|
|
|
THREE MINUTES
---
Chapter 9
9/11.
06:00, 11 September, 2001 Pruett, Pennsylvania
Shauna Murphy rolled over and smacked the alarm into silence. Rubbing her hands over her face, she sat up in bed, looking at the time. It was 6:00 AM, and she had a hangover. She had spent the previous evening drinking heavily at a bar inside a themed chain restaurant, laughing and playing pool with a dozen or so pilots who had attended her seminar that day. Shauna was an Air Traffic Control Specialist at the nearby Pruett Flight Service Station, and yesterday she had hosted the station's monthly "Operation Take Off" event. "Operation Take Off" was a sort of community outreach program, designed to attract general aviation pilots to the Station to better understand the services they offer. "General Aviation" meant mostly people who flew for fun, or at least for smaller companies -- air tours, cargo, or just anyone who wasn't flying for the big airlines. Shauna had shown a short film called "Tail Plane Icing", and had done her best to keep the subject matter from putting people to sleep. She had answered a few questions, then led her small group of mostly new pilots on a tour of the facility. Flight Service Stations, like the one at Pruett, provided pilots of smaller aircraft with the sort of information the big airlines took for granted; while a cross-country 747 might receive its weather information from a data link system like ACARS (the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System), the general aviation community depended on the small Flight Service Stations that dotted the countryside. They would respond to pilot's radio questions about weather, traffic, even what an airfield looked like from the air. It was folksy, for sure -- and that was part of its charm. Nearly half the calls she received were just that: cellular telephone calls, from pilots in the air who just didn't want to clutter up the radio frequency with their chit-chat. The highest-tech part of Pruett's services at the moment was the Automated Surface Observation System, or ASOS, and it was new; many pilots had just found out they even had it, when the new aeronautical charts had been released. The new charts gave the ASOS frequency in small print right over Pruett, and pilots could just listen to a computer voice rattling off conditions in a dreary monotone. The younger pilots seemed to prefer it, but the older ones still liked to call the Flight Service Station -- and Shauna liked to hear from them. Shauna swung her feet over the edge of the bed and stood, plodding to the shower. She regretted drinking so much, but the boys had been fun. They were so enthusiastic about their newfound hobby, so grateful for the opportunity to learn, it reminded her of the brightest schoolchildren she had ever taught in her previous job. As she let the shower warm up, she thought about the structure of her day, wincing as she stepped into the water and remembered what she had ahead of her. Mikey, the equipment maintenance supervisor, was off today; Shauna had promised him that she would take care of his rounds today, which included heading out to the ASOS equipment array and going through the maintenance checklist. Not too bad, actually, she thought. A little outside work would be a nice change of pace. - As she drove up to the gate at the end of the runway, Shauna turned off her CD player. She had listened to the entire disc, a collection of songs recorded by a man named Champion Jack Dupree. Lately she had decided she was suffering from a lack of diverse musical knowledge, and had purchased a collection of blues music. Her brother chided her, because her understanding of music pretty much ended once you went further back than the 1980's. Truthfully, she hadn't enjoyed most of the blues music -- something about scratchy recordings on a CD rubbed her the wrong way -- but she was beginning to get into this Dupree fellow. The piano finished out the last chords of "My Baby's Gone" as she switched off the car's ignition and stepped out, fumbling in her jacket pocket for her huge ring of keys. Shauna searched through them for the blue one that fit the gate's padlock. The Automated Surface Observing System was housed in and around a nondescript concrete building at the "touchdown" end of the main strip at Pruett Regional Airport. From there the instruments had the best clear line of sight in every direction, and produced the most useful information for the pilots. Through its sensors, the ASOS created a new observation of the weather situation every sixty seconds, although its reporting software wasn't always that quick on the uptake. It would take about two minutes to figure out it was looking at a scattered deck of clouds, maybe ten to indicate a broken cloud layer; the algorithm that analyzed the sensor data and turned it into an advisory was inherently conservative about the weather clearing up, and preferred to take its time before telling pilots that things were improving. Shauna shouldered her backpack and walked up to the little building, avoiding little puddles of mystery liquid that had collected on the gravel path. Unzipping her pack, she dug through and pulled out a small radio, a battery-powered scanner she sometimes used to listen to Air Traffic Controllers from home. Switching it on, she dialed in 125.127, and started hearing the stoic voice of the ASOS: "--Regional Airport...Automated Weather Observation... One... Four... Zero... Two... Zulu... Wind... Variable... At... Zero... Four... Visibility... Seven... Sky Conditions... Overcast... Three... Hundred...." She turned the radio down slightly; her main concern in listening was that she could use the scanner to warn her if she knocked something out of place while checking the sensors. Shauna found the metal ladder bolted to the side of the building and climbed to the roof, where the sensors waited for her. They were carefully bolted to steel plates, and painted white -- except for the wind sensor tower support. That pole was decorated with a few high-contrast red stripes. "...Temperature... One... Nine... Celsius...." She made her way down the list, checking things off as her inspection progressed. The Laser Beam Ceilometer, that measured cloud height: looking good. The Visibility and Day/Night Sensor, which used a scatter technique to measure the opacity of the atmosphere: check. The Hygrothermometer, an unlikely device that looked like it was trying to offer her a plastic mushroom, but actually measured temperature and dewpoint: working fine. And the Liquid Precipitation Accumulation Sensor, a rain gauge that looked for all the world like a white garbage can: still working, and still looking like a little white garbage can. "...Dewpoint... One... Niner... Celsius... Altimeter... Two... Niner... Niner... One...." The ASOS was a dandy new package for the little airport, Shauna thought to herself. The automated system broadcast 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on its own with little help from real people. It was no substitute for an interactive weather briefing with a specialist, for sure, but over the years more and more people had been learning to fly. It was a good tradeoff to help reduce their workload. "...Remarks... Ceiling... Variable... at...." The voice was finishing its message, and would be silent for a few seconds while the information from the sensors updated. But instead Shauna heard something else. And not a computer-generated voice. "...Mayday! ...Need emergency instructions...!" Shauna dropped her checklist, turning to stare at her little scanner. ---
|
|
back to Chapter Index back home email Robb |
