Uncommon is a magazine editor who doesn’t occasionally struggle to come up with a topic for the monthly editorial. For me, it’s become one of the most difficult parts of the job. So, there I was, sitting at my desk trying to put this issue to bed, but once again lacking an idea for this page.
Contributing Editor Fred Simonds approached me months ago and asked if I’d be interested in a feel-good article covering some of the many saves attributed to an individual controller or a group of controllers within ATC. The norm in aviation journalism is to identify a failure of some type, usually human, and analyze it to find out what might have gone wrong and what sequence of events led up to that point. The idea, of course, is to learn from the mistakes of others—at least that’s what we tell ourselves to justify this ghoulish reporting.
