WATCH ABOVE: It’s the eye in the sky that makes sure thousands of passengers take off and land safely. Michel Boyer takes us inside air traffic control at the Edmonton International Airport.
Edmonton Off Limits is a special series that takes you behind closed doors to places that are usually forbidden or too dangerous for the general public.
EDMONTON — Air traffic controllers are reputed to have one of the most stressful jobs on earth.
A handful of people are responsible for the lives of thousands of passengers both flying in the sky and on the ground.
They calculate speed, altitude, distance and air congestion to make sure everything flows smoothly and on time.
Weather also plays a major factor and that can significantly slow things down.
“The biggest thing would be when the visibility is down,” said Brad Murray, Air Traffic Controller with NAV CANADA. “So when that happens, you go to the procedures we have in place to make it safe.”
Airplanes and airport are now often equipped with automatic landing instruments.
“The visibility may seem very low, but with those systems, it’ll bring the pilot right down,” Murray explained.
It is widely believed that controllers work for the airports, but that is not the case.
NAV CANADA is a private company that staffs all the towers and controls traffic over Canada. It also develops much of its own technology and sells it to other airport authorities around the world.
Much of the world still uses the “old school” way of controlling air traffic, using plastic strips with plane information on them.
One person in the control tower would be responsible for ground operations, another for departures and arrivals. Controllers would pass the plastic strips to one another when a given aircraft is ready to move. All that is replaced by computers, screens, which is why Canada’s towers are very quiet.
“It’s almost like a library some days,” he said.
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