Science: Traffic Control in the Sky

Moving silently across 21-inch radar screens, the dime-sized blips traced the passage of jet aircraft overhead. At electronic consoles shirtsleeved men spoke into pushbutton telephones, scanned slender strips of coded paper punched out by high-speed computers. Thus, in a bombproof building south of Oakland, Calif., the U.S.’s most modern air traffic control center last week went into operation.

The Oakland center was born of disaster: on June 30, 1956 a Trans World Airlines Super Constellation and a United Air Lines DC-7 lumbered blindly into each other over the Grand Canyon, sent 128 passengers and crew members to their deaths, and convinced the last cost-conscious doubter that the nation’s traffic control system was dangerously inadequate. As a direct result of the collision and others, Congress created the Federal Aviation Agency and this year provided $150 million to build a network of 26 new control centers. Of these, Oakland is the first.

To handle a daily average of 2,000 flights, the Oakland center has 750 miles of telephone wire within its walls, with enough switching equipment to sustain a city of 20,000. The Oakland controllers are in fingertip communication with 40 airport control towers and radar approach control centers in California and Nevada. Ten transmitters perched on peaks provide ground-to-air relays. A long-range microwave antenna speeds the blips of moving light to the center’s radar screens, enabling the safety officers to “see” the planes they are directing.

L. Ponton de Arce, regional air traffic chief for the FAA, supervises the Oakland center. Only 25 years ago, in Newark, De Arce had helped install the world’s first air traffic control center—at a cost of $158. “We kept track of planes by moving little bits of slate around on a map,” he recalled last week. “Sometimes I get nostalgic for those days when you flew around anywhere you wanted to. Everything moves just a little too fast today.”