Soon after beginning work at the ACC, I got involved in a new project. Inspired by the work at Stockholm Arlanda airport we started to organize a group of controllers with the task of communicating with pilots.
The pilots view…
The job was going to be a part of our quality work. We realized that the one who really could judge our quality was the pilot. By finding ways of meeting pilots we could learn more about how our job was perceived.
Controller – Pilot discussions on SAS crewbase in Copenhagen
We could give controllers feed-back on their job and we could find areas where we should improve the way we were doing things.
SAS crewbase on Arlanda, Stockholm
It might sound strange but it was not that easy finding ways and places to communicate with pilots. We started reading pilots magazines, and after a while we started writing articles about air traffic control for those magazines.
We visited crew bases. For the big airlines that is a good way to meet many pilots.
Me and Tomas visiting Finnair on their crewbase in Helsinki
We invited pilots to our premises. We let them be controllers in our simulators and we let them sit next to controllers working.
Pilots being instructed in the ATC simulator of ATCC Stockholm
And of course we took every chance to sit in the cockpit.
Captain Ekblad in the Malmö Aviation RJ100 cockpit
The things we heard from pilots were put down in an information paper for our fellow controllers. Those papers were highly appreciated.
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