Save Story: Controller’s Alertness and Keen Eyes Prevent Tragic Accident
Wendy Smith had witnessed hundreds of CV-22s taking off from the nearby Air Force base in her 12 years at Albuquerque International Sunport, so when something looked off about a takeoff, she knew to follow her instinct.
By Jim Tise, FAA Office of Communications
Air traffic controller Wendy Smith considers herself a laid-back person. But that doesn’t mean she’s afraid to speak up when something doesn’t feel right, even when it involves the U.S. military.
Smith was working the local position at Albuquerque International Sunport (ABQ) — a shared airport with the U.S. Air Force’s Kirtland Air Base — on the night of Nov. 10, 2020. The Air Force uses the field for training on a number of different aircraft, including the CV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, one that can fly as a helicopter or in a fixed-wing configuration.
Smith has witnessed CV-22s taking off hundreds of times in her 12 years at the facility. CV-22s are especially easy to identify at night because of the green lights situated on their propellers. Upon taking off and landing, the green lights rotate in almost a perfect circle.
That night, Smith noticed one of the lights didn’t look right. “It looked weird,” she recalled. “It looked rough. It looked like a kid drawing a circle.” She asked her fellow controllers their opinion, but they weren’t sure.
She went ahead and contacted the CV-22 pilot with her observations. “Hey Dusty 73, your right prop-rotor looks weird,” she said. The crew responded they weren’t feeling anything out of the ordinary in the handling of the aircraft. Eventually, the CV-22 took off on what was to be a four-hour training mission.
But about 10 miles out from the airport, Smith noticed the CV-22 turn around and come back. She wondered if the pilots were going to declare an emergency. “It felt so wrong to me,” she said. “I had this gut feeling that something is not right.”
The plane returned to base. The crew transferred to another plane and took off to finish their mission. That was the end of that, or so Smith assumed. “It was no big deal, a non-incident,” she said. “I thought they must be really irritated with me because I made them switch airplanes.”
Flash forward a month. One of Smith’s supervisors, Jeremy Brumley, was taking a familiarization flight with the Air Force. After the flight, Brumley learned from Lt. Col. Brett Cassidy, commander of the 71st Special Operations Squadron, that the “weird circle” Smith noticed was caused by a failing rotor bearing on one of the engines. The rotor bearing had maybe 45 minutes to one hour of life left before failing completely.
“He told me that the event was very near and dear to his heart because Wendy most likely saved the lives of the crew and saved the aircraft,” said Brumley. The “non-incident” suddenly took on much larger and potentially tragic implications. “He stressed that if the rotor bearing had failed, the aircraft would have most likely been a total loss.”
The Air Force arranged a special ceremony to present Smith with two commemorative coins in appreciation and acknowledgement of her life-saving action. “It requires experience to know that something’s wrong,” said Lt. Col. Cassidy at the ceremony. “She’s been up there for 12 years — that’s almost the entire lifespan of the Osprey aircraft. She’s probably one of the few people here with the experience to recognize that something’s just not quite right,” he added.
Col. Meghan Ripple, 58th Operations Group commander, acknowledged “sometimes it’s hard to speak up, and not know if you’re right or wrong. But absolutely speak up,” she added.
Smith credits in part her willingness to contact the pilots to the FAA’s working relationship with the Air Force, which she deemed, “pretty great.”
She feels the regular familiarization flights the Air Force offers FAA controllers makes for a really unique situation. The squadron commanders also have put Smith on a group messaging board, which provides an open forum email group in which the tower and the military can send questions or requests to each other quickly.
In turn, Smith runs the tower’s Operation Raincheck, in which Air Force pilots visit the tower to better understand how FAA controllers do their jobs. When the Air Force positioned a squadron of F-16 fighters at the base, Smith called and asked to come by and see them. She has approached C-130 pilots at the base as to what their needs are during training.
“The bond that we have with you — even though we don’t get to say hello and we don’t get to say thank you — it’s everything to us, and we really, really appreciate it,” said Ripple at the ceremony.
Brumley recalled discussing with Cassidy how many big problems — such as an exploding engine — are often touted as the greatest saves. “But this simple small event had a profound impact on the lives of all of these servicemen and their families,” said Brumley. “Had it been handled incorrectly, the consequences would affect generations.”
“I was glad I wasn’t afraid of them thinking I was an idiot,” said Smith. “I thought, ‘I don’t care. If I don’t say something it’s going to haunt me.’”
Cassidy said that in aviation people tend to focus on the bad. “This is one of those awesome moments where everything went right,” he said.
