Potomac TRACON
The Potomac TRACON (air traffic control facility) had an open house today so I joined some 100 or so other pilots in visiting their Manassass, VA building.
I was lucky enough to get to fly up in the Cirrus with John and Mike. John made use of the time to train towards his Instrument ticket and I used the flight to test out my "new" headset.
The open house started with a presentation in the conference room off the lobby. They told us the history of the TRACON - it is about 5 years old and consolidates approach and departure control from quite a few north eastern airports, including Richmond and Washington National. They gave us a few stats on traffic throughput, showing that the N.E. of the US is quite a busy place. Atlanta was the only area that gets busier.
After the presentation we went on a tour of the facility. We got to check out the warehouse-sized room housing the racks and racks of electronics that let the TRACON do it's thing. It was quite impressive - lots of expensive equipment and lots of redundancy. We then moved into the heart of the building - the control room.
It's organized in a circular fashion with the controllers on the outer most ring. Each has a large, square, hi-res screen recessed a bit into the wall. Beside that they have a touchpad screen mounted up a little bit that gives them instant voice access to other control facilities that share airspace boundaries with Potomac (for hand offs as a plane moves across the country).
They have a special back lit keyboard on the right side of the desk that, couple with a trackball, gives them what appeared to be the primary control of the interfaces. They have a least one or two other screens they can use to pull up weather info, airplane performance stats and pictures, acronym definitions, and other supplemental info.
One of the controllers was kind enough to chat with us while he was controlling a few airplanes. He'd stop us mid sentence on occasion to approve an altitude change or initiate a hand off. We watched his screen as it showed blue dots to represent the primary returns (what the radar sees) and green bars to represent the transponder signals. We learned at least one thing that surprised me - if you are squawking 1200 on your transponder ATC only sees your reported altitude, not your ground speed. I would have thought radar alone would have been enough to provide that info. Maybe it is and they just choose not to show it on the screen (maybe to reduce clutter).
It was pretty neat to see in action from the other side. It also made me think about how different the situation is on each side of the radio - on one side you're looking at blips on a screen sitting in the dark, on the other side you could be rock and rolling through a turbulent cloud with no real view of the weather ahead of you. I am personally glad those guys are available on the ground to help out if/when the going gets tough.
After an hour or so touring the building we took the rental car back to KHEF to get started on the return trip:
On the way back we happened to pass right over the TRACON, as we were talking to one of the guys in the control room we just visited:
I was lucky enough to get to fly up in the Cirrus with John and Mike. John made use of the time to train towards his Instrument ticket and I used the flight to test out my "new" headset.
The open house started with a presentation in the conference room off the lobby. They told us the history of the TRACON - it is about 5 years old and consolidates approach and departure control from quite a few north eastern airports, including Richmond and Washington National. They gave us a few stats on traffic throughput, showing that the N.E. of the US is quite a busy place. Atlanta was the only area that gets busier.
After the presentation we went on a tour of the facility. We got to check out the warehouse-sized room housing the racks and racks of electronics that let the TRACON do it's thing. It was quite impressive - lots of expensive equipment and lots of redundancy. We then moved into the heart of the building - the control room.
It's organized in a circular fashion with the controllers on the outer most ring. Each has a large, square, hi-res screen recessed a bit into the wall. Beside that they have a touchpad screen mounted up a little bit that gives them instant voice access to other control facilities that share airspace boundaries with Potomac (for hand offs as a plane moves across the country).
They have a special back lit keyboard on the right side of the desk that, couple with a trackball, gives them what appeared to be the primary control of the interfaces. They have a least one or two other screens they can use to pull up weather info, airplane performance stats and pictures, acronym definitions, and other supplemental info.
One of the controllers was kind enough to chat with us while he was controlling a few airplanes. He'd stop us mid sentence on occasion to approve an altitude change or initiate a hand off. We watched his screen as it showed blue dots to represent the primary returns (what the radar sees) and green bars to represent the transponder signals. We learned at least one thing that surprised me - if you are squawking 1200 on your transponder ATC only sees your reported altitude, not your ground speed. I would have thought radar alone would have been enough to provide that info. Maybe it is and they just choose not to show it on the screen (maybe to reduce clutter).
It was pretty neat to see in action from the other side. It also made me think about how different the situation is on each side of the radio - on one side you're looking at blips on a screen sitting in the dark, on the other side you could be rock and rolling through a turbulent cloud with no real view of the weather ahead of you. I am personally glad those guys are available on the ground to help out if/when the going gets tough.
After an hour or so touring the building we took the rental car back to KHEF to get started on the return trip:
On the way back we happened to pass right over the TRACON, as we were talking to one of the guys in the control room we just visited:
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