If you're anything like me every time you go to an airport and you look up at the control tower you
wonder to yourself what exactly happens up there behind those tinted windows how do the controllers
know what any aircraft is doing at any point in time and where they should be telling it to
go i have to give a big thank you for this video to Airservices Australia who did reach out to me
and asked if i wanted to come up and have a look at what goes on inside the air traffic control
tower here at Sydney airport i've never replied to an email as fast as i replied to that one
This is our lighting panel so on the taxiways there's a row of red lights and that's to signify
to an aircraft that there's a runway ahead of them they're not supposed to cross the road
stop bars unless they've been given an instruction by your traffic control that's all the different
holding points that aircraft can be at this is to represent our main runway Sydney three four left
once a track so when i give an instruction to lineup i'll drop the stop bar the screen here
is on my phones so we have lines to the radar controllers across the road there and the radar
unit hotlines to all the different positions in the tower this screen here this has all of
our weather information this is to signify that runway three four left and runway three four right
are the runways in use at the moment our crossing runway zero seven two five is not active at the
moment and then each runway thresholds has wind data to tell us what the wind is on each
threshold this is our ground radar that gives you a good idea of where everything's moving
very useful at night time or when we have the occasional fog and this screen over here this
is our air traffic monitor we're allowed to use this to monitor separation but we don't
use it as a separation tool finally this is my strip display the blues are for departures
so these are departures that have gone and the whites are for arrivals the SMC
controller will give me a departure when they're finished with it this one here is a Rex 6868
that tells you the aircraft type and it's wake turbulence category which is medium tells you
its destination which is double and that's Sydney and its initial tracking points what i do then
the aircraft calls ready and i give him a little tick to see if he's ready i'll drop
it down to this menu and that tells the departures controllers who are going to be talking to after
i'm finished what the next order of departure is so they can tell who's going to be coming next
and then i write in some initial tracking instructions which will be a heading of left 2 3
rex sixty eight sixty eight thank heading left two three four line up and went from three four left
life is an air traffic controller everyone has watched pushing ten everyone's watched
all those you know air traffic control movies in Hollywood it looks stressful you're sweating
you're bashing the desk is it a stressful job um no overall it's it's not a stressful job not
not stressed like these movies what we try and do as well is we try and
give people the correct amount of stress if you're operating you know with no stress whatsoever
you've actually got a tendency to get bored to make mistakes so as stress increases there's a
kind of sweet spot like an optimal zone of stress where you're really performing at your best we
try and keep our controllers in that sweet spot make sure that they're not bored but they're not
having too much stress. You may be wondering how i actually managed to wangle this visit
well like i said Airservices Australia did reach out to me and asked if i wanted to have a look
around so again thank you to air services for organizing that i needed a security pass on the
gate my driver's license was taken and recorded i'm being chaperoned as i'm going around i only
have about 15 or 20 minutes maximum in the cab at the top of the tower as well and there are
certain things up there that i was asked not to film certain people up there as well that
won't be in this video that i was asked not to film as well so it's a very very it's kind of
what you want and what you would hope for but it's a very high security part of the airport
usually he'll be landing on probably three four right but for purposes of this filming
we decided to connect them to people left youtube audience thanks that's great thank you from your
velocity 518 might thank us as well this might be his last sector of the day he's probably
looking to go home 25 18. he's called on frequency now i should make an assessment
whether there'd be enough space to get a departure airborne before he comes to the threshold in this
case the only departure i have is qantas 842 you can see him there and just out the window there
now there's no way he's going to be able to tax it down to the thresholds and depart before the
arrival land so i'll make the decision to give the priority to the inbound in the share landing
so the aircraft is now landing he's slowing down he's going to take the high speed
rabbit exit so it's a balancing act that we do and you're deciding that yourself based on yes
the supervisor they speak to the supervisor at the terminal control unit they look at the demand
for the runways for the certain hours that we have and then we just try and be as efficient
as we can to make sure that um you know there's not gaps on final they don't need to be there
line up runway and then i can actually take off clearance to quantity 2842. from my three four
left take off climbing nicely i don't have any more issues i don't need them anymore so you
can go quantity contact departures bye-bye should talk about covid i know we all hate talking about
it but the airport is obviously not as busy as it used to be what kind of levels do you think
you're roughly running at certainly on average did about 950 to a thousand flights a day pre-covered
and at the moment we're running about 700 to 750 depending on the day of the week so
um we're almost at pre-covered levels and that's with the international border that's still closed
for people out there who are interested in a career as an air traffic controller do you think
it's still worth pursuing that in the future i've been doing this now 15 years it's the best
job i can ever have before you know every day is different great people you don't need to go
to university you know you can come straight in encourage everybody to come and do the tests we
love having work experience people come to the units one last question i've got a million more
but i'm just i'm not going to hold you up i know you've got a job to do what do you do in the town
to keep busy during covet times were you still here it didn't shut no no it's never it's never
going to close the biggest thing that we did we divided ourselves into teams and we just rotated
through that generally you need about nine people here during covid's you probably needed about four
or five we never stopped training so we were always taking people from the learning academy
down in melbourne once the international borders open up again where's the first place that you'd
like to go to well the first place i'm definitely going to go to is um back to the uk to see my
family you haven't seen them for like a couple years so yeah same velvet if you are interested
in a career as an air traffic controller i'll put a link down to the careers page on the air
services website down below you can see what you could end up doing you can see the epic views you
could have from the top of the tower up there as well i don't know how you concentrate i'll
just be staring at it but hey thanks again for your time welcome to share that thanks
you