The Other Chip

The family and I ended our vacation to Canada with a pair of flights from Calgary to Denver, connecting to DFW. Our final flight required us to fly through those Saturday night storms that popped up over north Texas.

While in Denver, I checked the DFW weather, then called my buddy Ron Jackson here at the station. I asked Ron whether there would be storms near DFW Airport at our scheduled landing time, 9:30pm. He said yeah, there would be storms.

I was surprised then when we took off from Denver on time, thinking instead that the FAA would keep the plane grounded in Denver until the storms could safely pass.

United Airlines lets you listen to cockpit chatter with air-traffic control, a very cool feature. Doing this during a difficult flight gave me new appreciation for pilots and the air traffic controllers.

Shortly after takeoff, our pilots were told to change course and fly over Oklahoma City and make an approach from the north, as opposed to the northwest. It was very bumpy from Oklahoma City back to Dallas, as the pilots and ATC tried to find a "comfortable cruising altitude". There wasn't one because of the storms lined up to the west of I-35 down toward DFW.

What impressed me most was the give-and-take between the pilots and ATC, and the smooth exchange of information. The woman at the microphone at the FW regional ATC was brilliant in her handling of all the pilots on her radar. She was smooth, reassurring, helpful and energetic in her efforts to help pilots navigate safely around the storms.

Sure enough, even though the storms were all around the west side of the airport, they stayed away by about 10-15 miles for another hour or two, and that allowed our flight to land safely.