Dan Dare
21st Oct 2008, 16:11
Article in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/oct/18/workandcareers-theairlineindustry)
A working life: The air traffic controller
Sky highBecky Evans' workplace may resemble the lair of a Bond villain but, she tells Leo Benedictus, dramas and emergencies are thankfully few and far between.
"Everyone's always very surprised, actually," says Becky Evans. "When they come into the ops rooms they think it's going to be some mad hubbub of craziness." And she is right. Arriving at the National Air Traffic Control Centre at Swanwick, I did indeed think that. But it isn't. Instead, a mood of nonchalant tranquillity fills the vast, white chamber below us, from where almost all of the aircraft over England and Wales are being controlled.
Casually dressed staff chat calmly in front of their computers. When I am allowed in for a peep, one man is even reading a newspaper in his expensive chair. "Pensions announcement to be made today," promises a large, illuminated screen behind him, while four stuffed animals hang forgotten above everything - suspended from the ceiling years ago, I am told, by some office wag. It all looks rather like the lair of a progressive Bond villain, perhaps during the early consultation stages of his next diabolical scheme.
:E Baron Paul Blofeld?
"It's very quiet," says Evans almost gleefully. "It's a very controlled environment, that's the only way I can describe it. We know when aircraft are going to arrive in the sector, and you know what you have to do with them. And then you pass them on to the next guy." It sounds a disarmingly simple way of describing a very complex job.
And though Evans seems a master of it now, she only got into air traffic control, quite literally, by accident. All set to join the army after university, she snapped a ligament in her knee and was rejected on medical grounds. While she was looking around for alternatives, a friend who had already begun training as a controller recommended the air traffic service. "And the more I read about it," she says, "the more I thought, ooh that sounds right up my street."
So in 1998, aged 21, she headed straight for the College of Air Traffic Control in Bournemouth. And after three years of training, and having passed her final exams, she was ready to start moving real planes. Was she nervous that first time? "You're probably wanting me to say that it was more of a moment than it was," she suggests, accurately. "But you have been doing this training for such a long time, and during the training you also do periods on the job where you go to a unit or a tower. So it's not like that's the first time you've ever spoken to them on the radio. It wasn't that much of a thing."
It is still taking me a little time to accept that while hundreds of lives depend on Evans doing her job properly, she has always been perfectly calm about it. "Everybody thinks it's a really stressful job," she says. "But I don't find it stressful. It's very rewarding and satisfying when you've done it, and you've been sitting there for an hour and a half and it's all gone really smoothly. There are moments of high pressure, but the training that you do is such that you're taught to deal with it. It just becomes second nature, almost."
In Evans's case, this pressure usually means having to deal with the busy times when there are around 25 aircraft an hour jostling for her attention. In her patch of sky - the area above the south-west of England and the southernmost half of Wales - this happens most often at around 4am, as many flights from America begin descending towards London, and then peaks again from 10am, when another surge of planes heads off west once more.
The more dramatic types of pressure, of course, are very rare. Evans reels off a list of different systems each of which is designed to prevent mid-air collisions, and it certainly sounds as if there are enough of them. While other emergencies happen so infrequently that only once, in eight years as an air traffic controller, has she ever had to deal with one. So then, what does happen in an emergency? "If an aircraft says it's got an engine failure or a decompression or something, then there's nothing you can do about that," she says, with what sounds like well-honed realism. "It's not within your control; you just have to deal with it as best you can at the time."
Usually, this means clearing everything out of its way so the plane can land as soon as possible. And so it proved in Evans's own emergency. "There was smoke in the cockpit," she remembers. "A guy that was getting airborne from Bristol, he called me and said 'Pan, pan, pan, pan!' Pan is like a warning. 'Mayday' means big disaster, need to get down immediately, and 'pan' is the next one down. It's not as serious, basically."
So what happened? "There was nothing wrong with his aircraft, but he wasn't sure what was going on while there was smoke in the cockpit, so he said, 'I want to land immediately.' And Brize Norton is just there, which has a huge runway. So he took off from Bristol, went up two or three thousand feet, and then landed at Brize. And he was absolutely fine." She still cannot resist a little smile at the memory of this comically tiny flight.
It is interesting to listen to the way Evans tells this story - about "him", as if just one man was involved, when in fact "he" was the pilot of a jet full of passengers. It is a reminder that, while other members of her team plan routes and manage traffic flows, her job is fundamentally about talking to people - albeit in the coded language of the skies. "Speedbird123 climb flight level 300," for instance, would mean "British Airways flight 123, please could you fly up to an altitude of 30,000ft? Thanks awfully."
Besides this, though Evans has heard every imaginable voice and accent, there is little room for conversation. "You do have the chit-chat in as much as you say 'goodbye' when they leave your frequency," she observes drily. "And every now and then, if there's a big England game on or something, somebody will pipe up and say, 'If you've got a minute, what's the England score?' Then we have to send one of the boys off to find out so you can tell them. But that is only when it's really, really quiet."
When it's busy, on the other hand, competition between pilots can be fierce over who gets the best slots, in which they can save the most fuel. As a result, not every one of Evans's conversations is straightforward. "Sometimes pilots will not realise how busy you are and they will push you for things," she shrugs. "You just have to say, 'No, I can't do that.' So you have to be confident in what you're doing, and be prepared to say no."
Attempting instead to explain the complexity of her workload, which she shares with two other team members, would certainly be almost impossible. "I've tried with my mum for hours and never managed it," Evans admits. Nevertheless, she walks me over to a map on the wall to have another go. The main transatlantic artery seems straightforward enough, travelling northwest from London over Wales. Around it, she points out numerous smaller airports and subsidiary routes, all of whose climbing and descending traffic have to be mixed together without one plane ever being less than five miles in front of, or 1,000ft above, another. And that includes when a thunderstorm blocks the way. Or if fog suddenly makes an airport unusable.
"And we've got a lot of Manchester departures," she continues, slicing a great vertical line through the middle of everything. "So then you're mixing that in with all those Heathrow departures, and choosing levels in the middle that are going to make them all, erm, miss, obviously." She chuckles. But she has not finished.
"Then you've got faster aircraft and slower aircraft. You can't have a slower aircraft with a faster one right behind it doing the same thing. So you tell them to fly to these radar headings to keep them separated." Her fingers speedily traverse the map, which is splodged with coloured symbols, as if she were trying to separate all the strands in a bowl of moving spaghetti.
When she flies, I can't help but wonder, is she thinking about all this? "Yes," she admits. "Because it's your airspace, you know ... We went to Barbados last year as a quick last-minute holiday before my daughter was born. We came in through Gatwick, and it was actually really nice, because it was a glorious morning just looking out over the south coast. And of course you know exactly what you're doing ... I was thinking, I wonder who's working? Because obviously everybody who does this bit of airspace I know. You just wish you could go up to the front and sit in the cockpit, and go, 'Hello!'" Her face falls. "But it doesn't quite work like that." For just a moment, she looks genuinely disappointed.
Curriculum vitae
Pay "A full-time controller who has been working for a number of years can earn about £90,000pa. As I'm part-time, and I'm not at the top of the scale either, I think I'm on a shade under £50,000."
Hours "A full shift pattern is two morning shifts, two afternoon shifts, two night shifts and then four days off. I do two afternoon shifts, a day off, two morning shifts, and then five days off. And then I do it again. Shifts are eight hours, but you can only work a maximum of an hour and a half before you have a half-hour break."
Work-life balance Good. "My husband is also a controller, and we've got a daughter who was born a year ago. So I am now part-time, and my shifts are opposite to Martin's, which means we can do all the childcare ourselves. Which is fantastic, actually."
Best thing "Working as part of a team. And the time off, I really enjoy that."
Worst thing "Getting up really early is not good. And because of the shift work, we do every day of the year. Christmas Day, New Year's Day ... every day is just an air traffic day."
A working life: The air traffic controller
Sky highBecky Evans' workplace may resemble the lair of a Bond villain but, she tells Leo Benedictus, dramas and emergencies are thankfully few and far between.
"Everyone's always very surprised, actually," says Becky Evans. "When they come into the ops rooms they think it's going to be some mad hubbub of craziness." And she is right. Arriving at the National Air Traffic Control Centre at Swanwick, I did indeed think that. But it isn't. Instead, a mood of nonchalant tranquillity fills the vast, white chamber below us, from where almost all of the aircraft over England and Wales are being controlled.
Casually dressed staff chat calmly in front of their computers. When I am allowed in for a peep, one man is even reading a newspaper in his expensive chair. "Pensions announcement to be made today," promises a large, illuminated screen behind him, while four stuffed animals hang forgotten above everything - suspended from the ceiling years ago, I am told, by some office wag. It all looks rather like the lair of a progressive Bond villain, perhaps during the early consultation stages of his next diabolical scheme.
:E Baron Paul Blofeld?
"It's very quiet," says Evans almost gleefully. "It's a very controlled environment, that's the only way I can describe it. We know when aircraft are going to arrive in the sector, and you know what you have to do with them. And then you pass them on to the next guy." It sounds a disarmingly simple way of describing a very complex job.
And though Evans seems a master of it now, she only got into air traffic control, quite literally, by accident. All set to join the army after university, she snapped a ligament in her knee and was rejected on medical grounds. While she was looking around for alternatives, a friend who had already begun training as a controller recommended the air traffic service. "And the more I read about it," she says, "the more I thought, ooh that sounds right up my street."
So in 1998, aged 21, she headed straight for the College of Air Traffic Control in Bournemouth. And after three years of training, and having passed her final exams, she was ready to start moving real planes. Was she nervous that first time? "You're probably wanting me to say that it was more of a moment than it was," she suggests, accurately. "But you have been doing this training for such a long time, and during the training you also do periods on the job where you go to a unit or a tower. So it's not like that's the first time you've ever spoken to them on the radio. It wasn't that much of a thing."
It is still taking me a little time to accept that while hundreds of lives depend on Evans doing her job properly, she has always been perfectly calm about it. "Everybody thinks it's a really stressful job," she says. "But I don't find it stressful. It's very rewarding and satisfying when you've done it, and you've been sitting there for an hour and a half and it's all gone really smoothly. There are moments of high pressure, but the training that you do is such that you're taught to deal with it. It just becomes second nature, almost."
In Evans's case, this pressure usually means having to deal with the busy times when there are around 25 aircraft an hour jostling for her attention. In her patch of sky - the area above the south-west of England and the southernmost half of Wales - this happens most often at around 4am, as many flights from America begin descending towards London, and then peaks again from 10am, when another surge of planes heads off west once more.
The more dramatic types of pressure, of course, are very rare. Evans reels off a list of different systems each of which is designed to prevent mid-air collisions, and it certainly sounds as if there are enough of them. While other emergencies happen so infrequently that only once, in eight years as an air traffic controller, has she ever had to deal with one. So then, what does happen in an emergency? "If an aircraft says it's got an engine failure or a decompression or something, then there's nothing you can do about that," she says, with what sounds like well-honed realism. "It's not within your control; you just have to deal with it as best you can at the time."
Usually, this means clearing everything out of its way so the plane can land as soon as possible. And so it proved in Evans's own emergency. "There was smoke in the cockpit," she remembers. "A guy that was getting airborne from Bristol, he called me and said 'Pan, pan, pan, pan!' Pan is like a warning. 'Mayday' means big disaster, need to get down immediately, and 'pan' is the next one down. It's not as serious, basically."
So what happened? "There was nothing wrong with his aircraft, but he wasn't sure what was going on while there was smoke in the cockpit, so he said, 'I want to land immediately.' And Brize Norton is just there, which has a huge runway. So he took off from Bristol, went up two or three thousand feet, and then landed at Brize. And he was absolutely fine." She still cannot resist a little smile at the memory of this comically tiny flight.
It is interesting to listen to the way Evans tells this story - about "him", as if just one man was involved, when in fact "he" was the pilot of a jet full of passengers. It is a reminder that, while other members of her team plan routes and manage traffic flows, her job is fundamentally about talking to people - albeit in the coded language of the skies. "Speedbird123 climb flight level 300," for instance, would mean "British Airways flight 123, please could you fly up to an altitude of 30,000ft? Thanks awfully."
Besides this, though Evans has heard every imaginable voice and accent, there is little room for conversation. "You do have the chit-chat in as much as you say 'goodbye' when they leave your frequency," she observes drily. "And every now and then, if there's a big England game on or something, somebody will pipe up and say, 'If you've got a minute, what's the England score?' Then we have to send one of the boys off to find out so you can tell them. But that is only when it's really, really quiet."
When it's busy, on the other hand, competition between pilots can be fierce over who gets the best slots, in which they can save the most fuel. As a result, not every one of Evans's conversations is straightforward. "Sometimes pilots will not realise how busy you are and they will push you for things," she shrugs. "You just have to say, 'No, I can't do that.' So you have to be confident in what you're doing, and be prepared to say no."
Attempting instead to explain the complexity of her workload, which she shares with two other team members, would certainly be almost impossible. "I've tried with my mum for hours and never managed it," Evans admits. Nevertheless, she walks me over to a map on the wall to have another go. The main transatlantic artery seems straightforward enough, travelling northwest from London over Wales. Around it, she points out numerous smaller airports and subsidiary routes, all of whose climbing and descending traffic have to be mixed together without one plane ever being less than five miles in front of, or 1,000ft above, another. And that includes when a thunderstorm blocks the way. Or if fog suddenly makes an airport unusable.
"And we've got a lot of Manchester departures," she continues, slicing a great vertical line through the middle of everything. "So then you're mixing that in with all those Heathrow departures, and choosing levels in the middle that are going to make them all, erm, miss, obviously." She chuckles. But she has not finished.
"Then you've got faster aircraft and slower aircraft. You can't have a slower aircraft with a faster one right behind it doing the same thing. So you tell them to fly to these radar headings to keep them separated." Her fingers speedily traverse the map, which is splodged with coloured symbols, as if she were trying to separate all the strands in a bowl of moving spaghetti.
When she flies, I can't help but wonder, is she thinking about all this? "Yes," she admits. "Because it's your airspace, you know ... We went to Barbados last year as a quick last-minute holiday before my daughter was born. We came in through Gatwick, and it was actually really nice, because it was a glorious morning just looking out over the south coast. And of course you know exactly what you're doing ... I was thinking, I wonder who's working? Because obviously everybody who does this bit of airspace I know. You just wish you could go up to the front and sit in the cockpit, and go, 'Hello!'" Her face falls. "But it doesn't quite work like that." For just a moment, she looks genuinely disappointed.
Curriculum vitae
Pay "A full-time controller who has been working for a number of years can earn about £90,000pa. As I'm part-time, and I'm not at the top of the scale either, I think I'm on a shade under £50,000."
Hours "A full shift pattern is two morning shifts, two afternoon shifts, two night shifts and then four days off. I do two afternoon shifts, a day off, two morning shifts, and then five days off. And then I do it again. Shifts are eight hours, but you can only work a maximum of an hour and a half before you have a half-hour break."
Work-life balance Good. "My husband is also a controller, and we've got a daughter who was born a year ago. So I am now part-time, and my shifts are opposite to Martin's, which means we can do all the childcare ourselves. Which is fantastic, actually."
Best thing "Working as part of a team. And the time off, I really enjoy that."
Worst thing "Getting up really early is not good. And because of the shift work, we do every day of the year. Christmas Day, New Year's Day ... every day is just an air traffic day."