I hope Johnny LA and Broomstick and other pilots get in here to comment on this. It sounded like the pilots on the tape didn’t think there was a problem. I’ve flown before (not commercially, and I don’t fly currently), but I would have no problem with hearing a kid’s voice as ground control.
It seems like some of you guys don’t understand that the kid ws just a mouthpiece–he made no decisions. And the type of air traffic control that the kid was a part of involves fairly rote procedures.
I think you don’t understand what ground control does. They basically give pilots permission to do the only thing the pilot could possibly do. Basically, the pilot knows that they need to move from A to B, so they ask “can I move from A to B?” and the ATC guy says “Yes” or “wait a minute” or whatever.
It’s not like the ATC guy needs to listen intently at all times to get more info about the situation or is making split second decisions that could cause catastrophe if there is a delay in communication.
It certainly can have disastrous results. Therefore untrained people of ANY age HAVE NO BUSINESS DOING ANY PART OF IT, NO MATTER HOW ROTE OR ROUTINE.
Bingo.
What could the fucking idiot have been thinking? What the hell are the leniency advocates in this thread thinking? I wouldn’t want any of you anywhere near such a situation.
I am a perpetual flight student and I study ATC manuals for fun. The worst part of this is once again, horrible journalism. I tend to make the mistake that everyone comes from things with the same context, knowledge, and perspective I do. I watched various news feeds and they did insinuate at first that a child was actually controlling planes at JFK for sensationalism purposes which obviously isn’t true in the least.
Way to get the American public worked up into more of an ignorant clusterfuck frenzy than it already is media.
I am head of IT for a secure pharmaceutical factory and parts of my job aren’t that different from an ATC job. I have the big monitors to watch and have to shut down the facility a few times a week with little to no notice and have to report back why I did it. I can’t take my daughter there because it is industrial and secure but I can do the same thing from home after hours when I get emergency calls. It would be the same thing as asking her to press the ‘Enter’ key after I made my decision and put the right systems in place. It is a non-event and educational for the child. There is no danger involved and the professionals involved didn’t seem to mind.
Isn’t there some country out there with two wars going on, a melting economy, a terrorist leader in hiding, widespread corruption, and a failing political system around that we can focus some attention on. I am sure they can use our hep if we can get aid to them…somehow.
Are you or have you ever been a pilot?
What the kid did was basically the equivalent of saying “please drive around to the window” at the drive-through of a fast food restaurant.
Yep, absolutely agree. The fact that almost every news story about something I have some experience with gets something major completely wrong makes me fear what kind of bullshit I’ve bought from the media about stuff I don’t have experience with.
I agree that it’s not a big deal, and not the same as a 911 dispatcher. The controller was in complete control the whole time. And really, what a cool thing that the kid got to see what his dad does for a living, and even got to make some calls on the radio. I’m not seeing how this warrants anything more than a slap on the wrist. I’d feel differently if it was the approach or tower controller, but ground? No biggie.
Rand, I’m with you. I have over 3k hours in the air, most of them monitoring and talking on the controlling frequency.
It would be inappropriate in a business context if someone had their kid convey a brief message to a client who was waiting for information, e.g., “the deal has been closed.” The kid is just repeating what he’s been told and he’s just conveying a message that someone was expecting, but it’s still inappropriate to do something like that in a professional setting when you are in a position of trust.
Bing - Go
The kid did nothing more than push a button and talk to the pilots
I’d really like to see a poll on this: 1) Do you think letting the kid talk to the pilots was a dangerous act and 2) Do you have any flight experience working first hand with ATC (Air Traffic Control)?
My answers to the poll
Again, nobody said it was the greatest decision ever but just way more than a little bit overblown and purposely ground up to be fed as chum in a shark pool. There are official take your children to work days in the U.S. as well across all sectors and industries and it is often encouraged. I wouldn’t be offended if a professional that was working with me showed off their job to them while I was there. My mother parents were teachers and I went to school and helped pass out papers and get things when I was young (I didn’t have a certification either but don’t tell anybody). Lots of large companies allow children to come into work as visitors or by necessity on a case by case basis and a few even allow new mothers to bring their infants to work.
Let’s face facts, we aren’t going to live forever and we have to raise a new crop. If I had a parent with a cool job, I would want to see them do it in person sometime. When I was in Boy Scouts, a small group of us got to take a cruise in a police car. A minor suspect was spotted and we went on a slow speed chase until backup arrived. We thought is was pretty cool and we learned something about law enforcement. That is the only way you can see such things when you are younger and make a decision if you want to follow in your parent’s footsteps. Many doctors certainly have their kids around patients sometimes when they are growing up unless the doctor works in a maximum security prison or something ridiculous like that :).
Sometimes I think the SDMB is half-composed of a Turing experiment that is only partially completed and chock full of bugs.
In the space of about 5 minutes, the kid interacted 6 times with at least four aircraft (JBU 171, AMX 403, JBU195, DAL 216 and possibly Cactus 14) while the air traffic controller also dealt with MSR986, COM6496, and EGF 4549.
The activities occuring included:
JBU 171: take off, instruction to contact departure (ATC for airspace leaving the aerodrome)
AMX 403: line up on runway 31L, and hold, then take off after JBU171 had departed
JBU195: lined up and hold on 31L while AMX403 took off, then take off after Cactus 14 cleared to land
DAL 216: lined up and hold on 31L (ATC accidentally calls them “Jetblue 2-” but corrects himself), take off on 31L after Cactus 14 cleared to land on 31R and after JBU195 cleared for takeoff on 31L
Cactus 14: cleared to land on 31R
MSR986: lined up and hold on 31L
COM6496: cleared to land 31R
EGF 4549: ground directions on taxiways/ramp and hold point.
A few of the kid’s comments were unnecessary chatter (“Good day, dude” to DAL216).
The majority of accidents and incidents occur during takeoff and landing.
This ATC controller is in charge of making sure all these planes (7 in 5 minutes) take the correct taxiways, line up on the correct runway (there have been two incidents this week at other airports of airplanes taking off from taxiways instead of runways!), maintain separation between flights to avoid wake turbulence during take off and landing, direct pilots to contact departure frequencies, receive pilot calls from ground and arrival frequencies, inform pilots about winds and weather, etc.
A lot of work and if the worst were to happen, do you really want a kid to possibly have been a distraction? As it happened, none of these flights had particularly similar numbers, but there have been occurrences of instructions given to one plane that were intended for another, and ATC even misspoke when speaking to DAL216 and called them JetBlue.
There is just such a huge possibility of a fuck-up, and I’m grateful that nothing bad did happen, but I think the controller deserves at least a major demotion, if not a firing. Air safety just doesn’t have a lot of margin of error, and the guy making sure planes take off and land when and where they should shouldn’t be taking his job so lightly.
My prediction as to ONE reason why there is such a divide in opinion:
*Cute-sounding “widdle kid” tells big airplane to go somewhere while daddums watches: “Ohhhhhhhhhhh! It’s cuter than a diaper full of kittens!”
Edited: period changed to colon. Ew…
Uh . . . what? You think I’m all googly-eyed over the cutness of the kid so I’m ignoring the major infraction of the rules that hold our society together (or somesuch nonsense)?
What is your previous experience with air traffic control? Do you have any idea what ground control does? Or are you just having an emotional reaction to something slightly weird happening around airplanes?
It’s no different than having a train engineer texting while on the job. After all, if something goes wrong, the engineer is right fucking there to take control.
Oh, wait, that sort of shit has resulted in death. This ATC needs to get his ass canned. You just don’t fuck around with this stuff, no matter how innocent it seems.
If you want to entertain kids, be a god-damned clown at birthday parties. If you want to be responsible for the safety of people, grow the fuck up and take the job seriously.
Lapsed pilot here. I don’t think it is a big deal. I got a chuckle out of it.
Now, if the kid were working the approach, that’d be different.
Ok. I’ll defer to the knowledge of experienced pilots and ask this: Have errors from ground traffic controllers ever resulted in fatalities? Is it really so unimportant that we can disregard it (well, actually take it less seriously)?
Serious question, since some pilots have seemed to indicate that this wasn’t a big deal. It seems to me that opinions are all over the place - from laymen thinking it’s cute, to people who have some understanding of safety SOPs and their importance (albeit in different industries, and I’ll include myself in this group), to pilots who seem to think ‘not a big deal’.
I can think of an analogy that I’ll post later if I need to explain my position.
It’s inappropriate. INAPPROPRIATE. A word that seems to have lost its meaning. I don’t understand why people don’t grasp the meaning of the word any more. It’s like its OK to do or say anything at any time, not a clue in their pointy heads why it might not be a good idea. Not a clue. You’d have to explain elemental basic things to them, and they would look back at you, slack jawed, wondering what your problem was.
If I called the doctor’s office and asked if my test results came back, and someone’s cute widdle kid in its cute widdle high voice parroted “you have to come in and see Doxster Gween to dis…discuss your test wesults” - I’m receiving important information in such an inappropriate way it’s like a big “f.u., what’s your problem, no sensa humor?”
So bottom line people… how many planes crashed? How many people died? How many people were injured? How many flights were delayed? How many bags were mistakenly sent to Baltimore?
I still say it was stupid… but look at the ultimate costs.
I have a commercial pilot license, although I don’t fly for a living. IMHO, I think this controller should be reprimanded, but unless he has a history of other problems, I wouldn’t necessarily fire him.
It is not correct to call this controller “ground control”. He was working the tower position (or what ATC calls the “local” controller). The ground controller owns the taxiways, while the tower/local controller owns the active runways. I strongly disagree that this is comparable to “just drive around to the next window”. Airport ground movements, especially in a busy airport with complex layout like JFK, is a very serious business. If you screw that up, you may end up with a runway incursion, sometimes with disastrous consequences. For example, the Tenerife disaster, the deadliest aviation accident in history, is caused by a runway incursion. Some other examples of recent close calls (YouTube links):
An incident in Charlotte
An incident at O’Hare
This is very serious and the FAA has put a lot of efforts into reducing the number of runway incursions in recent years.
Again we are relating delivery of a life threatening prognosis to “please pull up to window number 2”
One more time… stupid… life threatening… no.