Hamish Reid, Alameda Aero Club

[NOTE: due to the increased security arrangements after the September 11 attacks, the tours described here are highly unlikely to be repeated for a while yet, but I thought it worth leaving the descriptions here -- HR, 12/01].

July 2001

A bunch of us from the club signed up as a group for the "Fly The Bay" ATC tours led by Terry Craft, a tower controller at Palo Alto airport (PAO). These tours are aimed at GA pilots and students, and run for two three hour sessions on Saturday mornings or weekday evenings, and include guided tours of Palo Alto tower, Oakland Center (ZOA) in Fremont, and Bay TRACON (Bay Approach) and Oakland FSS at Oakland airport North Field. At each facility you get to talk to the controllers and other staff, watch what they're doing, see how it works, etc.

I highly recommended these tours for any pilot, but especially for students. You can sign up for information about upcoming tours directly at Terry's tour page.

What follows is a rather dry and long-winded description of the tours as I experienced them (they were a lot more fun in real life than I've made them sound, somehow). Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take photos inside ZOA or Bay TRACON, so most photos are from the PAO tower visit or from Bay Approach's own website. You can click on many of the photos for a larger version.

Day 1 -- PAO & ZOA

We meet Terry in the parking lot next to Palo Alto tower early Saturday morning. It's 9am, it's cold, it's grey, and it's slightly windy -- a classic Bay Area summer MVFR day with ceilings at about 1,500' -- and there are already 5 planes and a helicopter in the pattern. PAO's probably one of the busiest single-runway airports in America, and it shows.

After a few introductions and preliminaries we were led in to the tower itself. The first stop was the equipment room inside the base of the tower. This was classic -- racks full of a mixture of grey metal 1950's radios, 1990's era modems (carrying the BRITE radar signals from SFO), and big tape drives for recording all on-frequency transmissions (including ATIS and ground) for use after incidents or accidents. Terry claims the tower is going to be the place to be when the Big One hits -- it's supposedly built on large amounts of solid concrete buried somewhere below us. Never mind that the runway and apron will be in shreds (or even under water) after any major Big One... still, the tower was pretty damn solid. And the equipment -- or at least the radios -- looked like they'd survive a direct EMP burst, if only because they're built like tanks, and probably use vacuum tubes.

The tower cab itself was a new experience for me. Firstly, it was a lot quieter than I'd expected; I guess I'd thought that you could hear all the radio transmissions, etc., but (of course!) really all you hear is a controller speaking normally and nothing else. Just one side of the conversation -- and at normal conversational levels, and not through a distorted speaker or radio. Secondly, the cab seemed bigger and somewhat roomier than I'd imagined. There were twelve of us visitors there and three controllers, and we all fitted fine. And the view of the runways, aprons and ramps, and surrounding airspace, is, of course, just great....

At that time of day there were three controllers -- Beth, doing ground; Mike doing tower work; and a trainee controller whose name I missed. The controllers wear light phone-style headsets with long leads, and typically pace around the cab watching for the planes and trying to work out where the planes were (and why...). It was a lot of fun trying to correlate what you could hear them saying quietly into their mics with the planes you could see in the pattern or on the ground (positional awareness from the other side...). It was also a very interesting experience overhearing the talk between the experienced controller and the trainee -- lots of little hints and sequencing tips. By about 9.30 the traffic was heavy enough to cause a few go-arounds, and there were probably ten aircraft in the pattern, as well as a couple of IFR arrivals (it was still mostly IMC around the rest of the Bay).

The equipment in the cab itself was pretty basic and relatively lo-tech: a few weather gauges, the BRITE radar screen (more on this in a moment), radio controls, a few phones, and what I'll call the "shuffleboard". Apart from the radios, this seemed to be the primary controller tool -- all aircraft under the tower's control have a corresponding clear plastic strip with the callsign on it; these strips are moved about depending on where that aircraft is or where it's going (or going to go). Mike seemed to move the strips around almost unconsciously while talking to the corresponding plane or watching out the windows.

The other major tool besides the radios is the BRITE radar screen. This is a repeater of the SFO tower radar, piped in by modem from SFO (and relayed back to SQL from PAO). PAO tower isn't certified for radar control, so the screen is used primarily to identify arrivals and verify position reports. If you've flown in to PAO at a busy time you may have been issued a 5300 squawk code by PAO tower and told to ident -- this is solely for identification and positioning purposes: VFR clearances and sequencing, etc., are always done visually by the tower. The radar screen itself just looked like a digital version of the relevant bits of the SFO terminal chart minus the land data; it even had the Sunken Ship and SLAC marked on the screen. The large view of the screen is pretty self-explanatory, but if you need annotations, click here... (note: SQL shows no pattern traffic on the display due to it being IMC only a few miles further up the Peninsula at this time of day)

There was a well-thumbed copy of "A Field Guide To Airplanes" on the bench, which answered my question about how they could identify each plane or knew what a "Tailwind 4000" looked like (experience, mostly). There was also a set of wooden aircraft models on one of the back shelves, whose use wasn't explained. The tower cab also had the inevitable boom box tuned to some classic rock station or other; this seems to be a common part of the ATC environment (only Oakland FSS didn't have some sort of music in the background somewhere). Terry claims it helps him cope when it gets busy by cranking it up loud....

Some notes from questions during the tower visit:

• If you're not with Bay, but closely overflying PAO's airspace, Terry would rather have you call PAO tower even if you're just passing over -- there's enough traffic going around and about the area that you're far better off being on frequency with PAO tower, and at least they'll know who you are and where you're going (this advice doesn't hold for less congested class D's -- LVK, for one, doesn't care much about anyone above their airspace).
  
  
• PAO has a letter of agreement with Moffett about extending control into Moffett's airspace for those long downwinds.... I always get real nervous when asked to extend my downwind for 30 ^H^H^H 31 at PAO because it's nearly impossible not to bust Moffett's airspace, but Terry assured us all that if tower asks you to do it, it's OK. Plus Moffett doesn't have that large stream of ASW aircraft approaching and departing anymore, so the traffic volume there is much smaller than it used to be.
  
  
• Yes, they do know and recognize local voices and aircraft callsigns. I've always wondered whether tower controllers had different expectations (read: treat you differently) depending on whether they know you were local or not; the answer is that it's at least partially true (no more sarcastic on-air comments or goofing off in North Field's airspace for me, I guess).
  
  
• Transient parking space at PAO is a big issue (as anyone who's flown there recently knows). Yes, it's OK to park on the grass opposite the transient tie-downs (but watch out for the mud in winter...). There's actually a long waiting list for tie-downs anywhere on the field -- even with the dot-com implosion.
  
  
• This one's probably obvious, but: use your landing lights -- from at least the time you first start talking to tower. As was really obvious from where we stood in the tower, the visibility difference between someone with their lights on and someone with them off is huge, especially when you're trying to spot an arrival that's five miles away.
  
  
• This one's also obvious, but it bears repeating: don't tell tower you've seen your traffic unless you're damn sure you've seen the correct plane. If tower tells you you're following a Cherokee on right base and all you can see is a Cessna about where right base might be, don't assume the tower mis-called the aircraft type (or that Cherokees were made with high wings one year...). Ask! In any case, Terry says tower controllers typically have a gut feeling about whether you've really seen your traffic or not (or even whether you could possibly see it as called -- there are stories about miscalled traffic being "spotted" in impossible locations, etc.).
  
  
• When doing position reports for PAO and SQL, be aware of the difference between what I call "Local North" and real North around these parts: we all "know" that 101 goes north along the Peninsula (just like 880 goes north through Oakland and Hayward, right?). So PAO tower gets lots of position reports from planes claiming to be (say) "5 north over 101". This is west, of course....

After an absorbing hour or so of this, we headed back across Dumbarton Bridge to ZOA, Oakland Center, in Fremont. I wasn't sure what to expect, but first impressions were a bit odd -- the facility is quite big, and (except for the armed guards and the complex-looking antenna arrays, etc.), looked like any old anonymous high school or university. Inside, even more so -- long rows of lockers, a bad cafeteria, linoleum and bad-carpet floors, people furtively smoking in the corridors (OK, I made that last one up), etc.

We met John Wilson, our guide, at the anonymous front door, and were led into the facility past the ZOA Golf Club notice board. ZOA is divided into two main areas: the domestic sectors, and the oceanic sectors. ZOA domestic extends north towards the Oregon border where it meets Seattle Center (ZSE), south towards ZLA, and east over Nevada to Salt Lake City Center's airspace. You've probably talked to ZOA domestic dozens of times while flying away from the Bay Area. The oceanic sectors cover the routes between all of the West Coast and most Pacific Rim destinations, as far as Japan itself, and more than three-quarters of the way to Australia. Correspondingly, most of us have probably never talked to ZOA oceanic. There's currently a big difference between the way the two parts of ZOA work -- domestic is the familiar mix of radar, VHF radio, victor airways, jet routes, direct routings, etc., but the oceanic system is (currently) mostly about position reports, HF SSB radios, great circle routes, ARINC, and a total lack of radar (more on the oceanic routes later).

This place is a big contrast to PAO; the most immediate difference between the tower environment and the center environment is... darkness. It becomes obvious why the place seems to have a permanent cloud of coffee in the air -- in a place like this where the light's perpetually subdued, how else are you going to stay awake? PAO tower, by contrast, is all light.

The other most obvious difference is in the equipment. PAO's gear is functional, but lo-tech and mostly unobtrusive. ZOA's equipment is by contrast the whole point -- in fact it's all you can see besides the humans themselves. The main domestic sector room is a large window-less barn just full of cables, screens, switches, PCs, etc., of varying lineage and age. (Nerds take note: there was a refreshingly large number of Linux and Unix boxes in the center, still outnumbering the various Wintel boxes. There's a lot of potential for bad nerd jokes about literal Blue Screens Of Death here (or "out of airspace: core dumped")...). Some of this equipment obviously survived the ice ages, but most of it was relatively up-to-date (in fact, the radar screens looked rather boringly like recent electronic design gear or expensive brokerage desk monitors rather than the "real" radar screens (with rotating traces, etc.) that we were to see at Bay TRACON later. They weren't even circular, dammit!).

I asked what happens if all this gear goes out -- a power failure, for example, or the Big One hits. "Funny you should ask...", says John, and it turns out that five or six years ago this actually happened (the power failure, anyway), and things went mostly according to plan -- except there was no plan. This wasn't supposed to happen.... In any case, Seattle Center took over most of the northern high altitude sectors, LA the southern ones, Salt Lake the eastern ones, etc., and various means of getting planes to change frequencies and use the towers and FSS and other facilities' frequencies, etc., were devised (I hadn't known about this outage until I asked). So it's not a total disaster when this happens....

There seemed to be two main types of gear on the domestic side: the radar screens themselves, and the various traffic management systems. The individual sector radar displays are built up by computer from a mosaic of radar inputs from around the region; the actual sites themselves are at places like Mt. Hamilton and Mt. Tamalpais in the Bay Area, and scattered at various other heavily-fenced places around the state and Nevada. As implied above, the screens don't look much like the conventional radar screen -- or what we think of as radar screens (i.e. what you see in the movies). They're fully digital, for a start, which means no flicker, no rotating circular refresh trace or sweep, etc., they're multi-colored, and they're not usually centered on the radar site itself. And they're rectangular. Planes and traces and details can be in different colors, and the whole thing is easy to read and very smooth-looking. The on-screen info for each aircraft is easily-read and gives things like current ground speed, altitude, identification, etc. You can use a trackball to get more info, such as track, heading, route, etc., both textually and graphically, for each plane. There are also the ubiquitous paper strips next to each screen with full details of the filed (or amended) route, etc., for backup and cross-checks. Hand-offs to other sectors (and accepting handoff from other sectors) can be done automatically (with a mouse click) or semi-automatically (using the landline). Landline and radio control is done through touch-screen menus.

Sectors are typically either high-altitude or low-altitude; when you fly to Ukiah and talk to center on 127.8, that's a low-altitude sector; aircraft in the flight levels directly above you will be talking to another sector. I sat in with a controller for sector 31, a high-altitude domestic sector covering many of the main routes from somewhere north of the Bay to the Oregon border. The controller himself turned out to be a private pilot who used to fly with Flying Particles at Livermore; the most impressive thing about the 20 minutes I spent with him at his position was his ability to simultaneously listen to and answer my questions, monitor the dozen or so planes on his screen, hand-off or accept aircraft at the edges of his sector, listen to two separate radio frequencies, and drink coffee. All at the same damn time. Me, I could barely follow the radio. Just watching him quietly and smoothly resolve a couple of potential conflicts between 737's going north in the flight levels was fascinating -- and, of course, I wouldn't have noticed any sort of conflict at all until he pointed out the problems. Even at this time of the morning on a basically MVFR Bay day, center was busy, and we weren't able to sit in on all sectors (rush hour for the oceanic controllers is more like 2am, but that's a different story). Even given the rush, though, the overall atmosphere was calm -- no controllers screaming or running around the room yelling or cursing, no one loudly chewing out an errant Cessna or anything like that (i.e. this part wasn't like it is in the movies either). Not that we expected any of that, but still....

The other side of the equation here is the traffic flow management system. This is a series of controllers and computers that attempts to identify overloaded sectors and smooth out the overall flow through sectors and across the country by adjusting spacing and imposing the dreaded engine start and pushback restrictions, etc. The systems we saw displayed traffic in sectors and regions on screens with different colors for aircraft heading for SJC, OAK, SFO, etc., from across the state or the entire country -- this was really cool, especially seeing aircraft over NY state heading for SFO. Sectors would turn yellow if incoming traffic was projected to be above some threshold, and red (I think) if the actual number of planes in the sector exceeded some maximum. This part of the control flow is obviously very important for overall traffic flow and smoothness, but we didn't get enough time to explore this as much as I'd have liked.

We were taken upstairs to the oceanic division, which was a world apart. They used similar screens, but what was displayed on them -- and the scales involved -- was very different. Sectors here correspond to thousands of nautical miles in each direction (ZOA covers the largest area of any ATC facility in the US, 18 million square miles, the vast majority of that being the oceanic sectors), and there's no radar coverage for most of this. Center's radar can track incoming or departing flights over the Pacific to about 200-250 nm out from SFO, as long as you're high enough up in the flight levels; lower aircraft will typically be seen 50-100 nm out. Other than that, you're on your own, at least as far as radar is concerned (and Australia's 7,000 nm away...).

Aircraft on the oceanic routes use position reports relayed through ARINC, a commercial HF and VHF-based system that allows point-to-point communications between individual aircraft, airline dispatch, and controllers. This means that controllers here typically do not even speak directly to the aircraft under their control -- this is handled in both directions by ARINC. The screens at center then basically just show a hi-tech version of the old paper shuffling boards, but with decent computer-generated estimates, track / course / route, and deviation detection features. The great circle routes used are determined ahead of time for each day by the weather (especially the position of the jet stream); these routes are defined by the reporting points along the great circles involved. This system works fine, as long as the aircraft involved have decent GPS or inertial navigation; my grandfather, who apparently had to do celestial navigation while flying long distances over water in the 30's and 40's, would have found it mostly familiar (but a damn site easier now with GPS and / or INS).

There was a lot of talk about the newer technologies like GPS and satellite-based automatic position reporting, but it hasn't hit the FAA yet. The equipment is apparently mostly ready somewhere downstairs, but it's not in use. One of the oceanic controllers showed us a relatively new text-based system where he could simply type in a clearance (e.g. "UAL 1234 climb altitude FL310" (or whatever)); this was relayed through ARINC to the aircraft where it was displayed as text on a screen; the pilot then responded with a text message like "UAL 1234 wilco" (or whatever). This seemed pretty sensible, and has to be the way of the future for most enroute sectors, domestic or oceanic, if you ask me (I did wonder about how easy it'd be to hack this or subvert it, but I guess it's probably no more of a problem than the situation ATC currently has with bogus on-air instructions from idiots with handhelds, etc.).

Day 2 -- Bay TRACON, Oakland FSS

Well, if we thought Center was gloomy, we had a lot to learn... Bay is basically a really dark cave full of 1960's Dr. Strangelove era equipment and half-seen figures moving around in the gloom. I guess part of the motivation for these tours is to put faces to voices, but we barely saw any faces, just dimly-lit human shapes. And I have to say that Bay actually looked and felt a lot more like what I thought a real radar environment would look and feel like -- even the controllers looked more like, well, controllers, for some reason. No one actually got up and did the Pushing Tin thing, but it didn't look too implausible.

Our guide for the visit was Tom P., a rather cheery and very funny controller who's been at the facility now for nine years (he also kept using the phrase "...quite exciting..." to describe situations the rest of us would probably describe as "disastrous" or "terrifying", but never mind...). We met him as he escaped the roach coach parked outside Bay's building with "breakfast"...

Bay TRACON controls the familiar bits of the Bay Area's airspace up to 15,000', extending "south" (see above) to about Watsonville or South County, north to Mt. Tam, etc. It was originally built to combine the old Oakland, SFO, Moffett, and NAS Alameda radar approaches, and will itself be swallowed up by the new Northern California TRACON ("Sierra Approach") sometime mid-to-end next year (2002), where it will join what are now Stockton, Sacramento, Monterey, and Travis approaches in one large facility (much like SoCal Approach now).

Tom led us into a meeting room where he gave a short overview of what Bay does (aimed at GA pilots like us -- not one of those long-winded lectures on the importance of ATC, etc., I thought we might get...), then asked for questions. This question and answer session went on for a long time -- there were lots of questions, since we're all pilots who have regular contact with Bay -- and it was interesting to hear their side of things like the Travis Approach Handoff Issue or the "Why Can't Bay See My Transponder As I Approach OAK Along The Berkeley Hills?" question. Basically, the guys at Bay are pretty reasonable people, and what could have turned into a mild mud-slinging session was actually a good-humoured and fun time. The actual answers to these and other imponderables appear later, below.

The radar room itself -- the cave -- was classic. It wasn't just gloomy, it was dark, with very minimal lighting, mostly just to stop people bumping into the furniture or each other. Why the darkness? Because the screens -- the entire damn system -- dates from the 1960's, and it wasn't built with daylight in mind. The screens are those large round ones with the rotating trace (the sweep) you do see in the movies, and adjustments (like display gain, sector selection, etc.) are made not with a mouse or anything as hi-tech as a pointer or even a keyboard, but with a bunch of rotary switches, potentiometers, and rockers straight out of Power Engineering 101 (a course I well remember). If you want a good look at what I'm talking about, go to Bay's own site and browse the Fun Stuff / Gallery pages. I stole several of their photos to use here -- hope they don't mind... (the facilities photos from and on Bay's own site don't do justice to the darkness -- they've been made using a flash, of course).

Bay's radar sites are at Oakland (next to 29/11) and Moffett. Unlike Center's displays, all Bay displays are centered on either of the two sites; all that changes is the scale (that is, there's no image built up out of a mosaic of inputs that can be centered conveniently someplace other than the radar site itself as with Center's displays). The screens (as shown above) are horizontal and placed in the desk in front of the controllers rather than in the more familiar vertical positions we saw at PAO and ZOA. Why horizontal? Well, when they were first installed and in use, the controllers actually used little slips of paper -- called "shrimp boats" -- with each plane's details on them, placed on the glass just above the corresponding radar blip itself. They moved the shrimp boats by hand over the glass as the underlying plane moved. Things are slightly better nowadays -- the shrimp boats have been replaced by an overlay that displays each plane's details pretty similarly to the BRITE screen at PAO. The underlying rotating sweep-based radar really seems to do little more than illuminate the sector and airspace boundaries and landmarks and provide primary returns (when primary returns are needed). The real work is done by the overlays, using the magic of class C transponder returns and computers that probably don't use vacuum tubes. Amazingly, the overlay has to be lined up by hand with the underlying display when a new sector is selected -- it's not integrated at all, and there seems to be plenty of scope for errors here. There's room for three controllers to sit around the same screen; there were several sectors with exactly that arrangement when we were there, probably due to the busy IMC Saturday morning arrivals schedule (this time it was IMC all around the Bay).

We got to sit with Tom and Terry at one of the spare stations (kept for overflows and for cannibalizing when one of the other stations needs parts). We concentrated on the SFO approach, with aircraft coming in single file down the 28R ILS in IMC (ceilings at 1500') from over SJC and the bridges. Unlike at center we couldn't hear the controllers or the aircraft unfortunately, but it was still fascinating to watch from this side of the screen.

We asked about spares: what do they do about repairing things in this day and age when most controllers are younger than their gear, and when things like suitable vacuum tubes just aren't made any more? Tom pointed to the screen and desk we were standing around and said that basically, that was what they used for in-house spares. Apparently there's a warehouse full of supplies for this sort of thing at OK City, but in any case when Bay moves to Sacramento next year, they'll be getting more modern equipment (probably ... Transistorized!!! .... maybe. One day it'll have integrated circuits and even DSP chips. Maybe.).

Power outages (etc.) here aren't too catastrophic, apparently -- ZOA is usually able to handle arrivals with a bit of extra workload, and departures can obviously be kept on the ground a few extra minutes while things are sorted out. It's going to be interesting to see what happens when the Really Big One knocks out Bay and Center simultaneously. Can't wait.

As with Center, traffic flow management is a big concern, and, in this at least, Bay seems to be technologically right up there with the rest of the FAA (now that's a bit ambiguous...). We saw pretty much the same set of equipment being used to monitor flow, spacing, sector overloads, etc., and it was pretty damn cool to be able to click on a small blip over Minnesota somewhere and discover it was heading for Boise, Idaho, or to see the mosaic of all the planes currently in the air over the USA headed only to Oakland, etc. Unfortunately, I still don't really have much of a feel for how they manage this stuff -- I guess it's less glamorous than the actual sector controller positions, but it seems just as important in the overall scheme of things.

Some notes from the earlier question and answer session:

• Bay (or Tom, at least) tried to be diplomatic about the whole Travis Handoff Experience (if you don't know what I'm talking about, this is the wonderful experience of suddenly being dumped out of flight following over the Delta on your way to or from the Bay Area because Travis doesn't want to contact Bay or won't accept more than a very small number of VFR (or even IFR) handoffs).
  
  Travis is military, and a lot of the controllers there are trainees, and young, and inexperienced, and the whole mindset there seems to be against cooperating with Bay. That's about all I'll say about what Tom actually said....
  
  
• I asked why Bay sometimes complains about not being able to see transponder returns from our club aircraft as they fly down the line of the hills for the Temple, even though Center and Tower see them just fine (Bay is somewhat notorious with several Oakland outfits for issuing grumpy requests for transponder recycling as you fly inbound over Richmond, El Cerrito, and Berkeley, and complaining that they can't see us and that our transponders must be broken. The same thing sometimes happens if you approach OAK from the south (i.e. east) along 880).
  
  Apparently there is some sort of potential problem in that area (and other areas near hills) with transponder returns and false echoes that the computer removes along with the correct signal when it gets confused. Tom's advice was to simply tell the controller that the return light is blinking normally, which is basically all the controller needs to hear at this point. You may also have to advise the controller of your altitude and any altitude changes, but, as always happens, by about the time you're being handed off to OAK tower, the secondary transponder returns will magically start showing up properly again anyway. Unless the transponder really is broken, in which case... oh well.
  
  
• Ever wondered how they turned the major jet approach and departure patterns around in winter when they need to use what's called the South-East flow rather than the usual West flow (i.e. using runways 11 and 9 at Oakland for arrivals and departures)? Well I did (since it seems like a huge task), so I asked....
  
  Turning the patterns around is definitely not something done lightly, but it can get even more complicated by the occasional need to sometimes keep (say) SFO running on the West plan while Oakland goes South-East or vice versa (normally all three major airports switch at the same time, but sometimes it takes an hour or two for weather to cross the Bay). In any case, they have to coordinate this closely with Center and the various towers, and then basically run departure sectors dry (holding planes on the ground), while getting Center to slow approaches outside Bay's sectors or even hold planes for a while. The whole process can now be done in less than twenty minutes, apparently.
  
  
• The phrase "Bay Tour" means different things depending on whether you fly out of PAO or Oakland. For most Oaklanders, it just means getting flight following while pottering about beneath the Class B over the Bay or the City; to most PAOers, it normally includes the 101 Transition through the Class B "north" along 101.
  
  This difference always causes arguments (and it caused several during the visit, since we were about evenly divided between OAKers and PAOers), but it can also cause more worrying airspace incursions. To most of us (including Bay controllers), getting the "Bay Tour" emphatically does not include a Class B clearance, but if you fly out of SQL or PAO you probably think it does, or that the clearance will be there for the asking.... Tom says it's best to be as explicit as possible when asking Bay for a Bay Tour -- if you're going to want that 101 transition (or any other Class B clearance), ask early.
  
  
• If you're coming back to Oakland and you can't raise Bay because of the relentless on-air traffic, Bay says it's OK to call Oakland tower direct over Chabot or Lake Merritt.
  
  Unfortunately, if -- like me -- you've actually tried this in desperation, Oakland tower will try to bounce you back to Bay without even acknowledging your callsign. Bay (Tom, mostly) advises persistence in this situation -- make it clear to tower that you've tried several times. Well, it didn't work for me, but it's what Bay believes is probably the best cause of action (and it's Bay that's going to have to field your callup if tower won't accept you).
  
  
• If you've wondered lately what happened to 127.0 as a working frequency (it's still charted on the terminal and sectional charts as the main callup frequency over San Pablo and Suisun Bays), and why traffic only ever seems to be done on 120.9 now, the answer is just what you'd expect: staffing issues.
  
  Yes, Bay still occasionally opens up 127.0, but the effect's lost on many of us now anyway, because you just don't bother with 127.0 any more. Bay does guess ahead an hour or two and try to estimate likely incoming traffic loads (based usually on things like student departures from Oakland for the San Pablo practice area), and open up the frequencies accordingly, but in my experience this isn't happening much, and 120.9 can be really difficult to use for initial callup.
  
  
• I was worried that when Bay disappeared into the new Sierra Approach TRACON, the sort of local knowledge the current controllers have that lets you (say) call up and say you're "over Tiburon" or use the Sunken Ship as a reporting point (or that lets them mentally change a pilot's local "North" to real magnetic "West"...) might also disappear. Apparently not, though -- trainee controllers sent to Bay have to rote-learn something like 150 reporting points and local landmarks in their first week of training, and this won't change with the move. I'd still probably feel happier with people who actually knew the difference between Lake Chabot and the Chabot Observatory (or who knew 680 or 880 from the ground), but I guess it probably won't make much difference.
  
  
• The big relief wall chart in Bay's meeting room was so old it still had Crissy Field marked on it. As an airfield...
  
  
• Yes, for things like whether you'll get the 101 / Bayshore Transition or that extra convenient clearance into the Class B, it does matter how you sound. Or at least it helps to sound like you know what you want and what you're doing (more accurately, you definitely won't get it if you sound like you're unsure or don't know what you want). Yes, we've all suspected this, but it's nice to hear it from a real controller.
  
  
• Bay controllers do a pretty amazing job considering the age and relative difficulty-of-use of the ancient equipment combined with the extremely busy airspace. Bay's always been friendly to GA, especially compared to, say, the UK or even Australia, where levels of service like this are simply unavailable. So don't whine too loudly the next time you can't get a Class B transition or you get vectored back out over the Hills due to traffic. Just think what the controller's going through....
  
  

After Bay we trooped across the lot to Oakland FSS. I wasn't sure what to expect here either, especially after the excitement and activity at Bay. Like most of you (I'd guess), I don't have much personal contact with FSS -- I get most of my weather briefings and do most of my flight plan filings through DUATS, and I'd never actually seen a real working FSS facility (the dead one at Ukiah doesn't count...) or met an FSS person. I do talk to them on the phone for last-minute briefings often enough, and activate flight plans in the air with them, etc., but that's about it. It's difficult in any case for a pilot to do a walk-in visit or just drop by Oakland FSS -- it's in a really out-of-the way place (right next to Bay TRACON, with no walk-in access from any ramp or apron), and (like so much Federal property after Oklahoma City), protected by locks and barriers and closed-circuit TV cameras.

Predictably, FSS turned out to be more interesting than many of us had thought. Sure, it's not exciting compared to Bay or PAO tower, but it's pretty essential, and it's interesting to see how it works. For me the most astonishing thing is that while there are usually a handful of specialists staffing the phones, there is usually only one specialist staffing the radios at any one time -- for the entire Oakland FSS region (which is quite big, and uses many different frequencies simultaneously). So next time you get asked to standby for a few minutes when trying to activate your flight plan, don't get too impatient. Similarly for flight watch -- there's only one of them on the radio as well (and always remember to tell them where you're radioing from when you call up -- it's difficult for them to keep track of this).

Most of the FSS stuff is about flight plans and weather, and most of the systems there were what you'd expect -- DUATS- or Cirrus-like displays, traffic flow monitors, etc. The specialists' abilities to just skim over a complex NOTAM or METAR and decode it -- or just tell if it was relevant with a single glance -- were pretty damn impressive, I have to admit.

There were some classic real-time weather displays -- and some classic midwest weather on display, with a powerful-looking thunderstorm system with tops to 55,000' and heavy squalls, etc. visible over southern Minnesota on one of the weather displays. This had to be causing havoc for the entire area (at least), but when we looked on some of the other weather displays, there was no warning or notice of this at all. Hmmmm. The specialist who was showing us around seemed a little surprised as well.

Conclusions

Some general impressions or observations from the tour:

• I believe these tours (or something similar) should be on every Bay Area private pilot student's curriculum -- you learn a hell of a lot from the controller's perspective, and it's sometimes a real eye-opener seeing what they have to do, and how they do it. It gives you a damn good appreciation of just how difficult the average controller's job can be, and how you fit into the overall picture.
  
  And it wouldn't hurt to send instructors on the tours as well....
  
  
• A fair number of controllers appeared to be pilots -- maybe 20% or more overall, according to Tom or Terry. This is good. But it'd be nice if it were higher....
  
  
• Most of the controllers we met had a decent sense of humour. I think you'd be dead or in therapy in an hour or two in a job like that if you didn't...
  
  
• The equipment we saw being used in the ATC system is extremely diverse, ranging from old vacuum-tube computers and radar displays to the latest real-time graphics displays. The real wonder is that the system works at all, frankly....
  
  
• Don't ask controllers if they've ever seen the movie Pushing Tin. They all deny ever having seen it and then spend a great deal of rather agitated time giving suspiciously detailed accounts of what's wrong with this scene, why that scene is so unrealistic, or how John Cusack's sunglasses were the only realistic thing in the movie, etc. :-). Me, I've never seen it, but now I'm tempted....
  
  
• Other "don't get me started..." subjects seem to include ATC privatization and the way airlines use "ATC delays" as an excuse for their own scheduling incompetence. Since most of us on the tours probably basically agreed with most controllers on these issues (in my case strongly), I'll be diplomatic and not say any more (don't get me started...).
  
  
• If you want to sign up for the next tour(s), go directly to Terry's signup pages, right now! If there's no actual tour dates listed, sign up anyway -- you'll get email when Terry is able to arrange the next one.
  
  [NOTE: due to the increased security arrangements after the September 11 attacks, the tours are highly unlikely to be repeated for a while yet, but email Terry just in case -- HR, 12/01].
  
  

Huge thanks to Terry Craft for organizing the tours, and for providing the expert guidance and commentary during the tours. Thanks also to the various controllers and specialists at Palo Alto tower, Oakland Center, Bay TRACON, and Oakland FSS.

Some Related Links

Some links to web sites associated with this article:

• Terry Craft's Fly The Bay website -- as he says, still under construction, but the place to start for ATC tours here.
  
  
• Bay Approach's own web site, a weirdly-organised but fun site. Check out the "Fun Stuff" pages... One of my fave home-grown official sites.
  
  
• The new Northern California TRACON -- Sierra Approach. Like its namesake, still under construction, but it'll give you a good idea of what's coming...
  
  
• Avweb's article on the ZOA power failure. "When all the radar screens went dark and all the radios went silent for 45 minutes, Northern California airspace became uncontrolled and nobody knew what to do about it." Chilling reading -- this is one of those "Can't happen" happenings....
  
  
• ARINC's home page. ARINC does a lot of the radio work for airline dispatchers and the oceanic and arctic routes.