Steve – the college drop-out
When making the interviews for this series of articles I was asked a few times: How did you become an air traffic controller? Although I invented the series to talk about others, I will allow a small break now and tell you a part of my story…
Frightening second flight
My dad traveled a lot and he brought home all kinds of aviation bits and pieces. Maps, postcards with aircraft, time-tables and what have you. I loved to look at those things and dream about visiting all the nice places they came from. I think the longing to travel and the attraction to flying machines came to the surface at about the same time.
I was around 7 or 8 when the local airline started to organize 30 minute pleasure flights over Budapest using their LI-2s and single DC-3.
Dad surprised my with tickets to one of those and on a beautiful spring Saturday afternoon we took to the air. It was wonderful! Then a year later I got another set of tickets and we went to fly with a cousin of mine. This was a total disaster! The plane made all kinds of crazy maneuvers, climbing steeply than dropping like a stone… I was terrified and could not wait for the ordeal to end. A year later the DC-3 (HA-TSA) doing one of the pleasure flights crashed into a residential area, killing all on board. I have not seen the official report of the crash but if they were performing something similar to what I experienced, the crash was not at all surprising.
My love for airplanes did not diminish however. Real love is blind and you tend to forgive a lot…
When a composer talks about air traffic control
We were living in Cairo, Egypt in the second half of the 60’s, caming home for vacation every Summer. Cairo-Athens-Budapest or Cairo-Istanbul-Budapest, depending on which day we traveled, in an IL-18 was the highlight of those vacations.
It was in the summer of 67 if I recall correctly that in one of the pop music programs on TV I saw a guy who was writing music for all the most popular singers at the time and he described what he was doing when he was not writing music He was controlling airplanes. In spite of all the trips I took before and all the reading about flying, this was the first time I ever heard about ATC. It sounded like fun!
Strange as it may sound, at the time I was not planning to be either a pilot or air traffic controller. In fact, a career in aviation was not even on the agenda.
The difference between a physician and a physicist
We have some famous people in the family. My grandpa was a composer (albeit he started out as an architect) and one of my dad’s cousin was no one less than Professor Dennis Gabor, the Nobel Laureate and inventor of holography.
I have not inherited any musical talent. So much so that in primary school an understanding music teacher agreed for me to learn short accounts of composers’ lives instead of singing…
But physics has always been close to my heart. I even fabricated demo gadgets for physics class to show how a wire will extend upon being heated…
I did meet professor Gabor a few years earlier when he was visiting Budapest and we talked about my plans and I showed him
my demo gadget which he found cute… When the time came to make up my mind about where to go after secondary school, the decision seemed easy. Too easy as it turned out later!
I would become a physicist like professor Gabor. There were lots of things I wanted to invent…
As I said, we were in Cairo at the time and I decided to send him a letter telling him the great news. I think in secret I was hoping that he would offer an assistant position or something similar at Imperial College in London where he was professor of applied physics at the time. His reply was a big disappointment in more ways than one. That he did not offer a position, I could understand. But that he showed no particular excitement at one more of the family going into physics was really shocking… He wished me luck but otherwise was notably cool in his reply.
It was only years later that I understood why he was not really interested. In my letter I used the word physician instead of physicist, in effect telling him that I was going to be a doctor! May be he hated doctors for all I know but the news was obviously something that left him cold.
From the university to the airport
It was our last year in Cairo and having received my GCE, I enrolled in the physics faculty of Cairo University. When we returned to Budapest a few months later, I was accepted at the physics faculty of the university there (a major advantage because others had to take entrance exams and very few actually made the grade).
I survived exactly 7 days!
I found myself in the company of super enthusiastic young boys and girls who wanted to be physicists like me (although at that point I was not so
sure any more) and they solved mathematical equations as a diversion during lunch break and discussed incomprehensible match problems instead of coffee. This was not my world…
On the 8th day I went to the terminal of the airport express bus, bought me a ticket and went to the airport, straight to the personnel department and told them that here I was, ready for anything that had something to do with airplanes. With my command of English, they hired me immediately and I was sent to the ATC school after a short stint in various supporting positions.
It is hard to describe the feeling I had when I came to work at the airport for the first time. The only analogy I can think of is what you feel when the girl you have been in love with for years finally comes into your arms and you kiss her and feel her tremble with love. This is how I felt, except that it was even better…
Of course, in the course of the years I attended school on more days than any university, getting my wings in various computer studies and specialized areas of air traffic management but these were always directly connected with aviation and hence were easy to embrace.
The here and now
I never looked back after that rainy bus ride to the airport and never regretted my decision. I did the only thing I could do, I followed my heart to find the great love of my life, aviation pure and simple. I did try to take a side-road at first but it was clearly not the right direction. I have never worked in my life… what I do is my hobby, pure fun, the thing I want to do, it is not work… who could ask for more?