We could have done it differently…
MP, my one time friend was appointed as the first director of Hungarocontrol, receiving his letter of appointment from the State Secretary for Transport (who has in the meantime moved to social work). I said one time friend because MP has also done his training in Riga and because, while he was still in the tower, we used to haunt the local pubs for a bit of professional chatting together, him, myself and two other colleagues who were also friends. On such occasions beer was not necessarily the most important element of the gathering, we did “work” in the form talking about the present as it was then and also about the future. Naïve that I was, I often though how nice it would be if the four of us would get a shot at making the world better.
With a bit of common effort we could have kept the “beat generation” at bay and our story would have been about the profession, pure and simple. Unfortunately this was not to be. Instead, some people managed to get ahead by individual, skilful maneuvering, bowing in to the whims of those who have gone before them.
I did not have a stomach for this and got my due punishment as a consequence. When the time came, another guy was picked for training as an approach controller and over the years it also became clear that I would be among the first ones to retire from the tower. The first one among those who had started work here that is.
Having been stuck in the tower, I tried to exploit the possibilities there. One such opportunity was the training of young controllers and also those returning from a longer leave of absence. It was a nice coincidence that for a while MK, the one time tower boss, also became one of my students. He had to work a few hours under supervision to get his license back. The simulator also became more sophisticated and we no longer had to move paper airplanes around the airport model. Instead, work was now split in two parts and two rooms. In one of the rooms we were staring at the radar with the trainees, in the other the pseudo pilots were wrestling with the system to make the blips go in the direction ordered by the students. It was a nice game and the youngsters carried out the tasks with ease. With the simulator sessions done, training continued in the tower under supervision of course, but the youngsters handled traffic without hiccups.
At one point some crazy mind came up with the idea of ordering the trainees to switch group every 100 hours so that they would get used to the sphere in other groups also. This has never been an issue in the previous 20 years, if somebody had to change groups, they could fit in easily if they wanted to, even with several years’ experience. I am probably the best example, I had to change groups at least ten times. In spite of our opposition, management stuck to its guns and would not let go of this nonsense. In the circumstances I could no longer vouch for my students since they no longer trained 200 hours under my supervision, so I gave up instructing (also).
At around the same time I got another slap in the face. At least that is how I felt when I got the news that they were hiring approach controller cadets from the street. The other guys in the tower had long before resigned themselves to the fact that advancement will not be in the form of moving to APP… so for them the news was not such a big deal. But for me this was like the world collapsing around me, this was the end of the old dream, the APP-TWR carousel. Not to mention the fact that this was yet another step towards the complete cutting lose of the two units from each other. This would never have come to pass if in the pub back at the beginning everyone of us had considered our common future equally seriously.
So, with great fanfare and expectations, Hungarocontrol came into being. Their home page provides a lot of information, so I will not go into that. I will focus rather on what is not on the web page. In any case, who has the patience to read all that bla-bla… As I said earlier, our new found democracy brought also a jump in bureaucracy and the art of talking while saying nothing. The only difference was that while earlier it was at the Marxist-Leninist high-school that they taught this art, under the new system this honor falls on the College of Communications.
As I said, Hungarocontrol was brought into being and there were initially some 800 of us. About half of those (but may be I am over estimating the numbers) were controllers, flight information officers, engineering, assistants and the met observers. The rest, office people. From my perspective in the middle of the prairie, it was difficult to understand why we needed so many office workers? But looking at the company home page, the question is answered automatically. You need a lot of people do a lot of thinking to write up so much about things us simple controllers always thought were the most natural thing in the world. We have always strived for maximum safety and the strategic aim was to ensure that aircraft get to their destination, this is what we do, what we help them with. The site shows all this as a new achievement…
Another nice aside was heard in the canteen one day, from an innocent mouth which enquired why the canteen was open during the week-end? A lot of heads turned at this one and the news spread like wild fire. May be we were not needed any more?
Whenever a new person was appointed to a given position, they were wont to come with brilliant new ideas, all aimed at experimenting on us by way of showing just how important the given person was. Like for instance that we should form working groups and talk about this or that. There is no management filter protecting us, there is nobody who would tell them to leave us alone, allow us to simply do our job!
To be continued…