Oshkosh 2010

After severe weather and flooding delayed many pilots’ plans to arrive earlier this week, thousands of planes are expected to touch down today at Oshkosh Airport. You can take what you know from the movies about control towers and forget about it.

Sure, there are binoculars and radar scopes and people talking really fast.

But at the world’s busiest airport things work a little differently. “Every year, we always have a day that we beat O’Hare and Atlanta,” says Wanda Adelman, Air Traffic Manager.

It all starts in the Town of Fisk, where men and women line up incoming aircraft single file toward Oshkosh.

“We do that to give the tower some more time, slow things down a little bit for them up there.

Its still a hectic up there. But it all starts out here at Fisk,” says Jim Hovick, Air Traffic Controller.

It’s so busy pilots aren’t supposed to talk back on the radio. “The controllers will sometimes key up and keep it keyed up for an awful long time.

They keep talking just to make sure things are safe,” says Adelman. “And if we need an acknowledgement, we ask them to rock their wings.

”Without these extra control centers, Hovick says it’d be very dangerous.

There’s simply too many aircraft headed the same way.

But even while giving rapid fire orders over the radio controllers say they try to keep it light.“It’s that kind of not joking around but kind of camaraderie we do build with the pilots.

That keeps things light and efficient and keeps people wanting to come back to Oshkosh,” adds Hovick