Pre-Christmas time is definitely a busy period for everyone and it’s therefore no surprise that airports around the planet stirred up a lot of headlines this week as well. On Tuesday we brought you a piece about the newly proposed Thames Hub in the United Kingdom yet today we have a cat and mouse game from down-under, environmental impacts in Scotland and Beijing as well as two tabloid stories from the United States for you.
What’s so comfortable in sleeping high up in a US airport control tower you might ask after having read this week’s news about controller number five and six falling asleep during their night shifts. Number five was reported to have happened mid week at Reno-Tahoe International Airport (IATA: RNO) where a medical flight carrying a sick patient tried to land without anyone responding. The latest one, number six, was reported on Saturday. Here the controller fell asleep during his shift at the Miami Air Route Traffic Control Center, which oversees mostly high-altitude, long-distance flights. According to the FAA, this time the controller did not miss any calls from aircraft and there was no operational impact. With all this, voices suggesting problems in the system rather than failures of individuals now become louder as stated in a Washington Post article. This won’t be the last time we wrote about it!
