Save Story: Controller’s Flight Assist Deemed “Best of the Best”
For Public Service Recognition Week, the FAA is celebrating the many public servants who help to keep our skies safe. Today’s story is about Seattle Center Controller Josh Fuller, who fought for nearly two hours to help a pilot in distress land safely.
Story written by Jim Tise, FAA Office of Communications
It was around 2:30 p.m. local time on Nov. 23, 2019, and Josh Fuller had just completed the morning shift as a controller at Seattle Center. He was chatting with his manager and ready to walk out the door when a supervisor came running into Area B of the control room looking for a pilot.
Fuller is the first to admit he’s not a very experienced pilot. He earned his private pilot’s license and has about 180 hours flying time, but he hadn’t been certificated for flying under instrument flight rules (IFR) yet.
“I asked, ‘What’s going on? Maybe I can help,” said Fuller. “I had my headset in my hand and walked back there to assess it.”
He walked into Area C of the control room and into one tough situation. For the next hour and 45 minutes, Fuller would assist a desperate pilot flying blindly through mountains outside of Seattle. His performance, said Brian Schimpf, ATO’s team manager for quality assurance in the Western Service Area, was “the best of the best.”
When Fuller entered the control room, he expected to stay in the background advising the area controller, Dave Murphy. Instead, he heard Murphy say, “Okay, I have a pilot here who’s going to help you.”
Murphy had done yeoman’s work getting the aircraft established on radar. He had taken the pilot’s distress call around 2 p.m. The pilot had departed Bonners Ferry for Priest Lake in Idaho.
“He was not the type of pilot to fly into bad weather conditions,” said Don Hill, air traffic manager at Seattle Center. “When he took off there was a [cloud] ceiling, but it was high enough not to interfere with his flight. What happened, the clouds descended and that’s when he got stuck in IFR conditions.”
“From the very first call, he said he realized this ‘terrible mistake I’ve made,’” Schimpf shared about the pilot. “The best thing he did was being very explicit and saying I’m in deep you-know-what. I need your help.”
The pilot had been flying above the clouds, but Fuller knew he would have to direct him to descend through the thick cloud bank in order to land. And he knew he would have to help the pilot fly his plane. For the next hour and 30 minutes, Fuller struggled to help the pilot maintain proper altitude and heading as the plane descended; at times the aircraft was flying less than 100 feet from terrain.
“I was little intimidated at first,” admitted Fuller, when he took over from Murphy. “I didn’t want to give any false impression to the pilot. I was a little embarrassed. I’m not some super-amazing pilot. It was really bizarre. It took a couple of minutes to realize we were going to be here for a while and to focus and get the job done,” he added.
Fuller didn’t realize how dire the pilot’s situation had been and was. Controllers had watched with increasing concern as the pilot zig-zagged through mountainous terrain unable to keep a heading or proper altitude. He missed one mountain by 90 feet, and likely narrowly missed one or two more.
“I told him I’m a pilot and I’ll see if I can help you out,” recalled Fuller. “He stayed pretty calm the entire time I spoke with him. He seemed to have trust in me and that helped.” Reflecting on the event, Fuller offered, “I wanted him to feel a sense of calm. That ability to keep him calm was probably the single best skill I brought to the table.”
Fuller’s prior job as a 911 dispatcher — “talking to the worst of the worst situations” — likely played a role in that.
Fuller “was the ‘therapist’ we needed,” said Schimpf. “He put a human aspect on the assist that we needed at the time.”
“When I first plugged in, his altitude was fine,” continued Fuller. “I really felt confident in the beginning. We wanted to get his wings level and started on a heading. When he broke out of the weather and was on top of the clouds, he had his wits about him. But we had to put him back into the weather. When he went back in I could tell he lost his orientation all over again.”
It was dark, heavily clouded, and raining. The pilot could barely see. Tensions rose as Fuller waited for the pilot to respond to his commands. “A couple of times, he didn’t respond. I absolutely thought he was done. When he said he was getting icing, that was honestly the most upsetting part.”
Fuller explained: “As long as I can provide him tools and instruction, that’s okay, but icing kind of takes that away. I can no longer control the plane the way I want him to.”
Still, he said he maintained a level of hope because of his fellow controllers. “The people around me were scrambling, reading charts, coordinating,” said Fuller. “It was an incredible team we had.”
Byron Andrews, the D-side controller, was calling Canadian controllers and other sectors trying to find areas with the best weather to which to guide the pilot.
Once Seattle Center made the decision to split frequencies, leaving Fuller alone on the channel to concentrate on the distressed pilot, Controller Mike Sellman took over control of the other aircraft flying through the center’s airspace.
It was Sellman who contacted a U.S. Air Force KC-135 tanker that happened to be flying in the area. “He got the KC-135 pilot involved,” said Fuller. “That aircraft was flying around looking for [visual flight rule]. He helped us find the VFR weather.”
Brian Hach “really dove deep into the charts,” said Fuller. “He was helping me pick headings. He was telling me he needs more of this heading, more of that heading. He was giving me a lot of crucial information. I didn’t have time for my eyes on the chart.”
Early on, Fuller decided not to rely on the pilot’s instrument readings.
“Right off the bat we didn’t think we could trust his airspeed,” stated Fuller. “He said he was at 40 knots, which means he should already have stalled. Then he said he was 180 knots soon after. That plane’s not that fast either.”
Fuller went through his thought process at the time: “I didn’t want to include speed in any of the instructions because it takes too much time to assess. He was spending a lot of time getting his GPS working. I didn’t know what we had to work with. I didn’t want to distract him from flying his airplane. Any instruction I gave him other than flying his airplane would crash him.”
For an hour and a half, Fuller issued minute instructions to the pilot, setting, then resetting, his heading, telling him when to turn and when to stop turning, adjusting his altitude all the way while keeping a watchful eye on the plane’s icing conditions.
“It was a little grueling,” said Fuller. “The time kind of moved a little faster. I didn’t realize almost two hours had passed. I was sweating. I was definitely engaged.”
“I think the key was the fact that Josh has pilot experience,” said Hill. “He was able to tell the pilot exactly what to focus on. He knew about keeping the horizon, wings level, watching the turns. He understood the pilot was so disconnected in flying in the clouds,” he added.
“The moment he broke out of the clouds was when I thought we had won,” recalled Fuller. “For me that was a win. At that point he can fly his plane to an airport.
“I can’t express just how relieved I was at that moment,” he continued. “I cried a little bit.” After the pilot was handed off to approach control, Fuller sat back. “My supervisor went to talk to me and make sure I was OK. Two hours is a long time sitting there thinking ‘this guy is probably going to die.’”
Fuller said the hardest part of the assist was yet to come. “The adrenaline would not come down for the entire day. The next day I was a wreck. I was so invested during the event I wasn’t aware of the other things.” When he reviewed the assist a few days later, Fuller said, “[When] I play it back I think there’s no way he would make it.”
The pilot was so grateful, he drove seven hours to the Seattle Center to personally thank Fuller and the Seattle Center team who saved him.
“He brought his family with him,” said Fuller. “He wanted his grandkids to meet the man who saved Pop-Pop’s life. It’s a pretty incredible thing to be a part of. I definitely want to stress just how amazing the whole team was. I get to take a lot of the credit being the voice behind the radio, but honestly, I don’t think I played any greater role than anybody else. Others have far more aviation experience than me and could have done a better job. I just happened to be the guy who was available at the moment.”
“This was a cast of many,” said Schimpf. “Everybody played a role. This is teamwork at its best.”
Schimpf plans to use the audio from this assist in future training courses for his controllers. “Never let [an] emergency go to waste,” he said. “We’re not going to let it go to waste.”
Hill has been a controller for 33 years and the manager at Seattle Center since 1995. He has been involved in 20 assists overall. “I’ve probably seen three in my career that rise to this level of difficulty,” he said. “This is top two.”
