Tracy seems to recall that their gyro had failed.
The crew had drifted off course, or thought they had. “Each runway up there had a grid heading,” he says, “and you just got out on the runway and set your gyro on that grid heading. For navigation purposes, the region was divided into a grid. “The magnetic north pole was actually southwest of us about a thousand miles,” says Tracy, now retired in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The crew were lost.Īt extreme latitudes, a compass is useless. The sun hadn’t yet set when he received a call from a Royal Air Force Lincoln bomber flying over the ice cap from Scotland. Air Force technical sergeant, was manning the tower at Thule Air Base on Greenland’s northwest coast, 695 miles north of the Arctic Circle. In the late summer of 1952, Bob Tracy, a 23-year-old U.S. Perhaps the stories here will get you thinking, the next time you’re on a flight, about who’s looking out for you down below. But the details of most controller achievements don’t get much news coverage. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association recognizes some of these saves annually with an award named for Archie League, who became the nation’s first air traffic controller when he was hired by the city of St.
civilian air traffic regularly make countless little saves, and some big ones. From one month to the next, the 15,500 controllers of U.S. While pilots get big credit for feats like landing airliners on rivers, air traffic controllers are tasked with keeping these pilots, literally, in line. THEY HAVE GOTTEN some bad press this year, but there’s a lot to love about air traffic controllers.
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