Mom – nothing in this entry involves me or the plane. Sorry, but they still let me fly…

ATC (Air Traffic Control) is responsible for controlling traffic around busier airports. This includes everything from a tower at an airport like Santa Fe or Bloomington making sure only one plane at a time uses the runway to controllers using radar to positively control both IFR and VFR traffic at busy airports like Denver or LAX. And you talk to ATC while you’re flying around, either for routing (IFR) or traffic advisories (VFR), although VFR doesn’t really have to talk to ATC in route. But it’s a good idea.

Anyway, for what not to do, there’s a guy in the news for being escorted down by F-16s after controllers thought he had been hijacked. Ooops. I’ve been in close proximity of F-16s and F/A-18s (they fly in and out of the Sunport), but never when one was escorting me. That would be double-plus not fun. There isn’t much information yet so it’s not clear whether he accidently scrolled through the magic code on his transponder or if he used one of the code words. Should be interesting.

There was an e-mail from the FAA Safety Team in my inbox when I got home from work today, a report on runway incursions for the last twelve months in the local region. The summary is:

12 - Entered runway or crossed runway hold bars without ATC clearance* 
11 - Issued and read back hold short instructions, then entered runway 
4 - Landed without ATC clearance 
10 - Departed without ATC clearance* 
2 - Departed from wrong runway 
* A single aircraft is responsible for multiple (2) RIs

So the 12 entered runway or cross runway hold bars is a difficult one. Clearly one guy took off that way, which is double-plus bad. But on complicated airports like KABQ, it’s not too hard to get lost and end up crossing an active runway. Not good, but you can almost understand how it happened. But 11 times, someone got instructions to NOT enter a runway, read back the instructions to NOT enter a runway, then entered a runway. I’m not sure how you do that exactly, but they did. *sigh*.