No, not the place full of prospective dimmocrat voters… I’m talking about shiftwork, wherein your fellow Americans shuck off the 9 to 5 mentality and work evenings and nights to keep the lights on and the products flowing. (And manning such facilities as air traffic control facilities)
I’ve done more than a small amount of shift work in my career: A couple of years as an operator in a carbon black plant (type “carbon black” in the blog’s search bar if you want to find those stories) and as an industrial electrician for a couple of petrochemical facilities. In one of those I was the ONLY electrician in a facility that had THREE operating powerplants, thirteen steam turbine generators, two gas turbines, a 69,000 volt distribution ring, 13,800, 2300 and 480 volt equipment and several thousand electric motors. Talk about FUN!
We worked a rotating shift schedule, and in every rotation we worked a set of graveyards. That was seven of them, 2300 to 0700 hours. There were different sleep patterns to handle these things, and mine was to shower and sack out when I got home in the morning and wake up in late afternoon. The first one for me was always the toughest. I tried napping the day before, but that was usually a failure, and if there wasn’t some action, you know, stuff that needed working on, then long about 0300 I was wiped out. I will admit to finding a comfy chair in the maintenance shop from time to time and catching a few surreptitious Z’s. But that was a facility where I worked by myself much of the time.
I can understand the realities of shift work, especially when things are going slow and routine. Like an airport control tower at 0200. I’ve had the privilege of visiting the control tower at Bowman Field in Louisville, Kentucky on a fine spring afternoon in the 1970’s when they had aircraft landing and taking off on the main, concrete runway and the grass on both sides, and watching expert controllers handle traffic was quite a site. But the same airport at 0200? If they saw ONE flight, that would be a surprise.
Fact is, many towers on regional fields have published hours and close from, say, 2200-0600. Licensed pilots know how to handle this. Matter of fact, many of us pilots fly out of fields all the time where there is no control tower at all. Further, I spent a goodly portion of my flying years in an aircraft with NO radio. The idea was, “Fly YOUR plane and watch for the other guy,” and this was under VFR (Visual flight Rules).
The majority of commercial aviation these days, however, flies under IFR (No, not I Follow Roads, but rather Instrument Flight Rules) and the air traffic system maintains positive control from the time you take off until the time you land, and at larger airports, they expand that to include from the time your wheels roll until they stop. The ultimate safety, though, lies with the pilot. The air traffic control system doesn’t help you fly your plane. It helps you keep from running into the the other guy flying his plane.
As far as the “they’re sleeping on the job” angle, well, bunkie, I’d imagine that it is a lot more common than you think, especially if they stuck ONE guy in a tower at an airport where he’s likely to serve a half-dozen flights on a shift after midnight. However, getting caught is an indication that something was amiss. In my own experiences, napping in the wee dead hours was often interrupted by the pager I carried, one of those old “beep loud enough to raise the dead, vibrate enough to fracture concrete” pagers and when it went off, I was off to the nearest phone, a few feet away from my comfy chair.
Were I in a control tower, I’d crank the volume upon the system.
