today was quite weird for Boeing airplanes, as well as for United. United Flight 1832 (a 737-8) from Cancun to Houston had a single engine shutdown on the way and had to divert to New Orleans.
I'm an Air Traffic Controller at Houston Center, and a regular user of this website. Today I was the Radar Associate controller in the Ocean West sector when that aircraft flew through.
The Radar Associate works alongside the Radar Controller, and performs coordinations and other actions to assist the Radar Controller. It is the Radar Controller who talks with the aircraft on frequency.
In the Ocean West sector, the Radar Associate controller coordinates with Mexico's Air Traffic Controllers to determine safe routes, altitudes, and crossing times at the FIR boundary, as well as pass along any other pertinent information.
I won't answer any questions about today's event here, but if anyone has any other questions, feel free to ask. I will also double-check the FAA's social media guidelines when I go back to work tomorrow. So, if I don't answer your question today, please check tomorrow.
TF or "Tango Foxtrot" are my operating initials - something which every Air Traffic Controller has and is unique per facility. We use our operating initials to identify ourselves when we perform coordinations via the landline.
I was also a Radar Associate controller at HCF Center (in Hawaii) for United Flight 1175, a Boeing 777, from San Fransisco to Honolulu when it lost its engine cowling back in 2018.
The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of FAA.
Actually, one thing I was wondering after I got the alert about the 7700 (via flightradar24) - is there anything I'm missing in terms of a reasonably reliable way to figure out what Center frequency a given airplane is currently communicating on, when not low enough to be talking to Approach? I'm assuming there isn't, because handoffs from departure seem to vary frequencies when I fly.
You would need charts that show the different sector boundaries and their altitude or flight level stratums. Sectors can be combined, so you might be given a different frequency in the same area at different times of the day and/or days of the week.
With Approach, sector boundaries can also change depending on which runway(s) they're landing.
You could potentially call up the facility and ask for copies of the sector charts, but I don't know what kind of response you will get.
Right now due to COVID-19, facility tours are not allowed, otherwise you could see ATC in-person and ask to take a look at their charts then, as well as ask the Controllers any questions, workload-permitting.
The facilities that I've worked at (HCF Center and Houston Center) have been happy to give tours, but they have to be during normal business hours, and you have to be a United States citizen. For a tour, I suggest organizing a group of pilots or others interested in aviation, rather than just going by yourself.
The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of the FAA.
Is RADAR Controller the senior position and RADAR Associate the junior position? That is, does one normally progress from Associate to Controller? How long does it take to progress from one to the next? Is it common/expected for people in your position to move to different airports?
Radar Controllers and Radar Associates are just staffing positions.
Some background information to build on…
An Air Traffic Controller's job title when they start out is Air Traffic Control Specialist. An Air Traffic Control Specialist starts out in the AG pay band (Academy Graduate). When that Controller gets certifications, they move up to the D1 pay band (Developmental), then to D2, D3, and when they get all of their certifications or "fully certify", they end in the CPC pay band and their job title changes to Certified Professional Controller.
The Radar Controller position is also called the R-side, and the Radar Associate position is also called the D-side. A trainee needs to certify on all of their D-sides before they start training on their R-sides.
So basically the answer to your first two questions is "yes". However there can be a more experienced controller working the D-side while a new controller is working the R-side. The Air Traffic Controllers rotate through the different positions throughout the day. It is based on when someone arrives for their shift, or comes back to the control room from their break, they check with the controller that has been on a position the longest, and asks that person if they want a break. If not, the Controller moves on to the next person who has been working the longest, and so forth.
ARTCCs or Air Route Traffic Control Centers or just "Centers", are divided into "specialties" (or "areas") that controllers are assigned to. Each specialty is divided into sectors. At the minimum, each sector needs to staffed by a Radar Controller. If the sector is busy with a lot of traffic or is complex due to weather events, or maybe traffic being rerouted from another sector, then a Radar Associate position will be staffed at that sector. If traffic is very light, for example in the middle of the night, sectors can be combined and one Radar Controller will work multiple sectors and talk to multiple aircraft on different frequencies.
The time it takes to get certified depends on many factors. It could be anywhere from one month, to six months. From starting out to get fully certified, can take anywhere between two years, to five years. It depends on many factors, such as personal ability, training opportunities, training backlogs, etc.
It is common for people to switch facilities at least once. Some stay at their first facility, some move several times. When a Controller graduates from the FAA's training facility (that's where "Academy Graduate" comes from), they are given a short list of facilities to chose from. The list constantly changes based on the FAA's staffing needs.
The FAA does do "direct hires" for people with previous ATC experience (usually through military) directly into certain facilities, but a new hire without experience won't know where they'll go when they start out.
The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of FAA.
What expertise is it that ATC folks build up in all of those years of training? Is it knowledge of plane behavior by model, familiarity with the region, radar behavior? Or is the majority of it the less tangible “getting a feel for the flow of traffic to instinctively pick out unusual behavior”?
(Edit to my parent comment: " It could be anywhere from one month, to six months" to certify on a single sector, but it's really more like one to three months.)
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All of the above.
Whenever an Air Traffic Controller transfers to a new facility, or even transfers to a new specialty within a facility, they have to train and get certified on all of the new sectors. Each sector is different due to traffic flow, types of traffic, equipment limitations, etc.
For the Houston Center Ocean specialty, equipment familiarization is very important for Controllers. There are 5 sectors: Ocean West, Ocean East, Offshore West, Offshore Central, and Offshore East. Ocean West and East deal primarily with aircraft flying between the United States and Mexico. There are different airways that aircraft can take, and each one has different characteristics (crossing airways, airways defined by RNAV fixes vs bearings off of VORTACs, radio coverage, and radar coverage).
In the Offshore sectors, radio coverage is harder to manage. There are multiple transmitters and receivers that are located on different offshore platforms, and the ocean elements and weather can affect the equipment. At our positions next to the radar scopes, there are touchscreens with many different buttons to select which frequencies we want to monitor, transmit on, use primary or backup sites, etc. Most sectors do not have to toggle between different transmitters, but in the Offshore sectors, that's a common occurrence. There are also different transmitter sites for the Ocean sectors, so we commonly get pilots saying that they're losing us on the radio when we are talking to another aircraft a hundred miles away, and we can hear the pilot just fine.
In the Ocean sectors, radar doesn't cover the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, so we have to rely on aircraft position reports unless they have ADS-B.
At HCF Center, there are mountains which block radar coverage, so it's good to know where we can expect to lose or establish radar contact with aircraft.
Yes, there is an element of becoming familiar with the routine traffic. You see many of the same flights every day, so you know where they are going. It got to the point at HCF Center, where if someone told me a flight number, I could tell them the departure and destination airports without looking.
However, just like pilots, Air Traffic Controllers cannot let routine turn into complacency. We can never just assume anything, if we are unsure, we have to ask or restate something. Safety is our number one priority.
The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of the FAA.
I use LUKS on my work laptop (company policy/etc). Sure the AES-NI bandwidth is a few GB/sec/core. But it definitely slows things like kernel builds down by more than double digit percentages. Turns out latency is still important for storage and making an extra pass over all the data doesn't help.
Storage Systems of this scale are thesedays almost exclusively built around object based storage rather than "legacy" block or file backed solutions. I guess today, min.io is would be the way to go. (to "go".. little pun on the end:)
It means you access your object through a GUID. Think about it like parking your own car vs. a valet. When you park your own car you need to know the address of the garage you parked in, the floor you were on, and the spot you were in. When you valet park, you hand the attendant a ticket and he brings your car back.
With a standard fileshare, you need to walk the filesystem to retrieve your file - this incurs a ton of metadata overhead. It also means when you've got potentially billions of files in a directory, it can be slooooowww. All the metadata requests also make it very chatty - so doing it over a WAN link tends to be extremely painful if it works at all. Newer versions of SMB and NFS have done a lot to batch the metadata requests but they are still protocols meant to happen at extremely low latency inside a datacenter.
Some object stores do this, but aws S3 for example does not. You can list the contents of buckets, nicely sorted by name. You can mimic directory structures if you want.
However, you touched a key point: object stores are all about throughput, not latency. You can store at a GB/s (if you have the pipes), but even checking if an object exists will cost you a few milliseconds.
My guess: No random write access to objects, you can (at best) append-only but often you can only append until the object is finalized, and cannot read it until it is finalized.
it's like a key-value store, (or a dictionary). However, the values are objects (big blobs of data). This means you can't update parts of objects without rewriting the blob. However, most of the object stores offer metadata operations (move, tag, ...), concat of n objects into 1 and partial reads.
About time! This has been the single thing keeping me from making the switch to Firefox for my personal profile. The Chromium-vaapi patch works well enough to justify being my default browser so far.
This is bought to you by the people that think /etc/sudoers is best replaced with javascript rules and the solution to a mash up of javascript and compiled languages not freeing memory is to ignore the issue for 7 or 8 years then admit that the issue is unfixable and solve it by manually running the gc constantly and noting that this performs in practice way better than you would imagine for such a hacky crappy solution.
In practice most users not using fedora are "apt" to see wayland not sooner than they upgrade to ubuntu 24.04 LTS or Debian 11 or later and as users will naturally upgrade when they feel like it as opposed to release day one would expect the majority to transition between 2024 and 2028.
Apps which don't work on X before this period would be even more niche than usual.
I wish I could take Wayland for a spin but it feels like HL3 vaporware that only a select few individuals are actually capable of using. (I have an nVidia card)
"Select few" being anybody with an Intel or AMD GPU? That's actually quite a lot of people. Shit not working properly is one of the prices you choose to pay when you choose to purchase hardware with poor FOSS driver support.
My poor little Intel GPU can't do 4K and the last 2 AMD GFX cards I purchased had such brutally bad coil whine I decided to switch brands out of sheer frustration.
The Nvidia card I have now is silent and works pretty well.
One day I'll get to take Wayland for a test drive.
Using it with Nvidia/Gnome 3 on OpenSuse Leap 15.1. Screen jumped left repeatedly today, and I'm having trouble turning it off. Other than that seems to be okay...
