Members of the San Diego 99s, including Lisa Golden, Heather Gamble, Barbara Murray, Dot Norkus, Alena Herranen and our guest Roberta Bernhard met Friday morning at the tower. The chief controller Tom Dray gave us a tour and explained some of the equipment including a color display of all the aircraft in or near the MYF airspace and neighboring airports. It is pretty amazing how much information is displayed for each aircraft shown. The display “time-shares” information so that it can show the tail number along with the type of aircraft, then it flickers to a different set of numbers which may be airspeed and altitude, and then, if I remember correctly, it flickers again to show other information before returning to the tail number. When two aircrafts come close, the letters “CA” appear in red indicating a conflict alert. This happens regularly at MYF when there is an airplane on each of the two runways 28R and 28L.
Upstairs where the air traffic controllers sit, it was extremely quiet. We tiptoed in and quietly watched them in action and enjoyed the wonderful view of the entire pattern. We saw one small plane make a very hard landing, and I think some of us were wincing inside realizing how well the controllers can see bad landings. They must have had some good laughs when I was practicing my landings a few years ago.
We are thankful to Lisa Golden and Tom Dray for this insightful tour. ~ Reported by Alena
