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Follow these rules for a trouble-free career in air traffic control. I've collected them by listening to other air traffic controllers over the past 20-odd years.
1. Never trust a pilot.
2. Never trust another controller.
3. You can break the rules, so long as you know which rules you're breaking.
4. Look for the landmines.
5. A little vert(icle separation) never hurt.
6. If you worry about it, it wont happen.
7. If he can catch him, he can fuck him. (A separation standard not found in the books!)
8. When you enter the simulator you will lose 50% of your IQ. The instructor will give it back to you piece by piece.
9. Air traffic control is easy until it gets hard. Then it gets very hard. The problem is, it can get very hard very easily.
10. Learn to say "No!".
11. Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment!
12. Experience is a hard teacher. First comes the test, then the lesson.
13. Experience is the knowledge that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
14. By definition, half of the controllers in your Centre are below average.
15. We have a perfect record in aviation: we never left one up there yet!
16. The similarity between air traffic controllers and pilots?
- If a pilot stuffs up, the pilot dies.
- If a controller stuffs up, the pilot still dies.
17. The more traffic at an airport, the better it is handled.
18. Don't trust anybody and don't do anything stupid.
19. Keep looking around; there's always something you've missed.
20. Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups.
21. Indecision is the key to flexibility.
22. Our failures teach us. If you want to increase your chances of success double your failure rate.
23. Luck will do for skill, but not consistently.
24. The nice thing about a mistake is the pleasure it gives others.
25. Flying the aircraft is more important than radioing your plight to a person on the ground incapable of understanding it.
26. When the art of radio communication between pilots and ATC is improved, the result will be vastly increased areas of significant misunderstandings.
- Robert Livingston, 'Flying The Aeronca.'
27. You land a million planes safely, then you have one little mid-air and you never hear the end of it ...
- Opening quotation in movie 'Pushing Tin', 1999.
28. A performance check ought to be like a skirt, short enough to be interesting but still be long enough to cover everything.
29. The wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance.
- Sigmund Freud
30. " If God had meant us to fly, he wouldn't have invented Spanish air traffic control".
- Lister, Red Dwarf [apologies amigos]
Rules for successful Flow control:
1. Don't trust pilots.
2. Don't trust sector controllers.
3. Don't trust tower controllers.
4. Don't trust anyone.
5. Develop a thick skin.
6. Never back a BA146 to beat anything - even another BA146!
7. Never worry about departures, they are the tower's problem.
8. Pray that the management pilots have good FOs.
9. Computer Derived Threshold Times will be accurate only if the captain throws the computer out the storm window as he overflies the threshold in the go-round after being too intimate with the aircraft in front.
10. All pilots think that they should be Number 1.
11. Bandeirantes can be used to hide unexplained gaps in the sequence.
12. Unless they build more runways, the maximum number of aircraft that can land at an airport in a given time will remain the same, despite the wet dreams of airline schedulers.
13. Have faith in your own ability, no-one else does.
14. Same money, right or wrong.
15. If you believe the tower controller who says that the runway works will be finished prior to the start of the next sequence, you deserve all you get.
16. Your are only as good as your last sequence.
17. If your last sequence was not good, see above.
18. Keep slipping the odd joke to the approach controllers, it keeps their mind off what is coming up.
19. One day you will get a trainee who merely triples your workload.
20. Never sit in approach and work your own sequence.
21. Always keep a false nose or wig in the car, an angry mob waiting outside the carpark is not a pretty sight.
22. The Flow is never wrong, The Flow is merely acting on information that may now be superseded.
Send me your rules to add to the list!
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