My son's flight instructor set up a tour of Van Nuys Tower, for 10:45AM Friday Morning. I was not happy, since Friday is my busy day at work, so my original thought was that I would do the tower thing, bring my son back to school for his JROTC stuff and then drive 35 miles down to work. Well, thank goodness my boss is cross trained and I got half of my Friday work done. I left the rest to her and she told me to take the entire day off. Yay team!
Got my son out of school at 10AM on a beautiful Friday morning. You couldn't ask for better flying weather and that proved to be true as we parked at the Van Nuys tower. Jets were roaring above us, as they took off and landed. Our teacher arrived just when we did and we stood together in the parking lot, while we waited for the group of us, to show up. After about 10 minutes, we were just waiting for the youngest member of our tour to get there. When they finally arrived, her with her mother, we found out that the reason they were late, is that they encroached on the runways. Yikes!
The little one (she's only 13) would break into tears, every time someone would approach them. Her mother explained to us all, that ultimately, it was her fault that the two of them crossed from our hanger, to the tower. If you have looked at my pictures of planes taking off, you can see the tower is in many of the shots, just the short distance of two runways and taxiways away from our hanger. In a sad note, this meant that our tour always had the paperwork for "The Incident" going on in the background. We finally calmed them both down and the tour began.
Just to give you a feeling of what walking around in the tower is like, It is structured a lot like a lighthouse would be. A sort of (squared off) winding staircase is in the middle and at each floor (there are 5 of them) there are offices branching out from the center stair area. Each office is in a corner of the building and at the very corner of each office, is a long narrow window. When you look at the tower, you see the main face of each side is totally windowless, so just this small window at the edge, is all the light that is coming into these rooms. All those planes taking off and landing and these people basically see nothing.
They begin by explaining that the tower can't hold many of us, so they split us up into two teams and we got to sit out the first tour. One ATC leads Group 1 out, leaving us in a conference room with table and boards. This other man begins talking to us, explaining Class A, B, C and D airspace. He also tells us that RADAR does not really know where you are. It gets more inaccurate, as the distance from your plane to the radar, increases. He also mentioned that there will be a new Air Traffic Control system put in, that will use GPS. That is some years out though, since they will need to cover the entire Country with antenna's every twenty miles. I was amazed to hear this and wonder how many poles they would have to erect in the United States, to cover us. After about a half hour, Group 1 returned and it's our turn. We go up the elevator, to the top of the tower. As one would expect, there are windows all around us, planes taking off and landing, radar scopes, Air Traffic Controllers talking to planes. Ordered chaos, is the best way to describe it. Our tour guide, shows us how to read the RADAR and that was the most fascinating thing to me. Once I had my reference points, the runways, the VOR, back side of the two patterns, etc, I was good to go and could tell where planes were and when they were approaching the airport. It was incredible! They also use binoculars to keep track via, line of sight. I thought they did things, totally by the RADAR scopes, but that's not true. I was not allowed to take pictures inside the tower, so that's why there will be none posted here. Too soon for me, the control tower part of the tour is over and we returned to the classroom for more information and questions and then it's time to go. The flight instructor gets to take the mother and child to deal with "The Incident" some more and we head out to get my son back to school. It was truly an incredible time and I am so glad I took the time off to experience it.
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