Visit Miami TWR

[JeeHell]

Hello everyone,

I'm a French ATC trainee going to Miami in december, and I was wondering if anyone knew if it's possible to visit MIA TWR?
I'am actually working on a end of scholarship project concerning weather impact on traffic and it would be great for me to include a foreign point of view on this problem. So if anybody can point me the right procedure to do it I'd really appreciate.

Thanks in advance from France.

[WhatMeanPullUp]

Hi JeeHell, I have visited Atlanta tower, really interesting, and Atlanta Centre a couple of times, but this was about 10 years ago. What I did was send a message to ATC from work, on the official telecommunication system and they replied. They could see it was genuine from ATC but post 9-11 and the paranoid way the USA seems to be right now I am not sure if you will be successful. Good luck anyway.

[JeeHell]

Well thanks for the answer, I guess I'll have to annoy my chief enough to make him make the call...

[RadarKing]

I know here at Boston Center management is pretty accommodating about giving tours to foreign ATC specialists. We have controllers from Montreal and Moncton Centers come through quite frequently. We also has some French ATC students come through two years ago and they got to monitor operations on the control room floor.

That being said, each facility handles tours differently and we have some incredibly lazy a-hole mangers who couldn't be bothered to extend professional courtesy to colleagues from across the pond. If you don't get any satisfaction dealing with FAA management, another option is to contact the NATCA(union) representative who could probably grease the skids for you. The facrep at MIA is Jim Marinitti([email protected]) and at ZMA it's Steve Wallace([email protected]).

Best of luck.