There are youtube videos of ATC recordings (with transcripts) of pilots losing their cool. You are right, I don't think any ATC lost their cool in any of the recordings I've listened to.
A tower controller at an airport talks to planes in the air as they arrive and depart. They are in the tower so they can see the planes visually, and may also have radar available.
Ground control also works in the tower, after all they have to be able to see the airport taxiways. They may also have a separate ground radar. They are only talking to planes on the ground.
At a busy airport, these will be separate individuals working each of these duties.
At a less busy airport, or during quieter hours, the same controller may work both tower and ground simultaneously.
There are also "center" controllers who work in the enroute traffic centers. They are not in towers and often not at any airport, as they talk with planes at altitude and work by radar and voice communication, not visual.
For example, in a typical departure, you first talk to ground control for taxi clearance and instructions. When you are ready for departure (near but not yet on the runway!) ground will say "contact tower on 123.45" (or whatever frequency), and tower will clear you for takeoff. After you've taken off, tower may say "contact center on 124.56" (again, whatever the frequency is).
While you're flying, each center controller will hand you off to a different center (and different frequency) which you cross between the different areas that the different centers cover.
For landing, it's the same thing in reverse order: center hands you off to tower as you approach the airport, and after you're on the runway, tower hands you off to ground (who again is up in the tower, but only talking to planes on the ground) for taxi instructions.
And the reason why ground controllers often have much higher workloads is that at a busy airport things happen far quicker on the ground. Every plane you move you pretty much move another plane into its place.
Thanks for that! It's interesting (to me) that they descend (well, ascend!) into politeness with both pilots and controller addressing each other 'sir'.
Most of it is just using the ICAO/NATO phonetic alphabet to identify taxiways by their one- or two-letter codes. It makes a bit more sense if you have a JFK taxiway map in front of you.
You don't need to be physically sat on the plane to emphasise with the severity of the situation. It's not like ATCs are willing pilots to die. And sometimes not being able to physically control the actions of the pilots can add to the stress.
I can relate to this from rock climbing. Typically one climber at a time leads while the other belays (manages the rope). The leader is the one at physical risk but the most scared I've felt has been belaying.
Being the belayer means you don't have much control and are mostly just watching closely and hoping your buddy doesn't get hurt. Being in a scary lead situation forces you to concentrate which pushes a lot of the fear emotions aside. Worry and fear take a lot of energy, energy which often can't be spared in an emergency where you have some control over the situation.
The point of the conversation was about which is more stressful. Obviously having "more skin in the game" would directly increase the stress levels but yourself and others who posted like you completely miss the point that the ATCs are there to ensure safe travel and they very much are invested in that mission too. Comments like "well they're not going to die so why would they lose their cool" are just harsh and entirely miss the point of why the ATC are there in the first place.
The key reason for why ATC don't lose their cool has nothing to do with who is more stressed or has more "skin in the game" and everything to do with the fact that if ATC lose their cool then the pilot is more likely to die... and possibly other planes and their passengers and crew too. In order to save lives ATC have to keep their cool even when everyone else around them panics. That's the real crux of the matter.
In addition to what you say here, most of the ATC job is about maintaining order and safety, while for a pilot there are many other factors (and accidents happen when pilots get distracted by those other factors). The ATC is constantly thinking about possible accidents, while the pilot has more opportunity to have their thoughts elsewhere.
The term I've heard is 'task saturation' and I absolutely love it (the term, not the situation). (The solution proposed is usually to pull some science staff from science into operation, which luckily didn't have to happen so far.)
Probably, people regularly place their own lives as a much lower priority than the group their part of. I assume most air traffic controllers get emotionally invested as their actively talking to the pilots involved.
That really depends on the person and situation. Some people get really emotional, but it’s also common for people in highly stressful life or death situations to emotionally shut down and end up going through rote responses. This is dangerous because you effectively lose creativity and can easily get stuck in a loop repeatedly doing the same things.
One example is WWII commanders would sometimes continue to bring ammunition to machine gun nests even when just adding it to large piles. It may have been the best option when they start, but they never revisit that choice. The same thing happens to pilots where people investigate a crash and find pilots keep doing the exact same thing that’s not working for several minutes without considering that perhaps some assumption they have is wrong.
Finally, some people don’t seem to react much at all to such personal risks.
I heard a Cessna ask for a readout of its ground speed.
'90 knots Center replied.
Moments later,a Twin Beech required the same.
'120 knots' Center answered.
We weren’t the only ones proud of our ground speed that day
as almost instantly an F-18 smugly transmitted:
'Ah, Center, Dusty 52 requests ground speed readout.'
There was a slight pause, then the response,
'620 knots on the ground, Dusty.'
As I was thinking to myself how ripe a situation this was,
I heard a familiar click of a radio transmission coming from my
back-seater. It was at that precise moment I realized Walt and I
had become a real crew, for we were both thinking in unison.
'Center, Aspen 20, you got a ground speed readout for us?'
There was a longer than normal pause
'Aspen, I show 1,942 knots.'
No further inquiries were heard on that frequency.
That story is often told but is generally considered apocryphal. There is too much wrong with it procedurally. It's funny, but not likely a conversation that actually happened.
I haven’t looked that far into it, I just watched that video when Youtube recommended it. The written story that I’ve seen online was uncredited, so seeing someone talk about it made it seem more likely to have occurred (at least to me).
It's not unreasonable that the SR 71 was listening on the frequency of the airspace beneath them - if the're had been an emergency, it's always better to have a picture of who's on the frequency/within that airspace.
Dont under estimate what the military get up to. The MK1 Lynx helicopter (Westland Lynx) didnt have a black box flight recorder, and as it had the world speed record, many pilots when entertaining new recruits would attempt to scare the wotsit out of them by flying over the mountain tops of Wales before nose diving the chopper towards the valley floor to see how fast they could get it to go. Noisy! On a par with flying with The Blades who are ex Red Arrow pilots.
The upthread-linked Reddit debunk [0] is A) SR71 would've been on a different frequency to both other planes; B) ATC computers at the time were capped at 990 knots; C) SR71s' speeds were classified, no way the crew would've asked or ATC responded with it.
Correct, people keep repeating this story - it's false. I know controllers who have actually controlled the U2 and SR71 and they've explained why it's not true (they don't use the same freq, etc.).
Also Brian Shul (the originator of this anecdote) and his RSO were the only SR71 crew removed from the program. There is a reason for that.
Would you mind explaining the reason? His Wikipedia page [0] doesn't mention anything, although it does mention the story with four citations. One explicitly states "Though they didn’t really control us, they did monitor our movement across their scope." [1]
Off topic, but be sure to run Javascript on theaviationgeekclub.com or else the code that breaks your clipboard will fail to run.
The SR-71's top speed is still classified to this day, partly because they probably still don't know what it was, because nobody ever got one there. Shul's plane was cruising probably far below max speed (the number wasn't 1942, I don't remember exactly what he said it was).
As to "not using the same freq", military aircraft have radios with knobs that turn. They can certainly monitor and talk on civilian frequencies if they see fit to do so, and they fly in and out of civilian airports regularly on ferry flights (not the SR-71 obviously, but I know for a fact F-18s do all the time, because I used to stand duty at a command that owned a bunch of them and we had to file reports on what airport they were at). If they can't talk on civilian frequencies, how would that work? And they fly through civilian ATC owned airspace, they absolutely have to talk to civilian ATC.
As to Shul being removed from the program, have never heard that -- I'm not likely to take the word of some random on the internet about it.
Even after the transatlantic world record "fastest air-breathing manned aircraft" flights in 1976? Especially if they were flying below the record speeds (depends on the exact numbers, going by wikipedia, the record was for approx. 1905 knots, which of course is lower than the figure in the story)?
(But, yeah, I've heard plenty of people, including other SR71 pilots in interviews, question the validity of Shul's stories)
The SR-71's "speeds" are not classified. You can even download the long ago declassified manual that says what the max mach number it can display is.
The actual top speed might still be, if it is, it's probably because they don't actually know what it really is. There have been multiple pilots who have said they could pretty much keep giving it gas and it would keep going faster.
Come on, I didn't claim that. I responded to 'someone on HN claiming to have a pilots licence' who couldn't see a reason it wasn't plausible. I'm just offering three anti-plausability reasons someone else on the internet had.
In the original version I read they were in a blackbird and the pilot wanted to request the ground speed very badly but felt he shouldn't because he didn't think his partner would find it appropriate. Then just as it seemed like the opportunity was going to pass he felt the radio click and his partner requested the airspeed. They were a real crew after that.
I am pretty sure that ATC is trained to sound calm. I’ve been listening to ATC recordings at the worse the emergency is the more calm the controller is. I think it is deliberate to help the pilot concentrate and not panic.
This quote from the article made me smile:
>> Another pilot chimed in: "Only in LA."