It may also be who it is who shows you around and what he shows you. If all you see is the room with the scopes, of course it looks like everyone has something to do. But I also spent time in the cafeteria and the TV room. I cannot believe that either of these has been eliminated.
I think that was to reduce the tension, because these men (and a few women) literally had the lives of thousands of air passengers in their hands.
It's pure BS that this is stressful or that the controllers have thousands of lives in their hands, except that they could possibly cause a collision if they wanted to. It does help to know the system from a pilot's point of view and also to be shown it in a trusted way from the controllers point of view as I did and was.
When I first walked into the darkened scope room, it was obvious to me that my visit was not unexpected. One of the guys got up from his scope insanely screaming, "They're gonna collide! They're gonna collide!" It didn't take me long to see that the controllers considered their job a joke. I suppose I could have known that from the chatter my controller IFR instructor engaged in sometimes on the radio while we were flying. It must have just been one big fraternity to him as he seemed to have friends at a number of the facilities we were handled by. (I'm not sure we ever were even handled by his NYARTCC as they only come into play above 7000 feet or something like that.)
My instructor was the senior guy on his team and he had three underlings helping him when he was working the scope. He had a particular sector to work. I think he took handoffs from Cleveland ARTCC of planes flying at altitude, and had to bring the NYC bound ones down to 17,000 feet to handoff to another guy. When he was really working the highest number of planes he was talking to at one time was four. (This was between 6 and 8 PM on a weekday.) But he showed me different views he could see on his scope, so first he didn't eliminate the ones flying lower than his sector. And then he gradually kept increasing the radius of the sector displayed until it eventually was centered on NYC and extended past Boston and Washington. Then there a zillion targets on his screen. That zillion target view is always the one you see on a news feature about air traffic controllers.
It's been a while now since I've flown, but the number of times I had to struggle to get a word in edgewise with the controller who was working me was very low. If you're smart when you fly IFR you pay attention to everything going on on the frequency; and usually it's not hard to do. It's just another clue to the usual workload the controllers experience.
ML/NJ
First, I was not a VIP being shown around. I knew an old Air Force pilot through the Civil Air Patrol and it was he who took me there. BTW, it was not a special entree; this place had regular visiting hours for the public at large (we just had access on “off hours”). So, I don’t think they did anything special for me.
Second, I gathered that this was before there was computerization of a lot of the separations of various flights and I damn well believe that it was a stressful job under those circumstances. You may not. We have our opinions on that.
You must have entered a strange air controller facility if someone was acting crazy and you got the impression that the controllers considered their job a joke. What I saw was a group of people with intense concentration on what they were doing.
I will grant you the real possibility that times have changed, particularly with regard to computers making their jobs quite different from what I saw. That being the case, our experiences differ considerably.