Aidan Foley is drawing towards the end of a shift at around 11.30 a.m. on a Monday morning. Clearly tired and slightly flushed, he is still keeping a close eye on all his high-level flights until the moment he briefs the controller taking over from him and hangs up his headset.
He's one of several traffic controllers based at the Irish Aviation Authority's air traffic control centre at Shannon airport who lean on their elbows over huge green radar screens, muttering competently but, to the untrained ear, incomprehensibly, into headsets, issuing directions to pilots flying planes from all over the world.
There are private executive jets, commercial jets from the US to Belarus, from the Republic to Iran and also military aircraft passing over on their daily business or training runs.
There is more military activity up there than we might like to believe, which in the light of the recent events in the US might send a shudder of either reassurance or weird discomfort down the spine. An oddly-shaped dotted line on the radar screens marks the boundary of Irish military airspace over the midlands (generally out of bounds for commercial and private aircraft).
An apparent mess of numbers tells Aidan Foley all he needs to know about the aircraft thousands of feet overhead. Processing many calculations in the blink of an eye, he ensures they go on their journey safely. By flicking keys to shoot little lines and vectors around the screen he can tell the speed of an aircraft, its flight level and the level it needs to climb or descend to. It's apparently more a logical, than a mathematical, science.
Foley's colleague, Cathal MacCriostal, says controllers are in a sense, "educated jugglers". Each flight must be at least 10 miles behind the one immediately ahead of it in the sector, or "motorway", it's travelling in. And since last year, aircraft that are technically equipped to deal with the so-called RVSM (reduced vertical separation minima) technical standard must be separated by 1,000 feet vertically. It was previously 2,000 feet.
If you look at it long enough, the mass of lines and numbers resolves in the mind's eye into a 3-D image of aircraft in the air, passing each other some miles apart on the horizontal, or just 1,000 feet vertically, in their allocated sectors. Traffic: just like that on the M50 during rush hour, only it's statistically a lot safer - even following last week's events.
The skills of Irish controllers, trained intensively over two years at a cost of around £120,000, were put to the ultimate test on September 11th when the tragic events unfolding in the US after the terrorist attacks brought much of the west-bound traffic which had already passed through their hands back into Irish airspace. But, as MacCriostal says, the controllers were busy but simply dealt with "triple the workload". "You learn to expect the unexpected."
Lilian Cassin, communications director of the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA), says it "certainly was" one of the busiest days the centre at Shannon has had. Off-duty controllers phoned in to see if they could help manage the unexpected influx of aircraft, which had turned in their tracks after US airports shut down in the wake of the terrorist attacks.
The IAA has procedures in place to deal with hijackings, should such an event occur in its airspace. Due to the sensitivity of the issue, it will not discuss those procedures in any great detail.
But, according to Cassin, each controller takes an "emergency and unusual occurrence" module in every practical air traffic control course run by the IAA. "In light of the American terrorist attack, the hijacking element has been put under the microscope," she says.
"At present, there are no plans to change our procedures. Each air traffic service provider will be examining what's currently in place to see if there are any lessons to be learned from this crisis and if anything should be changed. Controllers are taught methods of identifying if an aircraft is being hijacked but because people's lives are at risk, we wouldn't discuss those details."
It is Shannon that governs most of the Republic's airspace well into the Atlantic and the IAA takes some 80 per cent of its revenue from activity at that centre. Every aircraft flying through its airspace pays a fee for the crucial traffic management services provided by a highly trained staff. Shannon controls the higher airspace traffic - which travels between 29,000 feet and 41,000 feet.
The atmosphere at the Shannon centre, which employs 168 of the IAA's 299 air traffic controllers, is nothing like the image of the job portrayed in the off-beat Mike Newell film, Pushing Tin, based on controllers struggling to manage astounding levels of air traffic over the three airports serving New York. And probably just as well. Anyone who has seen John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton as men-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous breakdown controllers or read the classic 1996 New York Post article by Darcy Frey on which the film was based will hardly hold the most positive image of those responsible for their safety when they next take to the air.
Indeed, according to a report in Aviation Today magazine, "overtime, long hours and extraordinary pressures have contributed to a threefold increase in mid-air collisions over New York city alone". The controllers who are protecting the lives of "millions of passengers each day" are, ironically the article says, forced to work with "antiquated, vacuum-tube computers, typically dated back to the 1960s" which have just 1 per cent of the power of a modern desktop PC.
Irish controllers do not labour under such conditions - the centre is quieter than the average office - and will in fact be "live" on a new £70 million computer system, it is hoped towards the end of 2003.
According to Donie Mooney, general manager at the Shannon air traffic control centre, the current CAIRDE system dating from 1992 is streets ahead of those in use in the UK and some parts of the US, but it would eventually become obsolete.
The IAA's sleek, new, air traffic control and training centre in Ballycasey, just a few miles from the airport, along with the major investment in a new satellite-compatible Air Traffic Control (ATC) system, puts the IAA in a strong position, he believes.
Clearly there will be major changes in the airline industry in the wake of last week's events, but the IAA will also face particular challenges over the next five years because of new policies under discussion at EU level. In line with the notion of member-states being common European territory, the European Commission has proposed a Single European Sky policy, which would eradicate national boundaries in airspace terms. If the boundaries make no sense on the ground, so the theory goes, why should they exist in the air? As a result, the 45 or so air traffic centres in Europe at present may be cut down to just six or seven if the EU has its way.
However, the IAA does not appear unduly concerned that its Air Navigation Services (ANS) or other activities will be affected by the eventual implementation of the Single European Sky policy. According to Department of Public Enterprise sources, the new policy is a long way down the line and there is, as yet, no lobbying under way on Ireland's part to maintain its high-profile role controlling the important airspace on the edge of the Atlantic. As yet, the policy is just at early discussion stages, following the report of the high-level working group last December.
For the air traffic controllers, errors are simply not an issue - they just must not happen. However, it's worth noting that the IAA has what it calls a "critical incident stress management system" which allows staff discuss problems which may have arisen in the course of their day with a colleague rather than a manager.
Some don't make it through the rigorous training. Twenty-four new trainees will shortly begin the two-year stint at the IAA's new centre in Shannon, but at least a handful of them probably won't make the finishing line. Mooney says he has occasionally had to have an honest talk with trainees who will clearly never make it as air traffic controllers.
"Essentially, what you are looking for is the ability in a person to anticipate a conflict or to identify a potential conflict and then to resolve that conflict by applying the correct solution to it. A large amount of controllers' initial training is taken up with conflict resolution and it's either make or break in those areas.
"If somebody is not seeing those conflicts or not seeing all of them, it's crucial that this has to be identified early in the training. If somebody is not applying the solution correctly or applying it at the right time or early enough, then there is clearly a problem."
Air traffic controllers do sometimes ask themselves the "what-if" questions. "You don't find yourself coming into work and saying 'my God, there are 300 people in that airplane and 350 in that one' - but you are aware that unless you are doing your job very, very well, there are enormous consequences.
"It's all about safety, safety, safety," he adds. "Everything else falls away. If you are flying as a member of the public, you just assume everyone is doing their job and doing it properly. We eat safety and sleep it and that's that."
The Walk of the Week and an article on diving will run next week
