There were times Thursday, Oct. 20, during the dedication of the new $72.6 million air traffic control tower at Memphis International Airport that noise from the arriving and departing jets drowned out the elected and appointed leaders.
Bustling air traffic is just one indication of how complicated growth is at an airport where there is rarely, if ever, time to stop the airport’s business and build something new.
“Memphis is one of the test beds for some of the things that we are doing with the latest and newest innovations,” said Federal Aviation Administration administrator Randy Babbitt, a former Eastern Airlines pilot who flew into and out of Memphis a lot during those days.
Planning for the new 336-foot control tower began in 2008 to replace the nearby 1977 tower, which is already being stripped of some materials. Demolition of the structure will begin the first full week of November.
The old tower reflected the era when it was built and the 20 years that followed – including no security fence. Memphis FAA Air Traffic Manager Michael W. Baker would occasionally see an airport patron hoofing it to the terminal, take a shortcut and walk past his window at the old tower.
Ground surveillance radar is on one of two screens at each station in the new tower, which the controllers moved into this past June.
“We didn’t have any ground surveillance system,” Baker said of the era when the old tower opened. “If the weather went down and we couldn’t look out the window and see the airplane, we just relied upon pilots to tell them where they were and hope they were accurate – that they knew where they were.”
The new tower was designed with a view toward the next 20 years of developments. That includes the new NextGen airspace system, which includes a satellite-based system of managing air traffic.
“We’re reaching critical mass in a lot of places,” Babbitt said. “What NextGen brings us is this elimination of the gap between days when the weather is good and days when the weather is bad. Right now delays really build up when it’s bad.”
The FAA is touting NextGen as a way to allow more air traffic to fly closer together on new routes that are more direct with a reduction in delays.
“We have more approaches in the country that use satellite technology to land than we do the old analog ILS (instrument landing) system,” Babbitt said after the ceremony with the new tower in the near distance. “Last year we crossed over. It’s so much more efficient.”
Jeff Plant, the Memphis FAA technical operations manager, said the new tower includes lots of NextGen technology and the ability to add other parts later.
“We have the new interim voice switch, which is all communications that come in here via chat lines, telephone lines, all the frequencies,” he said. “That is a bridge system to the new NextGen communications system.”
Baker, who is a 29-year veteran of the evolving air traffic control system, said coordination is still the most important element.
The controllers at the top of the tower direct the aircraft during taxiing, takeoff and landing. Once the planes are in the air, tower controllers hand them off to another group of controllers below who guide the aircraft while they are in the air, within a 40-mile radius and no higher than 16,000 feet.
When aircraft move beyond the radius or higher than the 16,000-foot ceiling they are guided by another group of controllers at an FAA facility on Tchulahoma Road.
“For as much as there are a number of folks that like to look at data and crunch numbers and consider it a matrix-driven type of organization – in reality, it’s not all about the science. It’s about the art of it and a computer can’t do art,” Baker said. “Having a human there and then having the equipment so that they can make sense of what the information is they are deriving from the equipment.”
At the top of the tower, controllers were in place for the 3 p.m. rollout of FedEx jets carrying loads for the U.S Postal Service. That involved more than 100 jets in what constitutes the afternoon rush hour for the world’s second-busiest cargo airport.
In terms of “moving individual airplanes,” Baker said Memphis International is “the busiest cargo mid-shift operation on the planet.”
Farther down the tower in a room lit by radar and computer screens and a plastic Halloween pumpkin, other controllers observed a tradition of keeping the room dark, which was once a requirement because of the technology.
“You had to keep the radar room completely pitch black otherwise you couldn’t see the radar scope,” Baker said, recalling his start in the business. “Now everything is digital. I know we keep it dark in the radar room. We could turn the lights on and it would be just as fine. It’s a culture change. Personnel is the only reason we keep it dark.”
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