin Airport. Like all of those working in ATC on this Wednesday afternoon, he projects an air of remarkable calm. In fact, up in the tower there is an atmosphere of almost monastic quiet. There is nobody hanging from the ceiling, nobody swearing or looking stressed, and no one is complaining that he has picked a bad day to give up smoking/drinking/sniffing glue a la Lloyd Bridges in Airplane. Instead, control of the aircraft moving before us is passed quietly from the ground movements controller - responsible for the aircraft while they are at the piers or taxiing to and from the runway - to the air movements controller, who deals with the aircraft using the active runway and with aircraft in the immediate vicinity of the airport. The comparative quiet of the tower is an indication of the degree of concentration required for the job: two hours without a break is the maximum permissible time for radar work, to ensure controllers remain fresh and at their peak. This is off-peak time for air traffic: the busiest times are early morning, lunchtime and late evening. It is now 3 p.m. and the handful of people in the tower all appear remarkably relaxed, despite the fact that smooth control of air traffic has been complicated somewhat by bad weather to the south-west of the airport
"In bad weather, when you have aircraft saying they won't go here or they won't go there, that may be a problem," says McNamee. "You can insist that a pilot goes towards the bad weather until you get separation, but that gets him stressed. There is a never-ending number of solutions to any number of problems, and no two days are the same. Even the evening rush, when we have the same aeroplanes coming in every day, is never the same. Sometimes, it can go extremely smoothly with natural spacing, and sometimes there is tactical work to be done."
Regulations established by the International Civil Aviation Authority in Montreal require that there should be a minimum of 1,000 feet of vertical separation between aircraft, and five miles between the aircraft themselves. In bad weather, when pilots may be reluctant to put their passengers through nasty turbulence, thereby effectively ruling out sections of airspace for use, a certain amount of juggling may be required. "You can't actively force a pilot to go anywhere he doesn't want to go," explains operations controller Tommy Quinn, "and no one wants to go into bad weather."
Directing the planes in the air is the task of the controllers in the Operational Room, which is located below the tower. ATC in Dublin is responsible for the airspace from the ground up to 24,000 feet and for an area stretching from Dublin to Wexford and extending 20 miles west of Dublin over the Irish Sea: much of it is currently visible on the radar screens of the Operational Room. Each dot on the screen represents an aircraft, with its flight number, altitude and speed detailed alongside. In the top left-hand corner is a slightly faster-moving dot: Concorde, travelling at more than 800 miles an hour and just one element of the 70 per cent of all north Atlantic traffic that passes through Irish airspace.
As if the weather hasn't given the operational room enough to worry about, one of the pilots seems to be fiddling with his frequency dial. The result is that he is out of contact, except for an irritating high-pitched whining noise. If it continues, the ground frequencies will have to be used: meanwhile, ATC tries to find out who the offending pilot is. The controllers accept the situation with the calm equanimity of individuals who have long ceased to be surprised at the ways of the aircraft world. (In Pushing Tin, one of the controllers comments to a flight attendant: "You think the captain controls this plane? That would scare me.")
"People react differently to stress," comments McNamee. "Some people will shake their legs or touch their hands, but the end result is basically the same."
"When I first started working, my fingers used to get icy cold," recalls air traffic control officer Don Rennie. "It was the adrenalin kicking in. It started to go away when I had a few good days under my belt and my confidence got up. You have a good day, with a lot of planes, and you handle it great. Then, the next day, you could have less traffic and you have a left-handed day."
What differentiates ATC from other occupations with high stress levels is the number of lives resting on the successful performance of the job: each blip on the radar screen represents hundreds of people. There was a time when the admission that the job was stressful might have been perceived as a sign of weakness, but that situation has changed. A Critical Incident Stress Management programme, in which two psychologists will work with a panel of experienced controllers to assist individuals who have encountered particularly stressful situations, is currently being established by the Irish Aviation Authority.
This recognition of the sometimes difficult nature of the work may also be linked to the fact that ATC is no longer as male-dominated as it once was, in part due to the equal opportunities intake of cadet trainees.
"I joined in 1984, and I would have been only the second woman to join," says ATC officer Maura Ni Ragahallaigh. "There was a time, when it was male-dominated, that people weren't allowed to admit that it was stressful. Not only were you nervous, but you had to cover it up. I think that the team system here is very important. The major part of stress is dealt with by the support of the people around you.
"One of the biggest stresses we experience is expectant stress, when you know you're going to get busy and there's nothing you can do about it. The adrenalin is flowing and you're waiting for it to happen."
There is also the matter of unwinding. "Last night, we were on late duty and we were hopping busy," says Don Rennie. "You don't just go home at 11.30 p.m. after that and sit back."
"No one here talks about aeroplanes," says Ni Raghallaigh. "But in the first 20 minutes after duty, that's all they talk about. For that time, it's a group that no one else can be a part of."
"I'm married with four kids," says McNamee. "I basically go home and watch TV. Nothing exceptional." But maybe that's an indication of just how stressful the job is, if going home to four kids seems like the relaxing option.
Pushing Tin is due to open here on October 29th
