New Reality Show Tryout

They are try­ing out a new real­ity show in the Sur­vivor series.  It’s work­ing title is

Sur­vivor:  Air Traf­fic Control

The pilot episode was done at Ted Stevens Inter­na­tional Air­port in Anchor­age, Alaska.

Accord­ing to KTUU TV Chan­nel 2 the chal­lenges started right away.  For the first chal­lenge the craft tech­ni­cians dis­abled the power supply.

A com­mer­cial power out­age caused a glitch in the radar sys­tem used to guide planes.

That was pretty easy and a mem­ber of the Air Traf­fic Con­trollers Team won the idol for that one by using the tele­phone to call the elec­tric com­pany.  But that still didn’t get them any elec­tric­ity to run their equip­ment.  For that they had a bat­tery backup sys­tem.  Which turned out to be chal­lenge #2.

Air traf­fic con­trollers claim the backup power sup­ply failed because its bat­ter­ies died.

That caused a Penalty Idol to be awarded to the team respon­si­ble for main­tain­ing the bat­ter­ies, the FAA Team.  Then came the next chal­lenge, #3.

Then the gen­er­a­tor went out because it ran out of oil.

For this series the pace has been accel­er­ated to main­tain inter­est.  It seems to have worked because every­body was def­i­nitely pay­ing atten­tion. Because of the accel­er­ated pace, before chal­lenge #3 could be met chal­lenge #4 arrived.

Radars went black for sev­eral min­utes while one plane waited for direction.

At this point another team, play­ing remotely, called the Peo­ple in the Air­plane Team, started voic­ing their opin­ions about the way other teams were meet­ing their chal­lenges.  One of the local teams responded

The National Air Traf­fic Con­trollers Asso­ci­a­tion, a union, pointed to FAA, say­ing tech­ni­cians asked for new bat­ter­ies more than a year ago.

Then the show reached it’s end and it was time for the teams to do their wrap ups.  For a new twist the pro­duc­ers decided that, instead of talk­ing to a cam­era while hold­ing flash­lights under their chins to look spooky, con­tes­tants should talk to the press.

The strongest clos­ing state­ment was made by the Air Traf­fic Con­trollers Team, who said it was lucky there was only one plane in the air.

“What really makes this story fright­en­ing to me is that had this hap­pened last week dur­ing that fog, dur­ing our peak rush and arrival time of the day at 11:00 when the con­trollers have both down­winds packed and the final approach packed, all these air­planes are under our con­trol, speeds and vec­tors, and all of a sud­den no radar. We are 100 per­cent depen­dant on radar because we don’t train non-​​radar pro­ce­dures any more like we used to,” said Larry Les­canec with NATCA.

The FAA Team state­ment was much lower-​​key.  Equiv­o­cal, almost uninterested.

The FAA says it is still look­ing into what hap­pened, but couldn’t say whether there would be an inves­ti­ga­tion or whether there were plans to update the equipment.

The Peo­ple on the Air­plane Team didn’t stick around to do the final wrapup but instead headed in a group for the cock­tail lounge.

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Tags: Disaster Averted, reality