Controller Helps Make Skies Friendly for Pilots

From his all-window office, with a 10-mile view of Ventura County on every side, Michael Marcotte fits a constantly moving, sky-size jigsaw puzzle together in his mind.

He speaks a stream of orders into a headset. He scans the hazy horizon. He tries to see into the head, or at least the flight plan, of a student pilot.

Marcotte, an air traffic controller wearing black shades and perched in the Camarillo Airport control tower, is in charge of his own slice of sky.

And if this suburban airport doesn’t see the level of activity of Los Angeles International or even Van Nuys, it’s still a big responsibility. In his tower, with an eagle’s nest vantage point over the fields of the Oxnard Plain, he and nine other controllers do without extensive radar and top-of-the-line equipment to guide often inexperienced pilots back to earth--some 190,000 times a year.

Marcotte’s workload is constantly increasing, his schedule changes daily and he lives with the knowledge that every decision he makes has to help people get back to the ground safely.

He cannot make mistakes.

“You gotta be able to make a decision really fast, but you have to be able to switch to Plan B,” is how Marcotte puts it. Unexpected things come up--controllers have to react quickly.

The former military airfield opened to general aviation in 1977 as an uncontrolled airstrip, where pilots radioed their takeoff and landing plans to one another. Air traffic control operations began in July 1989, directed from a temporary 30-foot tower that consisted of a house trailer atop two metal containers. A $2-million tower, opened in 1992.

Since then, it has become the busiest of the county’s three general aviation airports--including Santa Paula and Oxnard--thanks to a regular buzz of small personal and corporate planes, students from the San Fernando Valley taking on the less-crowded Ventura County skies and locals out for an easy day of flying. With as many as 800 takeoffs and landings a day, it’s busier than Burbank Airport, even with Burbank’s “heavy metal”--commercial passenger planes.

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The local airport handles a triangle of traffic between Oxnard Airport and the Point Mugu Navy base. “We divide the sky up,” manager Jim Swain says.

What Marcotte does is relatively simple in concept: He talks to pilots and ensures there is enough “separation”--room to maneuver--when they take off and land. The trick is in visualizing the big picture, sometimes in bad weather, sometimes with limited information.

“Two or three, that’s really easy,” Marcotte says. “Fifteen or 16 [planes] waiting to take off, you have to prioritize. Because they can’t see each other.”

Control operations are anything but high tech at the one-runway airport. There is a 1970s-era radar relay from Point Mugu, which mirrors what the Navy controllers see. But for the most part, pilots are relying on the eyes of Marcotte and his colleagues.

Marcotte’s eyes have 15 years of practice. He floated into the profession in the wake of the 1981 airline strike that prompted President Reagan to fire thousands of controllers.

Marcotte, who had been the manager of a pizzeria and hadn’t given much thought to flying, spent four months at the Federal Aviation Administration’s training facility in Oklahoma City. Since then, he has spent his professional life perfecting that training.

Some of his talents are God-given. It takes a special person to deal with the intense organizational demands, to have the ability to juggle the whereabouts of faraway planes just by talking to their pilots.

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He is good with spatial relations. He has a propensity for pushiness. He is a little bit obsessive.

This, Marcotte says, is how he knew he was becoming a career air traffic controller: At a Thanksgiving dinner, there were four cars in the driveway, but--clearly--six could fit. So he marched into the home of his host, turkey in hand, prepared to call the drivers outside and reorganize the driveway traffic.

“You’re not in the tower now!” his wife reminded him in what has become a familiar refrain around the house, Marcotte says.

Air traffic control is not really a growth industry. The Federal Aviation Administration only hires about 200 new controllers across the country annually, which according to the industry union won’t even account for the 250 to 300 controllers lost to attrition by burnout or forced retirement at 56.

“It’s a young person’s game. The older you get, the more [your talents] decline,” says Randy Schwitz, executive vice president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Assn.

The Golden State is one of the areas most in need of additional controllers, according to Schwitz.

“The California area needs a lot of help,” he says. “Most of the smaller airports need some help out there. They haven’t hired to replace the backfield.”

Some controllers come out of the Air Force. Some graduate from small college programs. Some are trained at the FAA’s facility in Oklahoma City. But the numbers still haven’t reached the peak set before the strike nearly 20 years ago. There are about 15,000 air traffic controllers nationwide, down from about 16,000, because technological advances have allowed America’s airports to get by with fewer, says Roland Herwig, an FAA spokesman.

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Marcotte, who has a good-natured ability to joke and a preference for gaudy Hawaiian-style shirts, doesn’t complain too much about being overworked. Though it would mean a pay hike, he doesn’t dream of working at Los Angeles International Airport--which has 55 controllers--or any other major airport. That is for controllers who want to play the “big video game in the sky” on radar screens. At 40, Marcotte says he is here--where controller salaries range from $40,000 to $80,000--until he retires.

When he tells folks he is an air traffic controller, most people assume he works at LAX until he sets them straight.

“They say, ‘Oh, really? There are air traffic controllers there?’ ” he says. “Their concept is you must be at the bottom of the food chain.”

But, Marcotte says, a small community airport offers challenges you wouldn’t likely see in a massive airport.

There is the guy, Marcotte says, who just built his airplane and hasn’t flown in 40 years, who flies into the wrong airspace, or can’t seem to talk and control his plane at the same time. There are the foreign students, whose English is fractured and who sometimes need coaching on the language.

“You can’t lose your cool and yell at them. I try not to get into the cockpit,” Marcotte says. “All they’re thinking is ‘I gotta land the plane.’ ”

But at a small airport, those same pilots can also visit the tower afterward, to meet the men and women who guide them down, and receive additional lessons in person.

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Marcotte tries not to take his work home with him, but it happens. The schedule can be tough: To cover the 14 hours a day, seven days a week the airport is open, controllers work a rotating 40-hour schedule, starting about an hour or two earlier every day as the week progresses. Marcotte gets bossy with his wife and kids. He has had dreams in which he knows planes are on the runway but can’t see them and can’t get radio contact.

But there is that pleasure that comes with the job. In some ways it’s the same as a risky, real-life game: Creating order where there is none. He runs the skies. He controls the air.

“You see it pulled off without a hitch. That’s the best part,” Marcotte says. “Everything fits together.”

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About This Series

“On the Job” is an occasional series about working people in Ventura County and how their lives have been shaped, challenged and enriched by what they do. This installment focuses on the work experiences of Michael Marcotte, an air traffic controller at Camarillo Airport.