Agreed. Although I'm a pilot and have 40+ hours in retractable gear, I couldn't tell you what a Mooney gear warning horn sounds like. As a controller, those are your noises, controllers have enough noises to learn on their own for example a small sampling: Collision avoidance alarm, low altitude alarm, emergency alarm, radar outage alarm, tacan, vor, ILS alarm, the noise that someone makes by pushing the button for entrance to the tower both top and bottom doors, and the list goes on and on.
Curiosity question. Is the collision alarm a high-low continuous? I hear that crap all the time from the other end of the radio at our somewhat busy little Delta. And it’s usually when a particular controller is losing the big picture. Trainee I’m sure, another voice always comes on and eventually straightens it all out. Hahaha. I’m developing a twitch whenever I hear that particular trainee’s voice to really watch out for mistakes and I wish I wasn’t.
Most recent was not switching back to full call signs when two “Seven Niner Mikes” were in the pattern. That one didn’t get corrected by the trainer but I made sure to say something.
“Cessna Seven Niner Mike, Cleared to Land Runway 35 Left.”
“Cleared to Land 35 Left, Seven Niner Mike.”
Now to me...
“Cessna Seven Niner Mike, taxi into position and hold, Runway 35 Right.”
Now let me preface this with our permanent procedure change that NOBODY calls our Tower. You are sequenced to the hold line by Ground and then told to MONITOR Tower.
The poor guy with the landing clearance just heard his landing clearance and my takeoff clearance back to back with NO indication yet over the air that I was there.
I made sure he didn’t respond and then answered with, “Position and hold 35 Right, for the OTHER Seven Niner Mike, 1279M.”
I’m sure the other guy was chuckling as he finished his arrival off to my left. Or relieved he wasn’t supposed to be hurrying over to plant his airplane on the other runway. But if he had mis-heard that as a runway change to his landing clearance I knew I had better not be out there for him to land on.
But that kind of stuff is just repetitive with this one particular controller right now. The other common one is there now is a “Seven Niner Mike” and a “Niner Seven Mike” based at the airport and that controller has mixed up who was where multiple times for our two callsigns. It’s just cringeworthy sometimes.
I suspect they’ll get better with time. I sure hope so. Hearing confusion in their voice is not helpful for me or students other than as a warning that we’d better watch for the airplane that got missed in the runway change.
A wind shift and runway change is always a zoo at APA but if that controller is working Local when it happens I often announce that I want to exit the pattern and return later if multiple 360s in the pattern are issued. It gets bad enough tracking that everyone is reversing courses and nobody got missed when the fully qualified controllers do it. I’ll just pick the safe exit direction and say I want to go away and it’s immediately granted. Bye. Don’t need a midair scare today, thanks.
One controller at home is STELLAR and really gets it. He’ll put airplanes all over the place — really knows how to use opposite side, overhead, landmarks, and and all of the airspace to his advantage when he has to. And he’s fast enough at the big picture that special requests like short approaches for power off 180s and such, are just a no-brainer to him. You can tell he’s been doing it a long time. He also recognizes voices and knows instructors and frequent flyers and who to ask for oddball stuff to fix spacing, etc.
Not saying the other controllers are slouches at all but that guy is good. Really good.
Time and practice. I hope the weak one starts coming up to speed. They don’t sound very confident most of the time. Someone needs to tell them they’re doing good but it needs to come up just one more notch. Our airport is busy. That controller holds their own until something unexpected happens and then it goes down the tubes. I just wanna yell “Work it! Don’t back off. Control it! You’ve got this!”
Which... is probably what their supervising controller is telling them, too. So they don’t need me saying it.
It’s like watching a student who gets tossed one more ball to juggle and drops all of them. A solid “All aircraft calling for landing, remain outside the Delta. I’ll call you all back in a minute.” would fix most of that controller’s issues.
But the ramp attendant at the FBO said he'd been up for more than an hour on a quiet summer evening, and I wondered if my radio calls entering the circuit was the distraction...
It’s like watching a student who gets tossed one more ball to juggle and drops all of them. A solid “All aircraft calling for landing, remain outside the Delta. I’ll call you all back in a minute.” would fix most of that controller’s issues.