Fire in Chicago ARTCC... Again....

Did he disable a halon/fm200 fire suppression system? Was he still in the room where the fire occurred when they found him? Maybe he threw gas in the room and slammed the door shut. They spoke of water damage so he may not have been in a sensitive room to begin with.


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roncachamp said:
The ARTCCs are pretty much standardized now. Same equipment, even the buildings. The differences are in airspace and procedures. There's no way around that because the nation is not uniform. Some ARTCCs have a lot of SUA and military traffic, others have very little. Not all of them deal with oceanic procedures or other nation's ATC. One size simply does not fit all.
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Not to mention landmarks, route intersections, who to hand off to as planes leave the sector, and altitude assignments. If you had someone from Chicago Center try to work Denver they may be telling planes to descend into the sides of mountains. It's not the equipment that requires different training at different places, it's the actual places themselves that vary.
 
roncachamp said:
It did happen in Aurora.
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I have no idea what your point is here. Of course it did. That's why we are discussing it. In other news, both you and I have been posting on a forum called Pilots of America. Did you know that forum existed?

The ARTCCs are pretty much standardized now. Same equipment, even the buildings. The differences are in airspace and procedures. There's no way around that because the nation is not uniform. Some ARTCCs have a lot of SUA and military traffic, others have very little. Not all of them deal with oceanic procedures or other nation's ATC. One size simply does not fit all.
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Then they're not standardized. It would be better to work a single nationwide ARTCC with multiple offices operating them then to have however many distinct sectors as we have.

Then, one size would fit all.
 
StinkBug said:
Not to mention landmarks, route intersections, who to hand off to as planes leave the sector, and altitude assignments. If you had someone from Chicago Center try to work Denver they may be telling planes to descend into the sides of mountains. It's not the equipment that requires different training at different places, it's the actual places themselves that vary.
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It is not 1975 anymore.
 
No, it's not, but that doesn't change the fact that geography and airspace differ from place to place.
 
StinkBug said:
No, it's not, but that doesn't change the fact that geography and airspace differ from place to place.
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We have these newfangled things called computers now. Most desks come equipped with one. You'd be amazed what kind of information can be had with them...

Did you know that you can get custom driving instructions across the whole country with a click of a button??
 
SkyHog said:
I have no idea what your point is here. Of course it did. That's why we are discussing it. In other news, both you and I have been posting on a forum called Pilots of America. Did you know that forum existed?



Then they're not standardized. It would be better to work a single nationwide ARTCC with multiple offices operating them then to have however many distinct sectors as we have.

Then, one size would fit all.
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You can't standardize airspace that is that diverse. It takes roughly two years for a controller to get facility rated at a center. Impossible to get controllers that work from across the country to able to pick up and start moving traffic at Chicago with no training. It would be like taking a captain who flys a 757 for UPS and telling them that today they're going to fly an A320 for US Air. They'd be lost.

Only way to prevent this would be to have a duplicate facility right next to the primary one. Basically a portable, tactical ATC unit. I don't see that in the FAA's budget.
 
SkyHog said:
I have no idea what your point is here.
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You wrote; "No. But if it happened in Aurora we could..."

Then they're not standardized. It would be better to work a single nationwide ARTCC with multiple offices operating them then to have however many distinct sectors as we have.
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If that was the situation a similar event would shut down the entire nation. Are ya sure ya wanna go with that?
 
Flew up to Ephram (3D2) this morning. Milwaukee approach is not providing flight following due to this issue. You could still get FF from Green Bay approach when you are about 25 miles south of Green Bay.

Milwaukee did sound busier than usual today.
 
roncachamp said:
You wrote; "No. But if it happened in Aurora we could..."



If that was the situation a similar event would shut down the entire nation. Are ya sure ya wanna go with that?
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It would only shut down the entire nation if we stuck to a single location. Diverse facilities are the key. But each doing the same thing.

This is very common outside government work apparently since so many people think this is tough.
 
I can tell Nick hasn't spent any time talking to controllers about how they actually do their job, and what the training entails.
 
SkyHog said:
It would only shut down the entire nation if we stuck to a single location. Diverse facilities are the key. But each doing the same thing.

This is very common outside government work apparently since so many people think this is tough.
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So are you proposing that every air traffic controller be able to work every sector in the country? Or some how make every sector identical, ignoring the fact that every airport is different, geography is different, military operations are different, some have large expanses of ocean beneath them....how could you possibly ignore all those differences?

What other industry is like the US ATC system that you're comparing?

Aside from all that, depending on the damage inflicted, there are physical connections to radar antennas, RCO's etc....
 
Velocity173 said:
You can't standardize airspace that is that diverse. It takes roughly two years for a controller to get facility rated at a center. Impossible to get controllers that work from across the country to able to pick up and start moving traffic at Chicago with no training. It would be like taking a captain who flys a 757 for UPS and telling them that today they're going to fly an A320 for US Air. They'd be lost.

Only way to prevent this would be to have a duplicate facility right next to the primary one. Basically a portable, tactical ATC unit. I don't see that in the FAA's budget.
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Or just put a couple shifts of local controllers on a couple planes and take them to the backup locations (i.e neighbor centers). Within 2-3 hours the backups would be online with properly trained controllers. Seems a lot cheaper than duplicating each center in a nearby backup plus the backups wouldn't be as likely to suffer a common catastrophe.
 
gismo said:
Or just put a couple shifts of local controllers on a couple planes and take them to the backup locations (i.e neighbor centers). Within 2-3 hours the backups would be online with properly trained controllers. Seems a lot cheaper than duplicating each center in a nearby backup plus the backups wouldn't be as likely to suffer a common catastrophe.
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That's great but they wouldn't be able to fly out because their facility is down. You'd have to bus them.:D
 
Velocity173 said:
That's great but they wouldn't be able to fly out because their facility is down. You'd have to bus them.:D
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I know one ATC person that used to take the train to OKC because he "knew too much about the system".... :rolleyes: :D
 
Rewrite the consoles as computer applications. Issue controllers laptops. Have them work from home. :)


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The only thing I can see that MIGHT work is interconnecting the facilities so that if one location is compromised you can bring the controllers from that location and have them work at a different physical site. However you still need to have a connection to the physical radar and radio stations that are normally connected to the evacuated office. That's not impossible, but depending on the reason for the outage it may not help. You cant protect against everything. If a tornado rips through the area and takes out a couple radar stations and damages the office, simply moving to a different office isn't gonna help.
 
I imagine that duplicate physical facilities within a short drive from each other could work, but it would be expensive.
 
Heard ATC could be down for a month possibly.
 
wsuffa said:
I know one ATC person that used to take the train to OKC because he "knew too much about the system".... :rolleyes: :D
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That's like a GA aircraft mechanic I knew who wouldn't get in a small airplane...
 
Palmpilot said:
I imagine that duplicate physical facilities within a short drive from each other could work, but it would be expensive.
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I would think in an area like Chicago they could wire up O'Hare and Midway with some extra stations in their tower that could be used for backup for the Center. Using existing facilities as backups for each other seems the most cost effective approach. The people are the difficult thing to duplicate.
 
SkyHog said:
It would only shut down the entire nation if we stuck to a single location.
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A single location is what you proposed:
SkyHog said:
Then they're not standardized. It would be better to work a single nationwide ARTCC with multiple offices operating them then to have however many distinct sectors as we have.
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Diverse facilities are the key. But each doing the same thing.
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It was explained in very simple language why that is impossible.
 
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StinkBug said:
The only thing I can see that MIGHT work is interconnecting the facilities so that if one location is compromised you can bring the controllers from that location and have them work at a different physical site. However you still need to have a connection to the physical radar and radio stations that are normally connected to the evacuated office. That's not impossible, but depending on the reason for the outage it may not help. You cant protect against everything. If a tornado rips through the area and takes out a couple radar stations and damages the office, simply moving to a different office isn't gonna help.
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That assumes the facilities that are temporarily gaining controllers can physically do so.
 
I am in Michigan under Chicago Center and feeling impact this is having on my local flights and airport.

It started on Friday where my daughters flight from GRR to KLAX via KMSP (Minneapolis) got cancelled. Then moved to Saturday and cancelled a few hours later. After 2 hours on hold the ticket agent told her she could move to Sunday but couldn't say with any confidence that flights would happen until Monday. So we got her on a direct flight out of DTW (Detroit) Saturday and I would fly her there.

It was a little foggy on ground across Michigan Saturday AM so I figured an IFR flight plan would be prudent....Well, that didnt happen. Apparently the ATC system was not accepting IFR flight plans. No biggie I will just GO VFR over the fog on Flight following.

This is where it was interesting, when traversing the local TRSA's and in contact with the approach I heard multiple commercial flights dropping in VFR from chicago making initial contact and getting squak codes to land locally.:yikes:

IE : "Lansing approach Embraer xxxx descending through 18,000 VFR from chicago with Juliet" And after contact was made I heard multiple times "its a mad house in Chicago" or "Its crazy , Thank goodness we dont have to go back today"

On the way home I just made the VFR departure from under DTW airspace northwest and picked up local FF counting my blessings I was not a commercial pilot navigating in chicago right now, wow...
 
Jmcmanna said:
So are you proposing that every air traffic controller be able to work every sector in the country?
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Yes.

Or some how make every sector identical, ignoring the fact that every airport is different, geography is different, military operations are different, some have large expanses of ocean beneath them....how could you possibly ignore all those differences?
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They look different but they're all the same. After all, we pilots fly through all that different stuff without issue on very little prep work....MOAs are MOAs. Class C is Class C. Etc. No reason to make it more complicated than it is.

What other industry is like the US ATC system that you're comparing?
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Every industry.

Aside from all that, depending on the damage inflicted, there are physical connections to radar antennas, RCO's etc....
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It is 2014 not 1975.
 
SkyHog said:
Yes.



They look different but they're all the same. After all, we pilots fly through all that different stuff without issue on very little prep work....MOAs are MOAs. Class C is Class C. Etc. No reason to make it more complicated than it is.



Every industry.



It is 2014 not 1975.
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There is a vast disparity between your understanding and reality.
 
SkyHog said:
Yes.



They look different but they're all the same. After all, we pilots fly through all that different stuff without issue on very little prep work....MOAs are MOAs. Class C is Class C. Etc. No reason to make it more complicated than it is.



Every industry.



It is 2014 not 1975.
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:rolleyes2:
 
Here is how it works in the financial industry:

Key facilities and key activities and key personnel are identified during the planning phase of Disaster Recovery.

Backup key facilities are prepared in a location sufficiently far from the original facility that a disaster hitting the original facility is not likely to also affect the backup facility, and yet the backup is located close enough to the original that key personnel could reasonably transfer to the backup. 100 miles seems to be reasonable. We located our Manhattan trading floor backup in New Jersey. When the Financial district in Manhattan was hit, traders moved across the river and trading continued within hours.

Then the key facilities contain mirrored servers and equipment with the ability to perform key activities after the key personnel arrive.

Finally, once a month, key personnel travel to the backup location and perform key activities just to ensure that the system can continue to perform adequately. You use the practice to make sure that all vital activities are performed in a way that keeps the system running, but with limitations. I remember the first time we tested our Disaster Recovery system. We knew that we had massive generators on the roof of the World Headquarters building that should be able to keep the whole building running (in case of a complete power shutdown) for half a day while services transferred. That was the day that we discovered that all the diesel for the generators had evaporated and we were unable to produce any power. We also found out that about half the battery backup was no longer functional. Fixed it.

If ARTCC were to implement the same thing, they would have a smaller setup somewhere outside the Chicago area, say Springfield, and would be able to perform key ARTCC duties with about 1/10th to 1/20th of the normal number of controllers and other personnel. There would be similar off-site Disaster Recovery locations for each ARTCC and key personnel from each of those facilities would be trained to use the backup facility.
 
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And again, the problem is not duplicating the facilities, it's duplicating the people. Financial institutions are all about numbers and data. Everything is on a server somewhere and it really doesn't matter who is at the terminal or where. You can literally do the exact same thing from anywhere on earth with any person who knows the ropes.

Despite what Nick seems to believe, simply having access to the ATC data stream in a different location wont help some random controller who isn't familiar with the area. Yeah, they know how to do the job, and they could probably keep planes from crashing into each other, but it's HIGHLY doubtful that they could actually keep traffic moving in and out of a complex and busy area that they are unfamiliar with.

Imagine trying to give a hundred people driving directions using google maps over the radio, but WITHOUT the actual driving directions function. All you know is where they are and what the destination is. You have a map, but aren't familiar with it. If you know all the roads in town, you can do it pretty quickly and efficiently. If you dont, it's gonna be a long slow process, and someone is gonna be driving in circles or find a dead end.
 
MyassisDragon said:
I am in Michigan under Chicago Center and feeling impact this is having on my local flights and airport.

It started on Friday where my daughters flight from GRR to KLAX via KMSP (Minneapolis) got cancelled. Then moved to Saturday and cancelled a few hours later. After 2 hours on hold the ticket agent told her she could move to Sunday but couldn't say with any confidence that flights would happen until Monday. So we got her on a direct flight out of DTW (Detroit) Saturday and I would fly her there.

It was a little foggy on ground across Michigan Saturday AM so I figured an IFR flight plan would be prudent....Well, that didnt happen. Apparently the ATC system was not accepting IFR flight plans. No biggie I will just GO VFR over the fog on Flight following.

This is where it was interesting, when traversing the local TRSA's and in contact with the approach I heard multiple commercial flights dropping in VFR from chicago making initial contact and getting squak codes to land locally.:yikes:

IE : "Lansing approach Embraer xxxx descending through 18,000 VFR from chicago with Juliet" And after contact was made I heard multiple times "its a mad house in Chicago" or "Its crazy , Thank goodness we dont have to go back today"

On the way home I just made the VFR departure from under DTW airspace northwest and picked up local FF counting my blessings I was not a commercial pilot navigating in chicago right now, wow...
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I hear ya. I have heard 121 carriers getting visual all the time though so it's not unusual to me at all. Only concerning statement to me was "over the fog on flight following." Fog is technically a cloud... How thick was it and were you operating Vfr on top, which is an ifr operation. Just checking what it was like.


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How about, "OK, Google...Navigate to Denver"

That hasn't been working too well on the ground the last few months. It keeps telling me to make turns, even when I'm on the destination road, so I go on loops.
 
StinkBug said:
And again, the problem is not duplicating the facilities, it's duplicating the people. Financial institutions are all about numbers and data. Everything is on a server somewhere and it really doesn't matter who is at the terminal or where. You can literally do the exact same thing from anywhere on earth with any person who knows the ropes.

Despite what Nick seems to believe, simply having access to the ATC data stream in a different location wont help some random controller who isn't familiar with the area. Yeah, they know how to do the job, and they could probably keep planes from crashing into each other, but it's HIGHLY doubtful that they could actually keep traffic moving in and out of a complex and busy area that they are unfamiliar with.

Imagine trying to give a hundred people driving directions using google maps over the radio, but WITHOUT the actual driving directions function. All you know is where they are and what the destination is. You have a map, but aren't familiar with it. If you know all the roads in town, you can do it pretty quickly and efficiently. If you dont, it's gonna be a long slow process, and someone is gonna be driving in circles or find a dead end.
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I suspect that a very automated system could be designed to handle the vast majority (i.e. non-emergency) traffic in the entire continental US with greater flight efficiency than the current system not to mention a much smaller requirement for highly trained operators. Many of the duties of the controllers are things that computers can do far more easily than humans (e.g. funnel arriving traffic from multiple different directions into a single stream efficiently).

Of course should the FAA undertake such a venture it would cost ten times as much to develop as it should and take so long to complete it would be obsolete before the it controlled the first flight. But it they managed to pull it off, redundancy would be fairly easy to accomplish.
 
gismo said:
I suspect that a very automated system could be designed to handle the vast majority (i.e. non-emergency) traffic in the entire continental US with greater flight efficiency than the current system not to mention a much smaller requirement for highly trained operators. Many of the duties of the controllers are things that computers can do far more easily than humans (e.g. funnel arriving traffic from multiple different directions into a single stream efficiently).

Of course should the FAA undertake such a venture it would cost ten times as much to develop as it should and take so long to complete it would be obsolete before the it controlled the first flight. But it they managed to pull it off, redundancy would be fairly easy to accomplish.
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Every controller and their union would have a stroke over that idea.....

Their attitude is YOU NEED US, AND WE CAN'T BE REPLACED......

Can we all say PATCO... and then unemployment...:yes:....;)
 
SkyHog said:
Yes.



They look different but they're all the same. After all, we pilots fly through all that different stuff without issue on very little prep work....MOAs are MOAs. Class C is Class C. Etc. No reason to make it more complicated than it is.



Every industry.



It is 2014 not 1975.
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Doesn't matter if it's 1975 or 2014. Computing power has nothing to do with it. ATC is still about a controller moving aircraft from A to B with a myriad of rules and local procedures. Next Gen or whatever FAA thinks will solve the increase in air traffic won't change the basic premise of ATC.

A controller has to have their entire airspace memorized. When I did it, I was responsible for memorizing airspace within 100 miles. We actually had a blank airspace sheet that we had to label airways, Fixes, MEAs, MVAs, SUAs, Airports. Airports within your airspace had to memorized with frequencies, runway lengths and IAPs. There are pages upon pages of SOPs for a particular facility that you have to be familiar with. You have various LOAs with adjacent facilities, commercial operators and military. Takes months for a qualified controller transfer to get signed off and some cases years for someone right out of OK City.

The situation is too dynamic to use the pilot analogy. The controller doesn't have time to reference something like a pilot does in a cockpit. The knowledge has to be memorized and it has to be immediate. Seconds matter.

The only thing that's even comparable to what you describe is what we did with tactical ATC in the military. You can do ATC in a third world country or even a military airfield on an exercise, but the airspace is not nearly complex and the traffic load is far less. Also, even in those cases we crammed for days if not weeks learning the area prior to deployment. In the OP example, that wouldn't be possible.

So, the only to have a backup plan in this case is to have some duplicate facility not far from the primary. It would have to be something that can be implemented in seconds, not hours. With an already strained budget for ATC, I can't see that happening.
 
Velocity173 said:
Doesn't matter if it's 1975 or 2014. Computing power has nothing to do with it. ATC is still about a controller moving aircraft from A to B with a myriad of rules and local procedures. Next Gen or whatever FAA thinks will solve the increase in air traffic won't change the basic premise of ATC.

A controller has to have their entire airspace memorized. When I did it, I was responsible for memorizing airspace within 100 miles. We actually had a blank airspace sheet that we had to label airways, Fixes, MEAs, MVAs, SUAs, Airports. Airports within your airspace had to memorized with frequencies, runway lengths and IAPs. There are pages upon pages of SOPs for a particular facility that you have to be familiar with. You have various LOAs with adjacent facilities, commercial operators and military. Takes months for a qualified controller transfer to get signed off and some cases years for someone right out of OK City.

The situation is too dynamic to use the pilot analogy. The controller doesn't have time to reference something like a pilot does in a cockpit. The knowledge has to be memorized and it has to be immediate. Seconds matter.

The only thing that's even comparable to what you describe is what we did with tactical ATC in the military. You can do ATC in a third world country or even a military airfield on an exercise, but the airspace is not nearly complex and the traffic load is far less. Also, even in those cases we crammed for days if not weeks learning the area prior to deployment. In the OP example, that wouldn't be possible.

So, the only to have a backup plan in this case is to have some duplicate facility not far from the primary. It would have to be something that can be implemented in seconds, not hours. With an already strained budget for ATC, I can't see that happening.
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All true but only because that's the way ATC has worked for years.
 
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