Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 5, 1995 TAG: 9503040033
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BERNIE KOHN KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: CHARLOTTE, N.C. LENGTH: Long
Juiced from Starbucks coffee, USAir's incoming-traffic cop bounds off the step stool he uses to get a good look out of the Charlotte ground-control tower.
``Where we gonna put this thing?'' Mark Helms asks nobody in particular. Every gate is occupied, including the one Flight 1571 would have used if it had been on time.
On board are 111 passengers, already fuming from the maintenance-related delay. They're due to catch 19 different connecting flights leaving Charlotte in the next 10 minutes. Helms asks: Do we hold those flights, or not?
``We've got to get these things going,'' pleads Rick DeVault, a customer service supervisor sitting at a computer terminal two rows above Helms.
If they don't, he notes, 20 planes will line up for takeoff at exactly 11:15. Most of those will be late, and Charlotte/Douglas and the entire USAir system might be in gridlock all day. And besides, Philadelphia employees already rebooked most of Flight 1571's passengers onto later connecting flights.
Not the 19 people who are supposed to connect to New Orleans in five minutes, another supervisor chimes in. What about them? Is it worth messing up the trips of folks who just might be headed to Mardi Gras - maybe making them mad enough to fly Continental Lite next time - to keep the system running on time?
These are the easy decisions.
``When the fog or rain gets so bad you can't see the end of the concourse, it gets real interesting,'' says Dan Hamrick, a 10-year tower veteran.
The atrium and food court between concourses B and C at Charlotte/Douglas are the parts of the airport's newly completed $29 million addition that passengers see. But USAir's miniature version of NASA's Mission Control, 91 steps above the food court, has far more bearing on whether passengers end up content or cursing.
In this glass-enclosed tower, 33 USAir supervisors and shift managers make the split-second judgments about who will make their connections and who will be delayed, who will get their bags promptly transferred and who will sleep in their clothes.
The Federal Aviation Administration, which staffs the airport's air-traffic control tower, monitors all movements of airplanes in the air, on runways and taxiways. The separate USAir tower is in charge inside the imaginary lines separating the gate area from taxiways. It's the nerve center for 7,000 USAir employees at the Charlotte hub, and a critical cog in keeping USAir's nationwide system running as it should.
The tower, which opened in November, guides in and out all 574 commercial planes that use Charlotte/Douglas between 5 a.m. and midnight each day. Among those are the 370 USAir jet flights, operating out of 43 gates on four concourses, that combine with 150 USAir Express departures to form one of the world's largest hub operations. (Included are six daily flights from Roanoke, carrying on average 300 passengers.)
Ten times each day, waves of flights stream in and out almost simultaneously. These ``banks'' are timed to allow people to change planes. During the typical bank period, about 4,000 people from all over the country scramble through Charlotte/Douglas, trying to make their connections.
At those times, everyone in the tower is glued to the computer screen, carrying on two or three conversations at once through their terminals and headsets. No one gets up to go to the bathroom.
There is little margin for error, because the banks virtually overlap. Often, the scheduled gap between when one plane is supposed to leave a gate and another is supposed to come in is 15 minutes. Any delay has the potential to snowball nationwide.
The room is abuzz with airline-speak. ``784 push back to Spot 7, good day. 297 push back to Spot 13, good day. 481, see Jetstream at your 1 o'clock.'' Hamrick, who's been in the tower for 10 years, rattles off the messages to pilots of outgoing planes with barely a pause in between. His eyes, like Helms', have that distinct caffeine glaze.
``I shouldn't have had that second cup of coffee,'' he says, laughing.
In a perfect world, the tower wouldn't exist. But there are snowstorms and thunderstorms, air-traffic control problems, maintenance problems.
Just for fun, throw in the unscheduled landing. Or the incident a few weeks ago when the airport was closed for 45 minutes after a fire-extinguishing system went off in an air-traffic control room and forced its evacuation.
The tower's job is to keep a normal operation running normally, and find a way out in times of chaos.
``We get a lot of the blame when things go wrong,'' supervisor Sandy McGrail says. ``But when [employees] want something, we're the first people they call.''
Whenever any decisions are made, it's the tower's job to let everyone else in the company know what's going on, and why. One supervisor on each shift does nothing but write and pass on electronic messages about which flights departed late, and why. The messages automatically are dispersed through USAir's main computer in Winston-Salem to reservations offices, ticket counters and operations rooms nationwide.
Two gate supervisors, who sit in the middle of the action, keep track of every plane's comings and goings on 21-inch computer screens. Video cameras sit atop each gate, and supervisors can call up the images - as zoomed or wide-angled as they'd like - to help them make educated guesses on when a plane might be ready to leave the gate.
Yet, with all this technology, supervisors fly mostly by the seats of their pants.
There's no time for data analysis when you have 70 planes on the ground, 43 parking places, and thousands of passengers in other cities who won't stand for excuses about why their plane was late leaving Charlotte.
``You do have to rely on the experience of the people,'' says Jim Tabor, USAir senior director of operations performance. ``Sometimes, they blow it. But we don't second-guess them.''
Every decision becomes a horse-trade: how many people to inconvenience now versus how many more you'd inconvenience later by trying to make the first group happy.
``Ninety percent of it is common sense and input from other people,'' says Steve Yancey, the Charlotte supervisor who plans months ahead which planes should park at which gates.
Supervisors, who typically spend 10 years in airport operations before joining the tower, have to demonstrate a feel for how USAir runs. Shift manager David Whitmire talks not just about flight numbers or destinations, but flight ``personalities.''
If you're looking to free up a gate quickly, you don't do it by trying to speed up boardings on a Florida-bound flight, he explains. A flight bound for New York LaGuardia, on the other hand. ... Well, speeding up a New Yorker isn't a problem.
Every decision has a hundred caveats, and there's no computer program to sort them out.
An incoming flight from Sarasota can't be put into gate A6A. It doesn't have a jetway. Employees would have to carry wheelchair-bound elderly passengers down steps into the terminal.
Boeing 757s can be parked only on B concourse. Fokker F-100s can go into only certain gates, because of their low exit doors and unique fueling needs.
In hot weather, DC-9s need a lot of runway space on takeoff to get the proper lift. That restricts what gates they can leave from. And on Sundays between 10 a.m. and noon, the airport shuts down runway 36L so aircraft noise won't interrupt services at Steele Creek Baptist Church.
Supervisors cannot send planes off preplanned routings if a maintenance check is scheduled during the day. If a 737 can't make a flight because of a maintenance problem, they can't substitute a DC-9 unless they know there are DC-9 pilots in Charlotte to fly it.
All the while, the tower must make sure planes don't run into each other getting in and out of gates.
Not surprisingly, the intensity of the job makes burnout as much a worry for the ground controllers as for air-traffic controllers. Each supervisor rotates to a different position each day. That keeps people fresh and fosters cooperation.
And there's just enough levity to keep the job fun. On one recent evening, a pilot radioed supervisor Brenda Perry that he had a minor maintenance problem. ``Firelights on floor flickering during flight,'' he said in a dead- serious monotone.
Within seconds, the tongue-twister was the talk of the tower.
Until November, the tower supervisors operated out of a glorified closet atop B concourse. They couldn't see much of the airport grounds. The old tower lacked the state-of-the-art technology in the new tower, so gate changes and messages had to be chicken-scratched on paper charts or keyed into PCs.
``We'd do gate changes by standing up and shouting at each other,'' Whitmire says.
Old habits die hard, because lots of people were standing and shouting the day Flight 1571 from Philadelphia pulled in 42 minutes late.
What did the tower supervisors decide? They held the New Orleans flight long enough for the 19 connecting passengers to get aboard. They didn't hold the 11 planes that Flight 1571's other passengers were supposed to connect with.
Supervisors dispatched the ABR Team - airplane baggage runners - to dig through the cargo hold, find everything tagged for New Orleans, and carry it over to the waiting plane. Supervisors had to get special permission from systems control in Pittsburgh to hold the flight, since the delay would be more than 15 minutes. They had to alert gate agents that the passengers were coming, let counter personnel know that the other passengers would have to be rebooked, and radio the pilot that his gate assignment was being changed.
All that happened within a minute.
Everyone bound for New Orleans would get there when they were supposed to. So would their bags.
Scott Link, USAir manager of ramp operations, stood above the hubbub with a grin of satisfaction. ``Those are 19 people who will probably fly with us again,'' he said.
by CNB