Rare Look Inside Airport Control Tower During Storm

It’s been called the most stressful job in the world. And it can get worse when the weather turns bad. Welcome to the rarely seen control tower at Pearson International Airport, a place where dealing with pressure and grace under fire are both job requirements.

The scene is one of expert timing, perfect calculations, nerves of steel and the ability to change on a dime. Unlike most jobs, this one comes with potentially dire consequences if there’s a mistake. Hundreds of lives depend on every call and there’s no real room for error.

Add in a snowstorm and terrible flying conditions, along with passengers demanding to take off, and it could be a recipe for ruin. If ever there was a job that requires keeping your head while those around you are losing theirs, this is it.

Normally, the controllers handle as many as one landing a minute. On Wednesday, as the storm raged outside their glass house, they were down to one every three minutes. But with so much going on inside and Mother Nature not cooperating outside, it was a difficult day.

But not, ironically, for those who managed to get airborne. About 25,000-30,000 feet above the city, it was a nice sunny day. Getting there and landing here, however, was another matter. Pilots have to be able to see at least 600 feet in front of them to land – roughly the size of two football fields. Some were able to come in and take off thanks to de-icing but the going was slow and the backlog became long.

How do the guys and gals in the tower cope with it all? “The trick to stay calm is to go back to your training, go back to your experience,” explains Dave Mastel of Nav Canada. “But there’s also coordination that’s required from one controller to the other. Everybody has to be exactly on the same page. Otherwise it doesn’t work. And it has to work.”

But with so much technology available, why does it take so long to get everything working again in a storm? It turns out it’s not entirely the weather. Each runway only takes about 15 minutes to clear.

But the air traffic controllers are taking extra precautions by spreading out flights, leading to some of the delays passengers experienced on Wednesday.

“Like on the highway, things slow down and they slow down at the airport, too,” explains Mastel. “We have a bubble of safety around each airplane that we can never compromise. And like you might leave more room when you’re driving in the winter, we put a little bit of padding around that bubble.”

Because in the end, that’s the only sure way to make sure this potentially deadly bubble never bursts.

To take a closer look at the tower, see the photo gallery below.