One tired midnight about seven years ago I got a taxi to take me from the crappy Arlington, Va., hotel in which I was staying to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The airport, known by its identifier one sees on baggage tags as “DCA,” obviously is a mouthful so I suppose people calls the airport basically whatever they want just as they would do anyway. I call it “Washington National,” because that’s what it was called before people figured it should be named for the man who broke the air traffic control union, PATCO.
Now I had never really hung around airports at 1, 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, but National was pretty doggone quiet until around quarter to 6 a.m. when the airport came to life including the arrival of the TSA inspectors. I never figured out why the airlines and airports and TSA said you should arrive a couple of hours before your flight for screening because the inspectors at National got to the job at 6:45 and had all their X-rays ready for the first boarding at around 6:30.
With that said, I never heard a thing fly into National from the time I got there around 1 a.m. until sometime after 6 a.m. So it wouldn’t surprise me that the control tower at National might not be fully staffed between midnight and 6 a.m. But to hear as I did in several stories today that only one controller was working during the wee hours Wednesday, and that controller might have been asleep just kind of gave me a chill. Check out this audio courtesy of The Washington Post.
By now the story has been well released that several flights just after midnight Wednesday ended up having its pilots to self-guide their jets into National, with the help of a controller who directs the flight paths across that area and is not part of the National or even the Washington airport system. That system includes both National and Dulles airports.
The incident is, obviously, being investigated by every initialed agency that has anything to do with flight control but there is speculation that the controller might have fallen asleep.
Now I admit to being drowsy on the job sometimes. I was drowsy before leaving work this afternoon. I had finished my major tasks and was waiting on signs my crappy work computer was indeed a computing device when a wave of sleepiness hit me. No other humans nor was really anything around to really stimulate me, I will have to say in my defense. But even had I fallen asleep, and likely only I would have known, I would not have had the potential to kill a couple of hundred human beings!
I imagine that controller will face stiff discipline, but as potentially dangerous as that was, the controller is suspended for the time being so as difficult as it might be let’s just chill until the incident has been thoroughly investigated before we decide to hang the guy. The FAA, or the people in charge of the agency locally by having only one person in the tower may also have been trying to cut corners as different offices of federal agencies are wont to do, especially in this age where everyone is paranoid over spending anything. Then again, the controller may have had some medical reason he dozed off. There are many reasons to look at before we start the normal condemnation of this person, who may have fallen asleep.
Thus, let us just see where this leads us. In the meantime, I think I will take a nap.
Spelling error report
The following text will be sent to our editors: