Approaching the present day…
What a strange folk we are, we Hungarians! We complain when we have to work with an obsolete system and when it is replaced with something new, we complain that we are forced to learn new tricks when we had actually grown used to the old ones. This was the situation with the introduction of the MATIAS system that followed Eurocat2000 and whose introduction was anything but smooth. As I heard from “inside”, the new system was simply too complicated for many an experienced colleague and they were actually quite happy to profit from the announced cut in personnel. They retired and my generation had a chance to follow them up in the Supervisor positions. Their place was in turn filled with new hires and those youngsters showed in short order that controlling the terminal area was not such a difficult task after all.
All of a sudden traffic became much more fluid and they turned aircraft on final with a flair never before seen. This was a revelation for us in the tower. Wow, it can be done like this also! We saw the change clearly since watching traffic being handled by the old guard we often shook our heads in amazement, especially when the odd aircraft flew all the way down to the town of Kecskemet for a bit of sightseeing as a result of being cleared for descent and turn to base leg far too late…
So after a few initial hiccups MATIAS arrived in earnest and after a few months of shadow operation, real work started with it. Looking back on that event from the perspective of many years, I think it is fair to say that a new era started with it. We finally had gotten rid of the flight progress strips which were replaced by all information being displayed electronically, in separate windows. Our “Best Buy” display shop also got enhanced with new monitors at each working position. The tower controller actually got two of those things, one showing only the radar picture and the other with the arriving, departing and expected traffic displayed in separate windows.
On 1 May 2004 Hungary became a member of the European Union and this opened the way also for Hungarocontrol to bid for EU investment funds. They did this with success and got a lot of money some of which was actually used for useful things. All the old radars were replaced, we got new radios, the met instruments were renewed and we got a new surface movement surveillance system which uses the SSR beacon replies to show the position of aircraft moving around on the field.
The only drag associated with all the changes and new equipment came in the form of incessant courses to satisfy the licensing requirements. Some of those courses could have been completed in 30 minutes but rules had to be followed and we seldom escaped with less than two days or so. I attended so many courses in the past ten years, my relatives keep wondering where I am storing all that new knowledge. A bald spot on the top of my head was a clear indication, and the source of a lot of leg-pulling, that the new knowledge was pushing my hair from the inside…
The important thing was that by 2010, basically all our equipment had been renewed and now the only thing remaining was the renovation of the tower cab itself. We have suffered through one of those once and can hardly wait for the next one to come.
In 2004 Hungarocontrol completed the ANS-II building at the same location the first building was erected and this latter contains nothing but offices! We from the tower go there but rarely, not least because we feel ourselves so lost there. We hardly ever meet old colleagues there any more and the new ones look at us as if they were seeing aliens. Really, we only go the HQ if we cannot avoid it, like for yet another course or simulator training or for a meeting of supervisors. Often I actually feel relived when I finally manage to get out of there.
A little later we found ourselves in a curious deja vue situation. A European security audit discovered some kind of minor shortcoming in respect of the
security fence surrounding the airport. I wish I could have read their report! I am practically certain that they did not recommend the building of a new fence right inside the existing one. But driven by the Hungarian tendency of wanting to comply, the airport company built a new fence, at places not more than 2 meters away from the existing one! Everything inside the new fence became the Security Restricted Area (SRA) and from that day on, security controls were doubled. We come by car from the street via the personnel entrance, then take a mini-bus and 100 meters down the road there is the next barrier. The control there is very thorough, even the savviest terrorist would have a hard time smuggling anything through that check-point. OK, I do accept that the risk level had grown but it is still strange that with 27 years’ worth of work at the airport, I am checked more thoroughly than are the passengers who actually board the plane. Last year we got the coup de grace… Someone must have been really bored at headquarters and came up with the brilliant idea of sealing the 9th floor of the tower to prevent unauthorized persons from inside the airport gaining access to the ops area. Since the idea originated inside the company, management did not even think of refusing this nonsense.
To-day going to work means 5 checks instead of the two we had previously…
To be continued…