Basically, the airport is operating as an uncontrolled airport, with pilots reporting positions using CTAF. Departures are calling Houston by phone when they reach the hold short lines at their departure runway to get their departure clearance.
Listening on liveatc.com is pretty interesting, if only because unusual to hear all the airline guys (especially the Brits taking their 777 to London) making position calls.
And inevitably some guys haven’t gotten the word. Several folks are futilely calling ground and tower until some kind soul tells them what’s going on.
The FAA is bringing a portable tower down from Kansas City but they don’t expect it to be up and running until sometime on Monday.
According to Wikipedia, they have about 150+ takeoffs and landings per day, so I imagine that it will not be routine operations at the busy parts of the day.
Pilots (and I know there are many on the SDMB), what are your thoughts on this?
Radar is basically a computer uplink and the outlying centers are directing traffic to the airport anyway. They just need to cover the last bit of transition and clearances. If the weather is good It’s not rocket science to operate as ground based observers to clear planes on final. 150 feet above the ground doesn’t add much to the equation. They do it all the time at Oshkosh.
Seems to me we need a civilian mobile system to back up airports or access to military units. This is twice in two years.
I am a private pilot and fly into lots of uncontrolled fields. It is not unusual to be sharing the traffic patters with 5 or 6 other planes and sometimes military C-130s. It would certainly be unusual to do it at a large commercial airport.
I am listening to LiveATC now at KATC and someone just received takeoff clearance so it is not really uncontrolled right now it seems… even if it is just a guy with a handheld radio. But people are still giving position reports. I would just be extra cautious going in there right now as a pilot.
This is fun. To be out for a couple days is sloppy work on the FAA’s part.
To answer an earlier question, operating airliners into fields without control towers happens every day in the US. But normally it’s between 11pm and 5am at the smaller airports at outlying towns.
It’s pretty darn rare to be doing it all day into a reasonably busy mid-sized city airport such as Austin. There are procedures to cover this contingency and once you’ve dusted the cobwebs off them they work fine. You’re going to have some significant volume constraints, but my recollection from running in and out of there for years is the place isn’t *that *busy. Right at peak times there will be some backlogging, but most of the day this will be a non-event.
It appears that as of now they’ve got a temporary tower, which may just be a guy in a pickup truck, operating during daylight hours. Overnight it’s a non-towered airport.
There are also some radar outages in the local area. Which is also a nuisance level problem and a source of delay, rather than a crisis.
It is certainly weird to hear a large commercial jet call “Any traffic in the area please advise”. I think he probably needs to pull out the AIM and review uncontrolled procedures.
