A Trip to the South

Traveling to Gaithersburg, MD on Monday afternoon I have to admit I had virtually no idea what to expect from the company that had paid for my trip and lodging to get out there for four days this past week. One of the workers there, who we'll call Mike (not his real name), was known to me since he had been a former Daniel Webster (DWC) student while I was there. His boss, Steve (also not his real name), was the main force behind all this and the man who had arranged my tickets and hotel rooms, but I had never met him and had only exchanged two or three emails with him.

I arrived at the office a little bit early, despite some dodgy Gaithersburg streets and poor directions. Walking in I found a well furnished meeting room with snack sized bags of oreos and chips'a'hoy cookies sitting in a bowl in the middle of a large table, and an HD television sitting at the far end. I wandered in, but encountered no one. I walked down one hall, aimlessly, and found no one... another hall, and still no one. I wondered if I had the time wrong, but peeking into two more rooms revealed Mike working away at a familiar looking computer console running the same air traffic control (ATC) training software that I had been using for the past year at DWC.

The two of us got to work pretty much right off, going over the plan for the rest of the week. The general gist is that we would work a joint radar exercise with Mike working the entire radar sector for ten minutes before we split into him running approach and departure control (feeder), and me directing the planes in on the last few miles of their arrival (final). It wasn't a particularly difficult problem, but it wasn't supposed to be: the purpose was to show off what the software could do, not what we could do. My portion of the problem started with a trio of planes essentially looking to land at the same time, and then getting three or four more planes trickling in as the exercise wound down.



The above is a rough representation of my first portion of the exercise. All three planes, left to their own devices, would pretty much connect in a spectacular aluminum shower somewhere northwest of the airport. My initial reaction was to throw Chataqua in front with Cactus behind him and close out with N1KA, with the next batch of planes arriving just as N1KA was lining up for his final approach. It turned out that this caused Chataqua and Cactus to come in too close to each other, so I ultimately decided to put Cactus in front, followed by N1KA and Chataqua bringing up the rear.



We ran the problem about five times and called it a night. Steve popped in at some point, as well as his boss, and we all went to dinner before retiring to the inn (except for Mike, who was local) and going to bed. The next day the problems would begin.

While trying to fine tune the problem we made some changes to planes that wouldn't affect me, but the tinkering would eventually cause N1KA to stop responding to anything. We ran the problem several times, even replacing N1KA with a new plane entirely, but we just could not get the plane to respond at all. Going back to a previous save worked for a while, but making one absolutely trivial change brought the problem right back to the forefront. Since we couldn't get it fixed, and we were trying to show off the program at its best, we decided to delete the plane entirely. This made my task (already simple) exceptionally easy. Sequencing two planes is practically the first thing we learn. We ran that version of the problem about ten times, including three times where we recorded it to be played on an iPad's video player, before packing everything up into a series of boxes and trucking off to Arlington, VA (my hometown).



Mike and I arrived in Rosslyn County late that night – Steve and his boss remained one more night in Gaithersburg – and checked into our new hotel rooms... with a free upgrade to suites (very nice) for reasons beyond my ken. If you've never had the 'pleasure' of visiting Rosslyn, picture this: someone transplanted a five or six square mile segment of New York City high rises, cleaned it up a lot, and then built a modern day hobbit shire under it. It's rather surreal. I stayed on the 10th floor of the hotel, which gave a beautiful view of Washington DC and the Potomac River, but just about every store in the area is built either underground or into the side of hills. For instance, there's a full Mobil station with stop'n'shop eatery built under a church, but still just a single, level turn off the main road.

It's a strange place.

The next day was relaxed by most standards, we had an appointment at the meeting room where we would present our program to setup our gear and make sure it all worked with the equipment we had brought. We had a few blips, but nothing serious. We ran the problem one time (now somewhere near our thirtieth total run, counting aborted attempts of trying to get N1KA to respond) and left. I spent most of the rest of the day reading.

Thursday, the day of truth, was when we would make our presentation to an unknown number of people working for a major aerospace company and certain ranking officers within the FAA. We arrived at our appointed time, only to find that the groups before us were running behind (no surprise) and so we sat around twiddling our thumbs for a good half hour before getting on with the show.

Testing the equipment quickly before the presentation revealed no flaws, so away we went. Steve's boss introduced us and laid out the point of the exercise, which took about five minutes, and then we started.

I had a very hard time looking professional, given that my task for ten minutes boiled down to “not fidgeting”, which of course meant itches popped up all over my body. Such is the way of things. The program started well, with the system responding exactly as it should... until Mike called up Chataqua 19...

Mike: Chataqua 19, Manchester Approach, descend and maintain 6000.

Chataqua 19: Say again

Mike: Chataqua 19, Manchester Approach, descend and maintain 6000.

Chataqua 19: Say again.

Audience: *muffled laughter* (though not malicious, more “yeah, I've been there...” chuckles)

Me: (to myself) Ffffffffuuuuuuuu...

Mike gave up for a bit before trying again. Same results. He decided to leave Chataqua alone for the rest of the problem. Suddenly I'm down to one plane. Now, normally I'd be thrilled. One plane? Are you kidding? Let me go home and get my cats, they'll direct this plane in for me... But not really in this case, since this was a great chance to do some showing off for the FAA. Mind you I wasn't wired with a microphone like Mike was, but still. Ah well, not that big a deal in the scheme of things.

The rest of the problem ran smoothly, with Cactus being sequenced in absolutely perfectly behind the last plane Mike controlled, some fifteen miles ahead of him (the ideal is to get them around three miles apart). I got one of my trickle jets coming in just as Steve determined that we were starting to lose the crowd, and had Mike shut it down. At the end of the day this is what I did...



Honestly I was a bit disappointed that I didn't really get to show off at all, but so what? I essentially got a four day paid vacation (plus three days spent at my parent's home prior to that) and a chance to play with the next generation of ATC training software that DWC uses. It was a great experience all around, and the real goal of the exercise – showing off the software to investors – was a resounding success as everyone in the room seemed genuinely impressed by what they saw. I might have asked to do things a bit differently if I were to do it again, but I'm satisfied with the trip on the whole.