So you've watched and rewatched Die Hard 2, Con Air and Pushing Tin and you’ve decided you want to be an air traffic controller. The first step is to be going out with someone who’s applying for a vacancy and decide sure, you might as well apply yourself. No, hang on, that’s what Gwen Morgan did, not what you should do. Sorry. Although it certainly worked for Gwen – she's now Director of Operations at AirNav Ireland, the semi-state company that provides air traffic management for Irish air space.
Despite what you might think from her rather whimsical entry to her career, Gwen told Oliver Callan that the training to become an air traffic controller is not the sort of thing that should be taken on lightly:
"It’s very much like a three-year university degree course compacted into two years. And it’s very intense training, but they’re training you first of all from a generic perspective to do with aviation or to do with air traffic control, then you go into more sort of focused areas, depending on where you’re going to be working when you finish."
It is, Gwen says, one of those things that you can either do or you can’t. The main reason for people not passing the intense training is down to spatial awareness:
"People can get the hang of it quite quickly, but then if you ramp up the level of traffic that’s coming through while they are in the simulators, it can get very difficult for them to manage – and to change priorities or to have my priority to keep scanning and to keep everything going. It’s extremely dynamic. So they always have to have Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D."
That’s a lot of plans. And you just know that "extremely dynamic" is a polite way of saying "very stressful". But as an air traffic controller you can’t get stressed. You have to stay calm, you have to speak clearly and at a rate that any given pilot – whose first language may not be English – has to be able to understand. If it still sounds like it’s for you, Gwen has good news for you:
"If you check out of your training, you’re guaranteed a job at the end of it. That’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to train and then apply for a job. When you’re training, and you qualify at the end of your training, you have a job with AirNav Ireland."
Surprisingly, in this 21st century of ours, with screens everywhere and planes that fly themselves (sort of), it’s still very important, Gwen says, to actually see the planes in real life with your real eyes:
"You have to look out the window in the tower. That’s the best screen that you have in the tower. Unless you’re in a day where there’s fog. So, thick fog, we can still operate aircraft. Less aircraft obviously, because the risk increases when pilots can’t see each other and then we can’t see the pilots or the aircraft moving on the ground. But we have systems in place that allow us then to see them. So, we have surface movement radars, so wherever there’s a plane on the ground, we can see it corresponding on the screen."
Air traffic control isn’t just about getting planes safely up into the air and on their way, or down onto the ground and into their landing slots, there’s a whole sky full of planes that are just passing through our airspace without touching down at all. Most air traffic that flies between Europe and North America goes via Irish airspace. AirNav have an area control centre in Shannon – known as Shannon En Route – which handles this traffic:
"The air traffic controllers there, they don’t look out the window, they look at their screens all of the time. So everything that’s flying at 25,000 feet, up to about 42,000 feet, 43,000 feet, those air traffic controllers are keeping those aircraft separate at all times."
Separate means, Gwen explains, that if there are two aircraft flying over the same point at the same time, there must be a thousand feet between them, and she gives Oliver an analogy to help visualise what she means:
"Pigeon House chimneys in Ringsend, 700 feet. Cut them in half, add that half on top, now you’ve got a thousand feet. There has to be that height between them if they’re passing over the same point."
It’s an intense job and a rewarding one, Gwen says and Oliver is enthusiastic enough to make you wonder if he might consider a career change. You can ponder that for yourself by listening to the full conversation, if you click above.