Flying over the cuckoo’s nest
A really cute novelty was the cuckoo act. This was the art of working during the night shift while being in deep sleep at the same time. I did not have much of a need to spend whole nights wide awake before coming to ATC… I mean, even in the military when doing duty in a guard tower I was able to nap a little (my gosh, I have just divulged a military secret).
The system worked like this. At around 11 p.m., most of the people on duty would depart for the rest areas with only two persons, the cuckoos, staying in the tower cab. In those days almost all traffic was gone before 11 p.m., so two controllers were more than enough to keep their eye on things until 0600 in the morning. The two guys were designated cuckoo one and cuckoo two. Number one was expected to be awake and available at an instant’s notice while number two was the back-up. In theory. In practice things sometimes worked out very differently, as we will see later.
I used a very good tactic when I was cuckoo number one. I would lie on the mattress on my back… I was unable to fall asleep in that position! I put the two headsets near my head and the STORNO radio was hanging alongside me. This way I could use any of the “equipment” without getting up and I was fully in the picture at all times. Of course when an aircraft called on one of the frequencies we were responsible for, I would struggle up and issue the start-up clearance on my knees.
Departing flights represented more pain as we could only suspect when they might decide to go. Arrivals were less of a problem, the strip printers would announce their approach with enough noise to wake the dead. Once woken by the strip printer, I did not go back on the mattress but waited half asleep on one of the chairs. When the visibility was good, it was easy to spot arriving aircraft. Especially those descending on the left downwind got the “evil eye” early.
Back then, Malev IL-18s on cargo duty and Aeroflot flights making a short stop in Budapest were the only night traffic for us. Arrivals and departures were nicely spaced out… by the time the poor number one cuckoo was about to nod off, it was time to get up again.
For some this night time routine was just a little too much. The institution of number two cuckoo had been invented for a good reason. He would either try to shake the errant number one back to life or if that appeared totally hopeless, he would take matters into his own hands. Not that all number twos were equally reliable. Rumor had it that one of them once sat up on his mattress, rattled off an ATC clearance into the night and then went right back to sleep…
But there were more extreme cases also, cases where we had to call the colleagues slumbering in the rest area. One such event was the emergency landing of an Air France Airbus 340 at Ferihegy. This was the Delhi-Paris flight and they landed because a pregnant Indian lady went into labor… One of us was working the phone, the others talked to the plane and the support organizations. The situation was doubly complicated since the 340 being such a rare visitor at our airport, its ground handling was not exactly a smooth operation. They landed on 31L and getting to terminal one was not a simple task. There is only one taxiway to reach that terminal so after landing the 340 had to taxi to the end of the runway, exit and then come right back again to taxi to the correct taxiway to access the apron. We could only hope that the lady was able to keep things together while those maneuvers took place. Around midday we heard on the news that they did make it to the hospital and she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Luckily, there were few emergencies like this and the cuckoo’s could rule most of the time undisturbed.
Around six in the morning the rest of the crew appeared in the tower cab and the cuckoos were released. After a quick wash they were the first to leave for home to sleep off the effects of the night’s hurdles. We only had two days off after a night duty while we were working in four shifts and at least half of the first day was spent in a state one could call foggy at best. Of course this was true only for those who had been cuckoos and that did not happen every night. It was not that bad at all.
When we switched to five shifts, the number of consecutive free days increased as did our feeling of working in an ideal arrangement. It just couldn’t get better!
To be continued…