Save Story: Boston Controllers Assist Pilot Suffering from Hypoxia
Two controllers’ quick diagnosis of a pilot’s condition may have saved a life.
By Jim Tise, FAA
Air traffic controllers are always at the ready to help pilots in distress. But what if the pilot doesn’t realize he’s in trouble? What would they do then?
That’s a scenario that played out last October in airspace around the FAA’s Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center. Rosilla Owen and Scott Elms were working the “Stewart Sector” of airspace. Both are experienced controllers: Owen with 12 years and Elms with 16.
The New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) had just handed off to Owen a Cessna 310 flying an aerial photography mission at 13,500 feet in clear conditions. The pilot was zig-zagging in and out of the Boston Center and New York TRACON airspaces, which is not an unusual occurrence for this area.
But right from the start, Owen noticed something odd with the Cessna pilot. She asked for his coordinates, but his response came back with long pauses in between, a cadence unusual for experienced pilots. “He took a really long time to check in,” she recalled.
At the end of the first transmission, Owen asked the pilot if he was okay. The pilot responded in the affirmative. “Okay, just making sure,” replied Owen. But neither she nor Elms were convinced.
Owen considered a number of possibilities. Perhaps the pilot was involved in other tasks that were distracting him. There was also a chance that hypoxia — a condition in which the pilot is not getting enough oxygen — had kicked in. In a worst-case scenario the pilot could have been experiencing a serious medical condition, such as a stroke or heart attack.
Covering all her bases, she contacted a controller at the New York TRACON who confirmed the pilot had been a little slow to respond to some of his directions too.
Thinking that hypoxia was affecting the pilot, Owen confirmed with the pilot that he had oxygen onboard. His answer came clearly in the affirmative.
“I was thinking maybe I made a mistake,” Owen said. “But I still wasn’t convinced it was working the way it should.”
Out of caution, she asked the pilot to begin a slow descent to 9,000 feet, an altitude at which the pilot doesn’t require oxygen flow.
Elms seconded Owen’s decision to descend the Cessna as a way to ascertain if hypoxia was an issue.
“You’re taking the easiest [possibility] and taking it out of the picture,” he explained. Further transmissions as the plane descended revealed the pilot’s responses were “getting clearer and clearer and sharper every time.”
A few minutes later, the Cessna pilot confirmed with Owen and Elms that his oxygen line had a kink in it, reducing the flow of oxygen. “Thanks for looking out for me,” he told Owen.
“That confirmed what we knew was going on,” said Owen.
“If he’s up there for another three to 10 minutes, we might be dealing with something different,” said Elms.
Perhaps the pilot suspected the same thing, because he indicated he was cutting short his mission and returning to home base. Elms contacted the New York TRACON.
“I asked them to keep an eye on him,” he said. “I told them he’s a little shaky, that he had just had a hypoxia event. They let us know he landed safely.”
“It was obviously a good outcome,” said Owen. “I was grateful at how quickly it was resolved and safely.”
Reviewing the incident, Adam Currier, executive officer at the Boston Center, was impressed with “the quick action that [Owen and Elms] took and the fact that they picked up on those cues as quickly as they did.”
That same sector of Boston airspace had experienced a hypoxia event a year before, and Elms had been involved with that incident as well. Tarah Park, the Boston Center air traffic manager, noted that lessons learned from that event were shared widely around the facility and likely prepared the controllers.
Adding a fitting coda to the event was the transmission from another pilot who shared the same frequency with the controllers during the incident:
Good catch out there. I appreciate you guys.
Air traffic controllers do more than just assist with takeoff and landings. They are as integral to the safety of the traveling public as they are to the aviation community. If you want to join this rich and rewarding team, learn how to apply to be an air traffic controller at www.faa.gov/be-atc.
