Just wondering...

POSTED BY: everyworldspinnin
UPDATED: Friday, June 3, 2005 06:14
VIEWED: 19516
PAGE 12 of 12

cljohnston108 asked:

Quote:

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What did you think of the movie Pushing Tin?

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Well, I like John Cusack. He reminds me of one of my best friends from junior high thru high school. Angelina Jolie, nuff said (and they did the right thing and got her nekkid, if only briefly). Billy Bob, not such a big fan. Good story, but it didn't have enough to do with ATC for my tastes. People in just about every walk of life get around to making a shambles of their lives. The movie was a disappointment from that standpoint.

But they did nail the "3D representation in his mind from the 2D radar scope" aspect. Dead on the money. (NB: Although it should be pointed out that the mental image is a 4-dimensional one, as I stated in my original post on this page. If I remember correctly, they even showed the visualized blips moving to follow one another in his mind's eye, before he took action and issued control instructions.) The only thing I might've added was having him imagine the pilot's workload based on vocal stress or through hesitation or misuse of words and phrases (typically, an inexperienced pilot who might be a little task saturated and/or intimidated by the situation).

I was also a little underwhelmed by the overly glib conversation he carried on with that one GOB pilot. That's a lot of excess verbiage when other customers are waiting to talk to you. While we do engage in some banter or 'slangy' speech with pilots -- it's friendly and comforting for the customer -- the busier it gets the more terse (precise) we become. There's just not that much room on a crowded frequency for shootin' the breeze. But the proper phraseology that Cusack did use was correct and seemed very natural rolling off his tongue.

I do believe that boy could be a controller, if that whole movie star thing doesn't work out...


Evaluatively,

zoid

P.S.
By the way, if you ever get caught on a routine tape review using non-standard phraseology (i.e., engaging in witty banter over an ATC frequency with your good ol' buddy the United pilot), you will get a talking-to by somebody wearing a suit. Problem is, you never know what timeframe they're gonna pull for the review; you just hope for one where you were minding your P's & Q's. If, God forbid, an aircraft you spoke to on takeoff subsequently crashes at its destination, the NTSB will pull your tape along with everyone else the pilot talked to on the doomed flight. Better hope you were being the model of phraseology then, too. And if he crashes at your location and your phraseology was less than perfect, you could be cited as a contributing factor; then you would most likely find yourself in a world of hurt.
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"Sure as I know anything, I know this: I aim to misbehave." -Capt. Mal Reynolds, Serenity, a.k.a. 'the BDM'

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