Its ATCJay here again with another post. If you have been reading regularly then you will know that I alluded to something cool in my last post, well today it shall be revealed!
Do you know where this could be?
That's right, its Stansted Control Tower, the bloody real one!
I wrote an email to someone at EGSS asking for a picture or two and a couple of questions, 'great' I thought, if I'm really lucky they might reply ... so as you might expect I almost caused a major trouser incident when they emailed me back inviting me to the tower. And as you might guess, being England, it pissed it down raining!
I don't know why, but for some reason I thought that the tower would be pretty much an empty tube with the cab at the top, nope its rooms and stuff all the way up, who would have thought it.
I'll go into some of the questions I asked and things we spoke about but so much was spoke about I doubt I could capture how cool it was. I was surprised that there were only 3-4 people in there, they were all friendly but very busy. I was a bit nervous about talking to one of them when he said hi because he still had his headphones on and .. well if I get distracted all that happens is someone flies through someone else or someone gets cross at me for making them wait.
I had some issues with the camera deleting files, rather not giving me an option not to delete them, so not all of the pictures I wanted made it onto the card but some of them are here (and should be click-able to enlarge)
I asked about how things are routed there, The routes are mainly used for radio-out situations and they use direct vectoring for approaches. And the SIDs are incorporated into the flight plan which is done during filing process so it sounds like they don't really have to deal with that.
I would have LOVED to get some pictures of their equipment but this wasn't possible. I'm not actually sure how detailed I can be in describing it. But to be honest the in-tower hardware that you could see was mainly just some very nice looking flat screens and an stunning view out of the window.
They did have some nice tech for strip management which looks very similar to the strip management software for Vatsim, but a lot more hands on. The actual hardware would probably be in a rack somewhere, I'm not interested in that I've seen servers before.
They had a training room which was the last place I looked at in the tower, unfortunately this was all powered down, but wow what a set-up! There were screens as big as TVs to mock up the window view and a series of monitors arranged in a manner to replicate the tower position so the training reinforces muscle memory. These guys are smart!
I have realised how spoiled we are with OpenRadar's radar display, they do not have all the SIDs and STARs on theirs.
It was really cool to see take-off from the actual tower, no ORCam required! There was a couple of other events I would have liked to photograph but I was too interested in speaking to the guy that we were just watching everything go down. Someone let off a fire extinguisher on Alpha West, but I didn't see any flames and it looked like nothing was damaged and no one was hurt.
Watching an arrival that was due to park at the business centre miss taxiway Golf because he was going pretty fast, was something that felt very familiar.
This picture is my favourite, I know you probably think that's weird but on my evenings on FlightGear this is where all the action happens. When someone parks its usually here, at Alpha East. I was looking down at this and thinking "Oh yeah, there’s SkyBoat and KL-666 down there waiting for my slow ass to give taxi clearance"
I like would like to give a big thank you to everyone at Stansted Tower for letting me come and visit and putting up with me endless questions. you guys are really cool and do a great job!
No comments:
Post a Comment