Eyes in the Sky

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In the airport's highest room, in a 130-foot tower, you can see 360 degrees over distant lands: the Sierra rises in the east, Napa sits to the west, and 12 miles southwest, Sacramento’s skyline flirts with the morning fog. But the people in this room barely notice the view. They work here every day, staring off into space, with the power to lift and land big and small planes simply by speaking.

Built in 1967, the air traffic control tower is the brains of the operation at the 5,500-acre patch that is Sacramento International Airport. It stands smack in the middle of twin 8,600-foot runways and controls airspace within a 5-mile radius and up to 2,000 feet. From afar, the white concrete tower with a reddish pinnacle looks like a giant Pez dispenser. In the top room — called “the Cab” for reasons they can’t recall — the air traffic controllers are conductors of the flight symphony. They monitor the moving blips on color-coded radar screens, peer at the sky through binoculars, check weather patterns, communicate with control centers and direct pilots through headsets to prevent midair collisions and crash landings.

“You have to think in three dimensions,” says Roman Miszkewycz, the tower manager. “If you didn’t have controllers, there would be chaos out there with all these big airliners flying around with thousands of people in them.”

Miszkewycz (pronounced Mis-ke-wits), a former Air Force navigator, has been running the tower from the ground floor for the last decade. He wanted to fly commercial planes when he left the service, but airlines weren’t hiring at the time. Instead, he did flight instruction and charter work in Columbia, Calif. Then he worked in air towers across the region from San Jose to San Francisco and did radar approach control in Rio Linda.

Sacramento Metropolitan Airport was renamed Sacramento International Airport in 1996, but international flights didn’t start coming in until 2002. Post-9/11, new carriers include Mexicana and Air Canada. Fourteen major carriers means the Sacramento air controllers have constant work. There are times of high pressure, and low pressure depending on the hour, but even in the quiet moments, the skies require their attention. In 2002, the tower received an award from the Federal Aviation Administration for handling 1 million operations without errors.

“What you ask of these guys is to be 100 percent right,” Miszkewycz says. “It’s a job where mistakes are not allowed. Period.”

But Miszkewycz is aware that some things are out of their control. A few years ago, one pilot forgot to lower the landing gear (“The next thing we knew, we heard some bad words on the frequency”), and they had to shut down the runway for an hour. In 1997, another pilot ran out of fuel and had to land in the nearby field. In June, one airplane was ready to take off, but the pilot thought he had a flat tire, which caused a 45-minute shutdown of one of the runways. Since the airport has only two runways, the closing of one affects all departures and arrivals.   

If he had his way, Miszkewycz would still be up in the Cab directing air traffic. But at 64, federal law says he’s eight years too old; the mandatory retirement age is 56. “It’s a head-scratcher,” he says. “They’re telling me I can’t control air traffic past 56, but pilots can fly until they’re 60. I either had to retire or take the manager job. But I miss it tremendously. I think the agency is losing a lot of experience.”

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