Jan Lebovitz:
Good afternoon. I'm Jan Lebovitz and I'd like to introduce Linda Ullman, who's here with me. We both are the co-presidents of the BNC Phoenix chapter. On behalf of our chapter, we'd like to welcome the alumni, parents, Brandeis National Committee members, and friends who are on this webinar. We want to give a very, very heartfelt thank you to the BNC National staff, Beth Bernstein and Alex Glomset, for partnering with us in our chapter to make this session possible.
Jan Lebovitz:
We want to tell you before we get started, if you have any questions, please type them in the chat and Michael will address them. Before I introduce Michael, Linda might have a few words to say.
Linda Ullman:
I just want to welcome everybody. We're excited to have Mike here. I know that there's a variety of people out there that have some knowledge of air traffic. We had the privilege of going through this beforehand and I have no knowledge. My husband had some knowledge. Jan's husband had some knowledge and Jan has the most knowledge, not compared to Mike. But we take these things for granted. I just wanted to tell you to enjoy Mike because he's terrific.
Jan Lebovitz:
Okay. With that, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce my friend and past coworker, Michael Julius. Michael started his career at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. After a year at Embry-Riddle, he transferred to Ohio State University where he received a degree in aviation atmospheric science. Michael began his Federal Aviation Administration career at Cleveland Center, Cleveland Air Traffic Control Tower, and the Cleveland Flight Service Station as a cooperative education program or co-op student.
Jan Lebovitz:
From Ohio, Michael went to work in several air traffic facilities in Indiana. While at Muncie Air Traffic Control Tower, he received several awards for outstanding flight assists and the Above and Beyond Award for the Great Lakes region. He was selected five times to serve as a guest controller at the Experimental Aircraft Association's Oshkosh Air Show, which takes place every July, other than this year, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Only the crème de la crème of controllers are chosen to work the Oshkosh Air Show, which during those seven days becomes the busiest airport in the world.
Jan Lebovitz:
While working in Indianapolis Air Traffic Control Tower, he served as the liaison to the local Aviation Career Education Camp or ACE Academy working with students to familiarize them with science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, principles necessary for a variety of aviation-related careers. Michael also served as a facilitator for the Challenge To Grow Committee and assisted with numerous diversity training workshops within the FAA's Great Lakes region. He moved on to Indianapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center as a traffic management coordinator.
Jan Lebovitz:
Moving onward and upward in his career, he became a frontline manager at Midway Air Traffic Control Tower in Chicago, Illinois, and retired as the manager of DuPage, Illinois Air Traffic Control Tower. Throughout his career, Michael continued to lead ACE Academies, teaching hundreds of students about STEM disciplines and aviation careers. Winning numerous awards for his dedication to the students, he truly, truly made a difference in the lives of so many. Michael is an associate professor in the aviation department at Lewis University in Romeo, Illinois, and has taught aviation workshops at Wright Junior College in Chicago, Illinois.
Jan Lebovitz:
He's married to Carla and lives in Aurora, Illinois. He has two beautiful children. Michael Jr. is a pilot and Aliyah will attend Ohio State University this fall. Over to you, Michael.
Michael Julius:
Thank you, Jan. Thank you very much, and Linda, for inviting me to do this webinar. I'm very excited. This is something I enjoy doing, reaching out to the community, and explaining what we do as air traffic controllers. As I go through the slides here, as I said earlier, I was retired as a manager at DuPage Airport. Also, here's a brief overview of my past history. I started at Lunken, Muncie, Indianapolis, as can you see, the other things that Janice spoke about. Let's talk about air traffic control itself. I mean the simple fact of the matter is that most of us when you go to the airport, you pretty much just put your bags and then you go to your gate and you check in.
Michael Julius:
But there's a lot more that goes on behind the scenes prior to you even getting to your things. For example, we're looking at this map here. It's a worldwide map of air traffic across the planet. As you notice as the sun is moving, how busy these areas get. As the Asian Rim is opening up, you see flights coming from America towards Asia and then it starts picking up towards Europe, as you see here, then across the pond, coming across toward the United States where most of the flights are coming inbound. But keep in mind, the traffic that's over land-based radar, and by radar, that's what most people are used to seeing and dealing with. That's radio detection and ranging, radar.
Michael Julius:
And then when you get over the oceans, it used to be that that was also just done by doing basically timed distance. So you'd have to report over fix, report over that fix, and then go from there. And then basically after you're over that fix, that's how we would track the aircraft. But now we have something called ADS-B or Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. Now that was very handy because it's an item that goes in the aircraft and basically you're tracked by satellites. Satellites could see you and it's a lot more accurate.
Michael Julius:
The thing we noticed the most, like areas over the Gulf of Mexico, it helped out immensely with the helicopters going to and from the oil rigs, up in Canada, over Hudson Bay, Alaska, those areas. It became very accurate. For areas that typically that didn't have radar or radar stations, it was very helpful for us for the improvement of air traffic. But this gives you an idea what we're moving at. If you notice how during the day, the East Coast wakes up first and then it kind of just works its way across the country. Well, it does that basically around the world. It just basically works its way across.
Michael Julius:
So as we look at this, different airspace classes, some of you who are pilots or have some knowledge, you understand that there's different classes of airspace that we use. Basically, Class A, that's pretty positive control airspace and above flight level 180 and flight level 600, as it's stated here, or better yet, above mean sea level. And then you have Class E. The best way to understand Class E airspace is it's Class Everywhere, everywhere where there aren't Class B. Class B airspace would be like Boston, New York, Chicago O'Hare. I would say Boston and Chicago O'Hare or Washington, DC area.
Michael Julius:
Class C is for aircraft or airports like Midway Airport. We're a Class C airport. And then Class D would be something along the lines of Aurora or DuPage or, say, Mansfield, Ohio, something to that effect. That's a Class D. Cincinnati and Lunken would be a Class D. Now, Class G airspace, this is airspace for airports that have airports that have flight advisories and stuff like that. And then no power and just basically wide-open airports fall into Class E airspace.
Michael Julius:
The phase of flight, basically, the best way I can think to explain to somebody who don't really understand fully the phases of flight, it's like if you're in your car and you back your car out of your driveway. That's like coming out of the hangar. You drive down your street. That's kind of the equivalent of going down a taxiway. To your main thoroughfare, to your main street, so when you get on your main street, it's like getting on a runway. You take your main street down towards the highway and right before you get on the highway, you have the on-ramps. Well, the on-ramps are like the TRACONs.
Michael Julius:
You get on the on-ramp. You look. You see what the traffic is like coming on, and then you merge into that traffic. Once you get on the highway, that's the equivalent of being in the in-route part of it. You're going onto the center. Say if you're driving, say, from Aurora to New York. I back out of my driveway, go down my street, get on my main thoroughfare, get on the highway on-ramp, like the TRACON. Take the highway, for example, Route 80, straight out east. So then you'll pass through Illinois, of course, and then Indiana, then Ohio, then Pennsylvania, New Jersey. Cross the George Washington, cross Island, cross Bronx, anyway, then out to Long Island that way to the house or to the area you want to get off.
Michael Julius:
You get off the ramp and then that's like the TRACON. You get on the main thoroughfare, down the street, down to your street. Turn left. Taxi in. That's pretty much the way it works. As you take off, pre-flight would be at the air traffic control tower. Take off also at the tower, but departure, that'd be your TRACON. That'd be your TRACON. TRACON would climb you up and then hand you off to in-route. So you would go from the in-route. And then basically when you get towards your destination, maybe in-route would hand you back off to a TRACON, back to the approach control to the tower.
Michael Julius:
For example, you would say from Midway Airport, you taxi out to the runway. Or first of all, you get your ... I'll explain that later. You taxi out to the runway. They clear you for takeoff. As you depart, you climb up and they switch to Chicago TRACON. Chicago TRACON, radar contact, climb maintain. They'll climb you up and then they'll hand you off to Chicago Center. So then you'll go from Chicago Center to Cleveland Center to New York Center to New York Approach to LaGuardia Tower. Then they clear you to land. And then to LaGuardia Ground and they taxi you into your gate. So that's pretty much what the phases of flight, the way it looks like.
Michael Julius:
I'm going to go and explain that a little bit more as we go along here. So just bear with me. When we talk about the towers, we talked about Midway Tower in particular. If you notice, there's positions. We call this part of the Tower Team. You have flight data and clearance delivery. And then you have ground control, local assist. Local assist is only open when it's very busy and local control needs somebody to help them sequence the aircraft, get releases, and do things of that nature, and then the radar position. So as you look down here, you see that there's 518 or so control towers.
Michael Julius:
There's 19,622 airports, most of which, if you notice, are private airports. And then this picture down to the lower right is also a picture of Midway Tower. Let's go forward. Midway Airport, as you see here that basically you got five runways, 10 runways if you count each end. Here's the terminal over here, so it's where everybody comes in. This is the terminal, the gates. So this would be Alpha part of the terminal and then the Bravo gates and then Charlie gates like that. Over here, you can barely see it, is the Midway Tower, and then Atlantic Aviation. Then you got Signature and ANC also over here. And then on this side, you have the main hangars for Southwest Airlines. And then you have your runway and, like I said, various taxiways.
Michael Julius:
So basically this runway is runway 31 Center. That's our main runway for commercial airlines. And then 4 Right, that's our other main runway. So that's where we land our 737s, 757s, things of that nature. They land on that. Well, then you have runway 31. This is 31 Center, 31 Left, 4 Right, 4 Left. This would be 22 Right, 22 Left, and then also 13 Left, 13 Center, 13 Right. Now, when I say 31 Center, what that's lined up with is the magnetic heading on a compass. So it's 310 degrees and that's the runway. So when you line up on the runway, it's 310 degrees. But typically when you have more than one runway pointing in that direction, they will make them a left, right, and a center.
Michael Julius:
That's why you only have runway 4 Right and 4 Left over there. There's only two runways, but they're both heading in 040 heading. The other runways is pointing in 220 degrees, so 220 heading, so 22 Left and then 22 Right. Once again, this is the Tower Team. As you look at the team, here you have your clearance delivery person handing off strips over to Ground Control. That's what this gentleman's doing here, Ground Control. This gentleman's in because we do have weather. That's what you can see on the scope here. That's weather as you look out the window also. So he's helping the local controller who's watching the BRITE, the radar position. We're on three ones, the way we're set up.
Michael Julius:
This gentleman back here is the supervisor watching the operation. This is the Tower Team. So the idea is that everybody works together to move airplanes. That's what we do. That's pretty much what it looks like. Let's go into different positions. With this is clearance delivery. Clearance delivery, these are the flight plans. Typically, while you're coming up to the airport, parking your car or getting dropped off, the pilots have been there a few hours early. They did their pre-flights. What they will do is send over the flight service, that's the flight service station. They'll get a weather briefing and they'll also put in the flight plan to determine what is the best route, according to the weather briefing, to fly.
Michael Julius:
They'll put that in and the flight service station will put that into the system. So when they get to their aircraft, sit down, do their preflight checks and everything, they're getting ready to depart or thinking about taxiing and everything else. As you're sitting down in your seat, getting your seat adjusted and everything else, they're up front talking to clearance delivery. So example, Southwest 1193, a Boeing 737 and this is equipment suffix. He's going to Las Vegas. This is his route to Las Vegas. What he would basically do is say, "Midway Clearance Delivery, this is Southwest 1193. Ready to go to Las Vegas at Gate Bravo 19." That's what the B19 stands for right here. As you can see that's handwritten.
Michael Julius:
Your clearance delivery specialist would grab the strip and then he would read back to him, "Southwest 1193, cleared to Las Vegas Airport via the Midway for departure." Then it's filed. "Maintain 3000." That's what the three here stands for. "Maintain 3000. Departure frequency 133.5." That's the frequency they'll use to talk to C90. And then the most important thing here is SQUAWK 1311. That's a beacon. We put that in what we call a transponder. A transponder in the aircraft is how we're able to follow the aircraft's altitude, speed, and direction. That's how we follow. They put this code in there and this code is synonymous with everything that you see on the strip plus more, as far as background information and everything else that they give the flight service.
Michael Julius:
That's how we follow them. As you look further down, you see this aircraft here. It's a Citation 560X and his call sign. That's his beacon code, 3545. As you see, he's going to St. ... Well, he's got a four-route route to St. Louis. In this situation, there was weather so they had to give him a four-route to St. Louis that we would read to him. Once again, altitude is 3000. His departure frequency, you see, would be 118.4. That's because he's going to be going out a different direction than the Southwest. And then same thing goes for this aircraft down below, which is a Hawker Siddeley, November 80 Juliet. Once again, his beacon code frequency and then altitude.
Michael Julius:
So then once he's done with that, he takes that strip and he hands it over to ground control. Ground control, at that point, looks at the strip, waits for the aircraft to call. When he does, when they usually push back he'll cock it on his board like this. He'll do that. Let's say, for example, just moving on, so Southwest 1193 calls in for taxi. Says, "Southwest 1193, Midway Ground, ready to taxi." So ground control would turn around and say, "Southwest 1193, Midway Ground, taxi to runway 4 Right." This is runway 4 Right. So now he has to give him a direction and where to taxi and how to taxi.
Michael Julius:
So he'll say, "Southwest 1193," since he knows he's parked here, gate 5119. "Taxi via taxiway Yankee. Cross runway 31 Right, 31 Center, and runway 31 Left, taxiway Yankee 1." So his route would be taxiway Yankee, crossing these runways all the way over to taxiway Yankee 1. So say for argument's sake, the next aircraft to call them is Citation 183 Juliet Sierra located at Atlantic Aviation, what happens to be this building right here. That's Atlantic Aviation. So he would say, "Midway Ground, this is Citation 183 Juliet Sierra. Ready to taxi, requesting runway 31 Center." 31 Center is not the active runway and you could tell this by the way our strip marking. I know you wouldn't know, but by the strip marking. We show that 31 Center.
Michael Julius:
So 4 is our active runway. That's why you don't see an oval or half-round shape over 4 Right. We would turn to November 3 Juliet Sierra and say, "Citation 183 Juliet Sierra, taxi to runway 31 Center via taxiway Foxtrot 2." Foxtrot, that's this right here. "Cross the approach at 31 Left, runway 31 Center." So Citation 3 Juliet Sierra would read that back and he would taxi out this way and like this. Since he's not a conflict for the Southwest coming this way, there's no need to mention that to him. Now, however, if this aircraft, the Hawker 80 Juliet, calls for taxi ... Let's say for argument's sake, he's at Atlantic. Says, "This is Hawker 80 Juliet, ready to taxi. Requesting 4 Right for departure."
Michael Julius:
You say, "Hawker 80 Juliet, it's actually runway 4 Right via taxiway Yankee 1. Give way to the Southwest aircraft on taxiway Yankee." So what you're doing is you're saying, "Yes, you can go from here. We want you to go all the way down to here to go to Yankee 1 to go to the runway. But we also want you to give way to this aircraft on taxiway Yankee." That's ground control controlling the aircraft on the surface and vehicles. Anybody that works on the airport, they talk to them. So then you would turn to Southwest 1193 and say, "Southwest 1193, traffic ahead and to your left will give way to you. Contact tower, holding short, runway 4 Right."
Michael Julius:
At that time, Southwest 1193 would be passed over to local control. As you look out the window here, this is approaching runway 4 Right. There's your Southwest in position. There's your Hawker jet behind him. You can't see the other aircraft on 31 Center because actually that's behind where she is standing, where the young lady is standing at. As you can tell, she's monitoring the scope here, got the aircraft in position here, looking out the window. That's basically what she does. In the next screen, I'm going to show you this. This is what she's looking at.
Michael Julius:
Here's this dash line that goes like this is actually the lake shore. This is the towers downtown, downtown Chicago. This is weather. You can tell this is weather because we have it up here on the scope, level one weather, the dots back here, level two. You can set it to where you have it on or you don't. The most important thing about this is that this is the extended center line of runway 4 Right. Each dash is a mile. Each space is a mile. It also goes out, out to five miles out from Midway Airport. This is what we call the dump zone and we use that to stay out of it. So we know when we have to turn aircraft, we turn outside of it because that's where they descend aircraft inbound to the airport.
Michael Julius:
So she would turn to Southwest 1193 and she would say, "Southwest 1193, Midway Tower, runway 4 Right, turn right, correction, turn left heading 250. Cleared for takeoff." He's going out over Iowa City. So it's a left turn, westbound frequency. So you take off and go in this direction. Behind him, she would put November 80 Juliet, runway 4 Right, turn right heading 130, cleared for takeoff. So actually he's going southbound. He'll come out and go out on a heading like this. And then after that, November 183 Juliet Sierra was on 31 Center. He would depart, but she would wait for the other Southwest to go this way to clear the departure path because this is the extended center line, 31 Center.
Michael Julius:
And then you would say, "November 183 Juliet Sierra, runway 31 Center, turn right heading 090, cleared for takeoff." So basically, your southbound will be out of the way going this way. Eastbound goes out this way. Westbound goes out that way and you're separated. Meanwhile, that's how we work aircraft out from the facility. Do I have any questions on what I spoke about as far as working at a tower? Any questions?
Alex Glomset:
Mike, we have one question that comes in from Ellie which is, has the number of traffic controllers changed over the years as advances have been made in technology?
Michael Julius:
We still have approximately 15,000 controllers. Right about the strike when Reagan fired the controllers, about the same amount, so about 15,000. As the, I would say, technology has gotten better, the traffic has also increased. So we've kind of increased controllers to keep up with that. That's what we have done. Right now, they are looking to hire controllers because we had people retire and relatively en masse. So they are looking to hire controllers.
Alex Glomset:
A few more questions, one's a quick one from Joan. Do you still use paper flight strips?
Michael Julius:
That is correct. We do use paper flight strips, as you saw the strips that were there. But we do have electronic flight strips. I don't have that on this right now. But we do have a situation where we have electronic flight strips. In fact, when you look at the strip here, down below, this bar code, when we scan that, that's what prints out over at C90 at the approach control. Their strips can either be electronic up on the screen or they can print out.
Alex Glomset:
Let's take one more. I'm going to combine two questions. What types of training do people need to work in a tower? This is just an added part question, what is the percentage of men to women controllers?
Michael Julius:
Okay. The type that you need to work in a tower, actually we have different training for tower, for TRACON, the TRACON being the approach control, and then for working at the center. Tower controllers, typically you're looking out the window, so you've got to be able to spatially orientate looking out the window, deciding whether or not you have distance and speed, to be able to figure that out by looking at the aircraft, as well as some towers do not have radar systems in the tower. For example, when I was at Muncie, we didn't have a BRITE radar scope, so we had to use binoculars.
Michael Julius:
You had to visually locate the aircraft after they told you they were inbound, find them, and then sequence them that way. So you have to have good spatial recognition. The other thing is, as far as for towers themselves, you can start off working in a tower and then promote up into a TRACON like I did and into the center like I did. So you can move along at different areas. The basic air traffic is taught to you down at Oklahoma City. So they kind of give you an overview of everything you need to know. And then when you're sent to your facility, it's more specialized at the facility.
Michael Julius:
As far as percentage-wise for women in the air traffic ranks, if I had to say and I don't know exactly, but would say somewhere around maybe 15, 20%, somewhere in that range as far as women are concerned. As far as minorities are concerned, I think we're at a range about 5% as far as African Americans, Hispanics, and things like that, about 5%.
Alex Glomset:
That's great. You have a lot more questions, but I think we should probably proceed to the next.
Michael Julius:
Okay. We'll move on to the next. But okay. Thank you for asking the questions. As we go on, we're going to talk about the Chicago TRACON. This is C90. This is what it looks like out in Chicago. As you can see, in the TRACON facility that you have also teams also. In that area, we call the facility or the sector and that's why we say, "Chicago, approach. Chicago, departure." The radar position is the person sitting in front of the scope actually talking to the aircraft. The radar associate is kind of like the local assist person. When they're really busy, they'll have an associate there to do handoff, strip marking, things of that nature.
Michael Julius:
The radar coordinator, the coordinator would work out and say, "Hey, I got to get this aircraft over here." You'll coordinate, as it says in the name, with maybe another sector or another facility. They also have a tracker and a sequencer, which I will go into later. And then flight data, pretty much every position, every facilitator has a flight data person or personnel. When we talked about those three aircraft, so that was Southwest 1193 going outbound. His outbound would look like the white line. See the white lines going out. Those are the outbound aircraft from Midway. Red is the inbound aircraft at Midway. This is pretty much a really nice weather day.
Michael Julius:
You see we don't have any weather in the Chicagoland area. The lines are straight. That's how you know the weather's good. When the lines are straight, the weather's good. Southwest 1193 going out over Iowa City towards Las Vegas this direction and down towards Vegas out in that direction, probably more or less right about here. Then you have Citation 183 Juliet Sierra. It came off through Acito Adell. Those are our southbound fixes. And then you would turn and bend him out over by St. Louis and then down towards Dallas, out in this area. Then you have 80 Juliet, also going out eastbound pretty much straight out, more or less this line because Pittsburgh's right about here even though this line goes beyond Pittsburgh, more towards Philly.
Michael Julius:
But he would be right about in here. That's pretty much the way they would do it coming out on a day which is relatively nice. But when you get to a certain altitude, they would only climb up to about 10,000 and the center would take over from there. And then here's the radar team. As you're looking at the frontline, as they used to call it down when I was down at Indy, they call it the frontline. You have your two controllers. Here's that overhead or the tracker position. That's where that's located at. So they would plug into here where you have overhead or the tracker helping out the controllers. That way the cord doesn't interfere with the person in front of the scope.
Michael Julius:
The other part of TRACON is also the arrival. Let's talk about that. I have a screen here where we're looking at Chicago O'Hare Airport. As you could see, this is where we are right now. We're 27 Right, 27 Center, 27 Left, 28 Right, 28 Center, 28 Left. Then you have the cross runways, 22 Right and then 22 Left. Well, when they're on west flow, meaning they're going in this direction, everybody's going west flow. They'll use for the inbound runways, 28 Center, this runway here, 27 Left, this runway here, 27 Left, and then 27 Right. So basically they're set up so they can send. They will favor 27 Left and 27 Right so they can launch the south side of the field.
Michael Julius:
As you can tell, that's where the terminal is mostly. So they can send people right after these ones and go. As you can see, these are future runways, existing runways. So what does that look like on the scope? This is what it looks like on the scope. So this typically, just like I say, it's a clear weather day. They're on west flow. West flow, everybody's going westbound, departures departing towards the west, west flow. And then, like I said, they would land in runway 28 Center, which is on the south side, 27 Left and 27 Right, which is on the north side.
Michael Julius:
With the two positions or four positions actually with this, you have feeders. So you'd have a north feeder and a south feeder. What the feeder is it takes the aircraft coming inbound from the center and descends them down to, say, 7000 or so, gets them on what we call the downwind. That's a downwind right there. And then this would be the base and then that would be the final. So they get them on the downwind, get them down to at this side, because I know O'Hare launches and climbs to five here because we're coming out. We're coming to three, so three to five.
Michael Julius:
Basically, what we have here is Midway. You would normally have a four post. Here would be your post. But they don't have a post down here because Midway's here. So they're not going to run over the top of us with this many airplanes. Basically, we come out to three. They come out to four. These guys descend down to five, turn to four, 4000 feet when I say it like that. And then they would join the localizer or RNAV inbound. When they get to a certain altitude here, they would hand them off to what they call the final controller. If you look back, let me see if I can find that picture.
Michael Julius:
There's only two people working there. So if this was the feeder here, then that would be the final controller here. The final controller is the controller that would say, "Five miles from the marker. Maintain 4000. Establish on the localizer. Clear ILS, 27 at left approach, ILS approaches." That's what they would do. The feeder controller would get the aircraft down and slowed and in a position where the final controller can turn them in towards the airport. Then you have different work terminal applications behind the super. A super would be something like the A380. So you need another heavy behind them six miles, a large aircraft, like a heavy would be a 747 or behind a large aircraft, behind a super, you need a 737.
Michael Julius:
Small would be eight miles behind a super. You would need that. You'd need eight miles. Small would be like a corporate jet, something to that effect. Whereas, behind a large you need normally four miles, a small behind a large, four miles, small behind a heavy, six miles. But these are things you also have to factor in when you're running your feeder, when you're running your aircraft, so how many aircraft you can accept at the airport at a time. That's basically what that looks like. So that's west flow. East flow, as is shown up here when everybody's going out this way.
Michael Julius:
This map would be basically reversed so that you'd have them all coming in and departing out towards the east and then would be landed 10 Right, 10 Center, and 9 Left. So that's basically how it would look on east flow. Any questions or discussion on the radar approach?
Alex Glomset:
Yeah. I have a few that I'm going to combine again because you have a lot of questions.
Michael Julius:
Okay.
Alex Glomset:
There's a fanatic sense here with a lot of questions about what happens when things go wrong. There's a question how are people's skills assessed to be an air traffic controller? There's one about are traffic controllers given periodic health checks like pilots are? And then another one that says what are protections against human error, like slip of the tongue, and against power or technology failure?
Michael Julius:
Okay. Well, every facility that we have that we work in, we have our backup generators. We have our own power waiting to go. We've switched over to that during thunderstorms where you have to go to your own power. The generator comes up. I think it can run for a day or so, as far as that's concerned. So that's one thing. There are redundancies built into the system. For example, when I showed you the final, for example, the way we did the final at Indianapolis, I did not work this airspace. But what we would do, we have what we call a low side and a high side.
Michael Julius:
So these guys, for example, at Indy, we would descend to 4000. These guys on this side would descend to 5000. What that basically did, if you turned them in towards the airport and you forgot about them and these guys at four, these guys are at five, they would flow through that side if that happens. So we kind of did certain things along the way to look out or to protect for potential errors. I mean it's just the way the job is, a lot of redundancies in it. I will go and address some of the things that have gone wrong later on. Also, I have a little bit in a section towards the end. We talk about certain requirements and things that are needed to become a controller.
Michael Julius:
Aside from that, yes, we get a physical. If you're younger than, I believe, younger than 30 or 35 I think it is, you get it every other year. After 35 and on up, you get it every year. We are constantly watched and given tests and evals along the way for certain things, what they'll come up with as far as headquarters. They're asking for certain evals on people and what you're doing and so forth and so on. I would say the type of person, not to get too ahead of myself, but to say the type of person that would fit into this job is somebody who has the ability to make decisions quickly and clearly but, more importantly, have the ability to know whether or not that is the right decision.
Michael Julius:
There's a very simple adage that we have in air traffic. It's not a mistake until you fail to correct it. So if you make a mistake, which people, we make mistakes, fix it. That's why we have go-arounds. That's why we put people in holding. That's why we vector people out of the way. Fix it. That's what you do. Once you fix it, it's like it never happened and you move forward. So like I said, I will address some of that later on in the discussion. But that's pretty much the way the C90 works or the terminal works and their TRACON works.
Alex Glomset:
I have one more technical question. The question reads, "I read somewhere that runway numbers with LNR need to add up to 36 or 360 degrees total. Some airports seem to have that pattern and others don't. Can you please tell us more?"
Michael Julius:
Okay. There's only 360 degrees in the mag compass. All runways are based on 360 degrees. So runway 9 is runway 090, is 90 degrees heading. Runway 27 is 270 degrees. So yes, they all fit on a magnetic compass. That's the way they work. So if you happen to see somebody put 390 or 39 on the runway, that's not legit.
Alex Glomset:
Here's one more. It says, "Why is the final controller at the TRACON as opposed to the ATCT? Is the final controller able to see the runway and that the runway is clear?"
Michael Julius:
Well, okay. The final controller just works the aircraft in the radar scenario, as I said, contact tower at the marker. At the marker, the aircraft switch over to the control tower, as you saw the young lady in the previous picture. And then she would determine whether or not she has enough spacing for departures to get out or to clear the aircraft to land. The tower is separate from the radar and from the TRACON. There's really no reason for them to see it. They sit in that room, as you saw in the other picture. That's what the room pretty much looks like. That's what they sit in.
Michael Julius:
There's no reason for them to see the runway itself. When they hand them off, the person that they hand them off to is in the control tower, can see the runway, can make the determination whether or not the aircraft has the spacing to land.
Alex Glomset:
Let's move on to the next section. We can save some of these questions for the next one.
Michael Julius:
Okay, great. All right. After you do that, you go to the air route traffic control tower, I mean center. As you can see, air route traffic control centers, there's 21 of them in the country. Each ARTCC is divided into sectors. As you see, the different air traffic controllers have, like I said to you earlier, about your flight. So if you left Chicago, you went to ZAU to Chicago Center, to Cleveland Center, to New York Center, to the New York TRACON, to be sitting right about here which is N90, and then to LaGuardia, then LaGuardia Tower, LaGuardia Ground taxi in.
Michael Julius:
But that's how you would transverse the country through these air traffic control centers. So if you're coming up from the South, you go from Miami to Jacksonville to Atlanta, Indianapolis to Chicago Center that way. So out here from Oakland through Salt Lake City, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago. So as you could tell, they're pretty much just kind of divided up, not along the lines of states, but along the lines of where the traffic flows and the best way the traffic looks. We have different sectors. We have the low, from the surface up to flight level 230, the high, from flight level 240 to 330, and then the super high or the ultra-high, as they call it, from flight level 340 to flight level 600.
Michael Julius:
And then above flight level 290, it used to be everything above 290 and above was all 2000 feet separation between aircraft. They brought it down to 1000 feet with reduced vertical separation minimum due to the fact they had improvements in altimeters and other technology on the aircraft so they could bring them in a little bit closer and it was more consistent. The problem before was that some aircraft, the altimeters may not act right. So they put 2000 feet between them because they're moving so much faster at that speed and the closer rate is so much, like at 1000 knots or greater, that they needed some room to basically for error.
Michael Julius:
Now that we have it down to the point where they're very accurate about where they are and how they're located, we've been able to go to reduced vertical minimum. As you look at these aircraft, for example, this Hawker 417 Tango Mike, he's only going as high as 16,000 down toward Peoria. So he would pretty stay in the low sector. And then you have Southwest 873 going to St. Louis, flight level 260, so he would wind up in a high sector. Excuse me. Then you have Swift Flight E135 Azalia going to Phoenix. He's climbing a little bit higher, so he would wind up in flight level 380 up in the super high.
Michael Julius:
As we look at the next one, here's a cutout view from Atlanta Center. For example, just bear with me for example. Atlanta Center, if you're departing out and you're only going to stay in the low sector, so you'd fly through here from the surface up to flight 230. So you'd wind up in this area. If you're going to the high sector, you'd wind up in this area, 240 to 330. And then the super high or the ultra high, 340 and above. But if you're climbing, say for argument's sake, from an airport, you're climbing through this sector. Then you would hand off to this section.
Michael Julius:
If you're going up to the super high, you go into this sector, and then you would fly out. Then on the way inbound, say if he's coming from the super highs, he would come down through this sector, probably go through this sector like this, down through this and down through that, and then to the airport that way or to the approach controls. What you see here are approach controls, so they go up to 10,000 feet typically. Above flight level 600 to flight level 240, you need five miles standard. And then below that, flight level 230, three miles between them but that's only for certain sectors and certain areas. Three miles would probably be more or less associated with this one here because they're coming out of an approach control and into the center airspace.
Michael Julius:
But typically you need three miles increasing to five miles or five miles in the center airspace. That's typically what you need. Once again, in the Chicago Center, you have the sector of the area. They'd all say Chicago Center or New York Center, something to that effect. But they would work a certain area. They have the radar position or this guy, you have the radar position, radar associate sitting there. Your flight data specialist, so usually at the end of the row, and this individual here would be your supervisor. Once again, we're talking about the flight and how your flight is arced across the country.
Michael Julius:
On a day where the weather is great, as you can tell, it's great when you got straight lines. Going into O'Hare, you got these guys lined up here and you also have aircraft here. Just to have an idea, when I worked at Indy Center at traffic management, we had a habit of even lining up aircraft coming into the Chicago area over the Gulf of Mexico. You reach that far out to make sure you can line these guys up because you can't see it on this screen, but these guys in actuality, they're all in trail is what we say they are. They're in trail. Once again, talking about the way your flight will go, the preflight takeoff, departure, landing, so the arc of your flight and then coming back to your destination.
Michael Julius:
You got that. Once again, like I explained to you in the other slides how that pretty much worked with the in-route going back from center to center to center or even going out west the same way, center to center. And then you hit the approach control going into Phoenix and then they send you down in towards the airport that way. Questions?
Alex Glomset:
Sure. I have another couple paired together, one pertaining to physical health and one pertaining to mental health. The first one, how are controllers managing to stay COVID free given how many are sitting next to each other for many hours at a time? The second one is about how much stress is induced by being an air traffic controller and how does one handle the stress? Are there stress-reduction classes or frequent breaks?
Michael Julius:
Okay. During the eight-hour day, typically you may be on position five out of the eight hours of the day. So you do get the breaks, as far as that's concerned. Let me go back and answer the first question with COVID. What we have done with COVID is they've gone to schedules where they have crews that will work together. They went to a three-crew concept at first where you'd work five days, then you'd be off for 10 days as the other crew would rotate in five days. Five days in, five days out. That way if somebody got sick, they could replace the whole crew and put them in that way. Or they went to five days on, five days off, so you have a crew on, crew off, crew on, crew off.
Michael Julius:
So that's the way we did that. Not to mention as far as going through the facilities and making sure they were clean and attended to. As far as dealing with the stress, I myself I played lacrosse throughout college. I still play lacrosse. So I would spend a lot of time as far as working out, lifting, training, playing lacrosse. But mostly the lifting was very beneficial when it came time to go to work because it is a stressful job. But you have to figure out what your outlets can be and be a positive outlet at that. So that's how I pretty much handled it for myself.
Michael Julius:
Other people do other things of that nature, hiking, jogging. A lot of people like to run marathons and things of that nature to as far as do something to exert that physical energy from everything else when you're sitting there just kind of tensing up and watching it. But I would say that the type of person, once again, it's kind of a personality trait as far as the controller's concerned. I remember when I went through the academy, the person that finished, I believe, was second in our class. He signed up, took the test, came in off the street. The guy was running a Ditch Witch. He was running a Ditch Witch as a plumber's assistant before that, but he had the knack.
Michael Julius:
He could see, as we used to say, see traffic. Because when I went through the academy, it was all non-radar. So he had the ability with non-radar to fix it and see people, other fixes and seeing the traffic before it came into conflict and he was good at it. So it's kind of like having a knack for the job itself.
Alex Glomset:
There are another few about international airspace rules. One, how are procedures standardized internationally? As well, how is airspace over the ocean divided among control centers?
Michael Julius:
Okay. Internationally, we have a thing called ICAO, International Air Traffic Association. It's called ICAO. So what we give for air traffic here is pretty much standard around the world is the way it's done. Just as English is the standard language of air traffic control, so no matter where you go, you got to be able to speak English over the frequency to aircraft. Over the ocean, for United States, it's too far back to bring that map up. But over the ocean, Houston Center pretty much runs the Gulf of Mexico, as far as that's concerned, for the United States.
Michael Julius:
New York Center runs the East Coast, as far as that's concerned, off the East Coast. Oakland runs off the West Coast. They're called oceanic sectors. The oceanic sectors are the ones that handle the aircraft over the oceans inbound to the States and vice versa. So that's pretty much how that's done.
Alex Glomset:
Another one I have, who picks the overall route from point A to B? How much is preplanned versus determined on the fly? How much control does the controller have?
Michael Julius:
Okay. The flight is actually put in by the pilots. When they file a flight plan, that's what they're doing. They're putting the flight plan and the direction they want to go, the route they want to fly to their destination. The time that the flight plans get changed or the route gets changed, and I'll get to that when we look at inclement weather, you have to change the flight. So you might hear if you're sitting and they say, "We have to wait to see or we have to put on more fuel because of our flight," well, that means the route has changed. I will go into that a little bit right after that. That's pretty much how that is done. What was the other part of the question?
Alex Glomset:
How much control does the controller have and who determines the route from A to B?
Michael Julius:
Okay. Typically, air traffic control or the flight service would say, for example, if there's a military operations area that's open, the flight plan, that's where the military would go into these boxes, per se, and practice their maneuvers. Sometimes you have flights or routes that go through that, that are open when the MOA, Military Operation Area, it's called a MOA, when the MOA is closed. If the MOA is open and they want to fly through during that time, they can't, so they have to change their route that way. That's usually when we change the route for that or other special-use areas for VIP movements and things of that nature.
Michael Julius:
But pretty much it's up to the pilot to file the flight plan for the route that they want and we just take what comes from there. So that's what we do unless we can get into area points of weather, which I will discuss here momentarily.
Alex Glomset:
One last question just because it's been submitted a bunch. There are a bunch of questions about your insight as an air traffic controller around 9/11.
Michael Julius:
Okay. For the record, for 9/11, my wife was in the hospital so at that day in particular I was not working that day. But the insight is basically what they did was once they couldn't determine the friend or, foe or the IFF identify friend or foe, with the airlines, they grounded everybody. Basically, air traffic, what we did, whoever was at whatever center's airspace, that's where you landed. So if you were in Cleveland's airspace and even though you were going to LA, you're not going to LA. You're landing in Cleveland. If you're in Indianapolis, you're landing in Indianapolis.
Michael Julius:
You're landing in Cincinnati. You're landing in those centers' airspace. So that's what we did with that, grounded it. And then from that point forward, the military took over the rest of the airspace and handled it from there.
Alex Glomset:
I think we can move to your next section.
Michael Julius:
Okay. Let's go then. Okay, hold on a second. Okay. So since we kind of touched upon this with the traffic management unit, that's where I worked at. TSD, Traffic Situation Display, that's what this is here. On a normal day at a peak, pre-COVID and everything else, we'd have about 5000 aircraft at the peak over the United States. We moved to about 44,000 a day. Once again, to answer your question, there's about 15,000 air traffic controllers. But when you're looking at this, you can see pretty much there's no weather over the States because everybody's pretty much going in their areas and they're doing well.
Michael Julius:
Now, inbound routes when there's weather, now this is what the person was talking about, individual with the question. If you notice, these routes, they're not straight. You got guys bending around weather this way coming in. You got these routes that probably would have normally been straight, bending up to the north coming in that way and so forth, to the south also. You could see this aircraft in particular. I can't pick him out. But had he came in this way over Chesapeake, West Virginia, lower Ohio, Indiana, and then made a hard right turn up towards Chicago. When you see here the streams, we call these the overhead streams. These are the highways that we were talking about.
Michael Julius:
Believe it or not, if you put a center on it, these aircraft are all being lined up to meet in a nice easy line right about here. When you blend these streams, for example, this aircraft was first, second, third, fourth. You can tell that by looking at this. He's coming up behind him. He's going to be slightly in front of him, depending how they run the route. You got this one here is in front of this aircraft. All these aircraft come in to this point. They'll be in line. Then these line up again this way coming inbound. That's what you call by blending the overhead streams.
Michael Julius:
And then from down south, you see the same thing this way. Even as you're doing this, you still got traffic going outbound. So once again, to that question about the routes, this is when air traffic goes in. We put in severe weather avoidance procedures or SWAP routes and we move their routes. They may want to be going to New York this way. They may have to go south and then come back around and then back up towards New York. This is where the pilot will come down the line and say, "Hey, it's going to be a few minutes. I got to put extra fuel on so I can do that and I can make this route." That's what they would do.
Michael Julius:
As you can see here, these are the outbound aircraft. Once again, they're going out and they're going out and around or they'll pick their way through if they think they can or if they can, depending on the height of these clouds, these clouds here with the red in them are actually a little bit taller. So they probably would go around them. But these, they might think they might be able to pick their way through. That'd be, once again, you're sitting in the aircraft and the fasten seatbelt sign never turns off, basically because they're flying through some turbulent air till they get out to this area, then they may turn it off. That's what they're doing. They're picking their way through thunderstorms.
Michael Julius:
Usually, when you're sitting there you can look out the window. You see these nice beautiful clouds. You're like, "Aw, that's nice." Yeah, they're going around that. And then usually those are the ones that when you're sitting, say, if you're in Iowa City or out west somewhere or St. Louis, say, "We can't get you to New York right now because the weather." You're looking for clouds. There are a couple clouds in the sky. You don't understand why. This is why. These are the moments where TMU comes into effect. I showed you those different layers of airspace. They may take some airplanes and cap them, as we would say, and keep them at a lower altitude because they can kind of zip through there a little bit better than having to go up higher and getting into the thunderstorms that way.
Michael Julius:
Actually, with my degree in meteorology, actually came in handy was in this way for sure because when you're trying to figure out routes you're also watching how well this is moving. How much is this going to build up afterwards, how fast, like I said, once again, the cells are building this way? So a route that might be open, say, here now may not be open if the weather's moving upwards. So you might run a few out this way quickly and then say, "Okay, you're going to have to wait a few minutes as the weather passed. Then you can go back out to the south." You do that pretty much and work it that way. Having a good idea, a good grasp of what weather's going to do or being a meteorologist, very handy for this type of work.
Michael Julius:
When things go wrong, as somebody asked, if you remember the Chicago Center fire and the outage, this is what it looked like on the scope. You had no aircraft. As you can see here, this is what it should look like, something to that effect or what the other aircraft we showed with the pink. When we went down like this, basically what we had to do was go non-radar. So myself being trained in non-radar, it wasn't a problem. I understood it. I understood how to put people out over fixes, how to give them joint airways. A lot of the controllers that came in after me, a lot after me, they didn't train on non-radar because what they did, for example, in the Chicagoland area, we got four radar sites turning.
Michael Julius:
So if one goes down, there's a backup to a backup to a backup. And then so when we lost the radar out in Chicago Center, we didn't lose a radar. We had the connection to the radar. What we wound up doing was going non-radar and they brought the center controllers to the towers, like to Midway and O'Hare, so they could put in the fixes and put in the routes because they were a lot more familiar with them than we were. And then we would launch guys. What we did was we did everything on time, just like we used to do. This aircraft began to depart, say example, at 2000 lifted off the ground by 2001. That's 8:00 to 8:01 or do 8:03, for example, 2003. And then that way, you'd launch him. And then behind him, the next guy, he's released from 2005 lift off the ground by 2008.
Michael Julius:
While you're doing that, you're launching, you're launching. And then they get to a certain point where Rockford could see them and Rockford was able to go up there. C90 was able to work them. So what they did was make sure they were on the correct flight path on the airway and they would hand them off until they would get to a point where Minnesota, Minneapolis sector or center could see them because they were able to reach down a little bit, same thing with Kansas City. And then we saw them and then went back to radar separation. But what we didn't do, we had no overflights. All the overflights had to go around. So that was a day that if a pilot put it in a flight that he wanted to go to Los Angeles this way, not going to happen.
Michael Julius:
He's going to go south and then that way and there's probably going to be some delay. That's what we do. Like I said, there's redundancy built into the system. This is one of the systems where we had to come up with this idea how we're going to do this. This happened within a day's time or so. They were able to figure that out. Another situation where you have inclement weather is with snow removal, snow operations. Like you see here at Midway Airport, we have the guys doing deicing. And then you have the broom teams out. There's actually a certain science to it. Certain types of snow, the fluffy, easy snow is easier for brooms. Whereas the heavier snow, the wet snow, they use the plows. Just something you pick up along the way.
Michael Julius:
And then here's, once again, the broom teams and then the snow blower. We actually piled up our snow and then we melted it. It's only a square mile. There wasn't many places to put it. When we did that for air traffic deicing, what you can only do after you deice an airplane, you have 15 minutes to get that aircraft out on the runway and depart. So you had to be very, very specific about who you deiced here, how you deiced, how many airplanes you deiced, and how quickly you can get them going. Also, in conjunction to getting the broom teams or the plow teams, that's what these are right here, excuse me, out on the runway so they can keep the runway clear.
Michael Julius:
Now, as you can see, there's Xs on these runways here on the ASDE. This is our surface radar that show those runways as closed. That way we can just taxi them right to the deicing spot and get them going. Typically when we did that, we would launch what we call the cross runway, coming across that way or land the cross runway and depart this runway. It's for efficiency, but that's basically what we did. And then you can see, once again, the plow teams here. With that in mind, this is what it looks like when they get it done. This is the guy with the shovel and a lot of work in front of him, as we would say.
Michael Julius:
When you have that at night, this is what it looks like from Midway Tower at night with some snow. It wasn't heavy snow, but some snow. So you could see, this is the terminal here. That's what it would look like at night. You can see the blue lights. Those are taxiway lights. And then you have this light here that's also green and alternating. That's actually a runway light for a high-speed off of runway 13 Center and runway 31 Center's going this way. So once again, you have your local controller, your ground controller, flight data specialist. This area back here's the desk.
Michael Julius:
As you can see, we're on 31 Center, depicted on the map here that this is where the supervisor typically sits. We talk about a bad situation. For example, Southwest Airline 1248, that was December of ... That went through the fence. Some of you may remember that or not, I don't know. But basically December 8, 2005. He was cleared to land runway 31 Center. Basically what happened was it was snowing so heavy, we could only see to about here, to the bullseye. Here's the terminal over here, the tower here. The visibility, excuse me, like you saw in the last picture, was worse than this where you can just barely see the terminal and you can see the bullseye would actually be up here.
Michael Julius:
You could barely see that. It was snowing just that heavy. The first aircraft that came in to land, it was a Gulfstream. He landed, turned left at Alpha to exit the runway. No problem. We lost an aircraft right before him. After he landed, we saw him go through bullseye. That's what this area is called right here. It's called the bullseye. He went through the bullseye. We launched again, far right. Then after that, Southwest came over. We watched him come through and we lost sight of him right about in here. Then we loaded 31 Center, had 4 Right loaded. And then after he came in through here, you're about ready to launch and we asked Southwest, "Report clear of the runway." Because what we wanted to do was launch 31 Center, then runway 4 Right.
Michael Julius:
"Southwest, are you clear of the runway?" "We're clear of the runway," he answered. Well, I wanted to know if he was on Bravo, which is this taxiway turning north going out towards the terminal. I asked the controller because at the time, we did not have ASDE so we could not see him on surface radar. He says, "No, we're off the field. We went off the field." So he wound up going off the end of the runway, through here, and landed and stopped right about here. That's where he stopped. So with that in mind, we couldn't see any of this, keep in mind. So we shut down the airport. It was the fire department. We reached out to the fire department, sent the trucks out.
Michael Julius:
We didn't know where he was there. But the policy at the fire department, they go and they check the whole runway, which is what they did. Now, within that timeframe, we still had an aircraft sitting on the runway here. Obviously, we're not going to launch this one because we don't know where he is on this part of the runway. But we had a guy here. This is what somebody was asking about as far as situations. The book says as soon as you close the airport, that's it. I don't care if the guy was sitting on the runway, the engine's fired up, ready to go. He's not going.
Michael Julius:
When I called the fire department out and said that we had an aircraft off the airport, he's sitting here. So while he's sitting here, there's a guy coming into work into the maintenance facility and he happened to miss the light. He didn't make the light. So he's sitting at the light right here at 55th and Central. All of a sudden, a big plume of snow and he looks out his window and there's a Southwest Airlines siting there. He calls over the AMC and said, "Hey, there's a plane in the street." They said, "We know. The fire department's rolling. We're rolling trucks, everything else." What we didn't know at that time, as soon as they did that, these guys that were doing snow removal on all the city ops over here, they started crossing the runway to go to the accident site.
Michael Julius:
But since the runway's closed or the airport's closed, they can do that. By simply following the rule, even though he's sitting here, the firetrucks are here, that guy taxied back to the gate. That's how you avoid certain things. A lot of times, the rules are put in place because of other incidents or accidents that may have happened long before you came on the job, but they're there for a reason. So when you follow that, it usually keeps you out of trouble. That was a sad situation that a child did wind up losing their life in that. But as far as we were concerned, we did everything we were supposed to. We didn't wind up with a lawsuit as far as that was concerned, but there was loss of life. Any questions?
Alex Glomset:
Yeah. So we're right about at time, so I'm going to group a couple more questions together. Thank you for everybody who submitted questions so far. There's a lot still here. The first group will be about communication with planes. The first part of the question is how do you communicate with aircraft over the oceans beyond the line of sight limit of most communications? And then the second question, kind of contradictory to that, with such technology, how were the two planes lost a couple years ago? How were they not able to be found even though there were those long searches?
Michael Julius:
So are we talking about the lost aircraft over by Vietnam and Malaysia? Is that what we're talking about?
Alex Glomset:
I think that's what they're referencing.
Michael Julius:
Yeah. That in itself, I have my own speculation on that which I'm not going to go into. But they should have been able to figure out just by telemetry and the path where the aircraft was flying where that aircraft should be. Aside from that, although it is ADSB and we do have satellites and we do have things that do that, we as the United States, we don't run that airspace. So I don't know specifically how that is done and how they are doing that and not being able to see where that aircraft went. I'll just kind of leave that at that.
Michael Julius:
As far as talking to aircraft, yes, now they do use satellites to bounce the signals over to talk to the airplanes, as far as that's concerned, radio, what they typically had done, they had different stations that they would tune into and would bounce the signals, say, from Greenland or Iceland, Greenland, Canada, down to whatever facility, which would have been New York. They would do it that way, as far as keeping in contact with aircraft over the open ocean. That's typically how they normally do it. You go some places, they have long-range radio signals that they're able to use. That kind of goes a little bit further than just line of sight. So we do have that.
Alex Glomset:
And then what I'll do for our last question, a couple grouped in. I'll read one question directly as it is because I think it's very detailed. The question reads, "What would happen if a pilot were to disregard ATC's instructions, for instance, if they requested flight level 380 to avoid heavy chop and ATC denied the request but the pilot changed altitude anyway, deeming it necessary for safety? What kind of investigation procedures are in place to follow up?" And then the second question that came in was about have you ever had to reprimand a pilot for doing or not doing something that had been communicated?
Michael Julius:
The second question, yes. I have reprimanded a few pilots along my career for not doing what they were supposed to do, especially when what they did had endangered other pilots. Now, with the first question, I'd say if he wants to stay at 380 and he was told to descend or to turn or whatever, if the pilot says, "I have to do this for the safety of the aircraft," typically controllers will let that go, try to move other aircraft away from that until they get past that. And then there would be an inquiry, if not an investigation, to why that pilot did not follow those instructions.
Michael Julius:
If it was just to try to continue on and not follow any further instructions, at that point we would probably have the military involved and he would probably get an escort. That's pretty much what would happen at this point. I think the first question, as far as pilots who I've had to speak to, I've had a pilot a long time ago depart when VFR flight was not recommended, but it was still VFR. He left out of the field, lost his electrics maybe about five miles south of Midway, turned around, came back. We knew he came back because we had a primary target. Basically, the radar was painting him. Had to stop all departures until he came in and landed. Couldn't talk to him until he landed.
Michael Julius:
But wound up having to stop five or six airplanes, Boeings, going out for an individual who probably should not have ... no, not even probably, should not have gone out in the first place. So we wound up doing that. That was something that I got FSDO involved and they had to talk to those pilots.
Alex Glomset:
I think I'm going to hand it off to Linda now. Thank you.
Michael Julius:
Okay.
Linda Ullman:
Thank you, Mike. It was fantastic. I have now sat through it a couple of times. I keep learning more and more. It's terrific. So I wanted to thank you very, very much for this special webinar. I want to thank Alex and Rebecca again for facilitating this. We really appreciate it. We thank you very, very much to Brandeis for partnering with us. Jan and I are both from Phoenix, as we mentioned, and it's 112 degrees, down a little bit cooler from 116, 117. So wherever you are, enjoy.
Linda Ullman:
We wanted to tell you we have another webinar that we're partnering again with and it's on July 31st. It's 1:00 Eastern Time. It's somebody whose name is Paul Rockower. He's a Brandeis alumni who credits Brandeis for his entire career, the opportunities that they afforded him to travel all around the world, he was particularly involved with the Middle East for a long time. He speaks six languages. He's traveled to 85 countries. So we hope you'll join us. Again, it's 1:00 Eastern Time on July 31st. We really, again, thank Mike very, very much. Have a wonderful day. Thanks.
Michael Julius:
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Linda Ullman:
Thank you.