Eyes on the sky
Behind the scenes at air traffic control,
It’s eerily quiet in Nav Canada’s air traffic control tower, the nerve centre where controllers guide planes in and out of Pearson, the country’s biggest airport.
There are as many as 1,400 departing and arriving flights here each day, so air traffic controllers know they hold enormous responsibility in their hands. They emit a sense of calm, though they will certainly joke with colleagues about posing for newspaper photos.
Given the stress of their jobs, surprisingly there’s no shouting or yelling here, nor even raised voices. It could be any office anywhere, except for the giant windows that look out at Pearson’s five runways.
It’s bright and sunny on this morning; without the glare-reducing window blinds, squinting would be required. The controllers sit with four computer screens each, headsets on. Two of them are working with trainees, who have already undergone five months of classes but are still required to take in many more months of on-the-job training.
The controllers order commercial planes, small private planes, even cargo planes into the right positions for landings and takeoffs, spacing the flights out depending on size.
“There’s a lot of mental gymnastics going on in a controller’s head,” said Clive Spurgeon, unit operations, supervisor at Nav Canada’s Toronto tower.
“You’re not thinking about what’s happening. It’s done. It’s about what might happen. You’re thinking about two or three steps ahead.”
Spurgeon acknowledges that controllers enjoy juggling challenges, comparing it to solving puzzles. They could face a bad storm; an aircraft with a mechanical problem; an ill passenger on board. “We are in a unique business. We thrive on a challenge,” he said.
Pearson is the busiest airport in Canada, the ninth busiest in North America in terms of takeoffs and landings, and the 15th busiest in the world.
Forty-five controllers work out of its Toronto tower, which is staffed around the clock, because even if there aren’t many flights coming in overnight, all movements — including trucks on the taxiways and runways — must be carefully tracked. (There’s also a tower run by the Greater Toronto Airports Authority that operates the airport, but those controllers only guide planes from gates to taxiways.)
Because of the job’s intensity, a controller’s 81⁄ 2- hour shift is broken up, usually with 30- to 45-minute breaks every 90 minutes. To unwind, some of them take a nap, read a book, work out in the fitness room or play video games.
While the Toronto tower handles all flights arriving at and departing from Pearson, many more flights are flying at all altitudes through Ontario’s airspace, headed to airports across North America and beyond.
They’re guided by the area control tower, also staffed by Nav Canada’s air traffic controllers. Divided into nine specialty areas determined by geography and altitude, these controllers keep track of specific flights as they move through their region, until it’s time to hand off to a colleague.
Smaller planes, including turboprops, are in the airspace below 24,000 feet, while commercial jets fly higher.
Flights heading east are at odd altitudes such as 33,000 feet, and westbound flights are at even altitudes such as 34,000 feet.
On this afternoon, the skies are especially busy due to bad weather in the Ohio Valley; planes between the U.S. East Coast and the Pacific Northwest are heading into Canada to avoid thunderstorms and lightning.
By day’s end, an additional 113 planes will fly over this region due to the rerouting of flights at the request of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.
But at 2 p.m., those same storms start heading into the Toronto area, with winds changing rapidly, forcing officials to switch active runways — planes must take off and land into the wind.
Typically, the three east-west runways are used more often than the two north-south runways, due to wind patterns.
At one point, only one runway is being used for landings, prompting Nav Canada to implement a ground delay program — essentially slowing the arrival rates of flights into Pearson to no more than 42 flights an hour, instead of the usual 60.
Dave Parco, Nav Canada’s shift manager, is just off a conference call with officials at Pearson airport as well as airlines.
The plan is to keep the delay in place until 6 p.m.
That means any flight coming into the Pearson area must first ask permission to depart.
“It’s an unpredictable, unstable storm,” Parco said.
Departures are generally not affected, although if incoming planes are delayed or cancelled, it can affect the overall flight schedule.
In fact, the ground delay program ends up getting extended until 10 p.m., though it is lifted at 8:39 p.m.