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The Student News Website of Francis Howell North High School.

FHNtoday.com

The Student News Website of Francis Howell North High School.

FHNtoday.com

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Bowers saves life by aiding endangered pilot in need of direction

In the middle of a December storm, a pilot starts to lose control of his plane.

“Cessna Six-Charlie-Alpha, how are you doing?”
“Eh. I’m not having a good day here, sir,” the frustrated pilot said.
“Cessna Six-Charlie-Alpha turn left heading 0-3-0,” the air traffic controller said.
“Yeah, I’m getting some ice on my wings. I guess that’s why I can’t handle this damn thing!”

On the evening of Dec. 28, 2007, a local pilot came perilously close to crashing his Cessna 182 Skylane private airplane, and probably would have, had not Air Traffic Controller Jack Bowers been there to talk the pilot through a navigation and landing at Scott Air Force Base.

Bowers, at Saint Louis Approach Control in Weldon Springs, spent two hours and 147 transmissions on the radio with the older pilot, who, according to Bowers, got in over his head in a winter storm.

“He kind of panicked,” Bowers, the part time flight instructor said. “They got me because of my experience as an instructor. The weather was so bad, and he couldn’t navigate. We had to do what’s called a surveillance approach.”

When the plane’s navigational instruments weren’t operational and ice covered the windshield, the pilot became disoriented. Bowers had to tell the pilot where he was and where he was going by looking at his radar in Weldon Springs.

Now they knew where the pilot was going, but the plane was barely hanging in the air, and at times Bowers thought the situation wasn’t going to turn out well.

“I actually thought I lost him twice,” Bowers, the 24th year Air Traffic Control veteran said. “Before he landed we lost radio contact a few times. He was kind of below the Arch and flying towards it. That’s when we lost radar and radio.”

When approaching Lambert International Airport, the pilot actually came dangerously near the Arch. The Air Traffic Control team in Weldon Springs decided to redirect the pilot to Scott Air Force Base, where there was a better chance of a successful landing. Then, according to Bowers, once the pilot landed the plane, he made a turn on the runway that put him on a restricted part of the base.

The pilot still isn’t entirely out of the clear. According to Bowers he is now being investigated by the FAA for currency violations. These violations mean a pilot would have been flying in weather and conditions he shouldn’t have been.
But for Bowers the situation brought on some recognition that he says is all a part of the job. The National Air Traffic Controllers Associations (NATCA) picked Bowers and fellow controller Dave Brown for the Central Region Flight Assist of the Year award.

“It’s kind of wild that we got Flight Assist of the year and there was only three days left in the year,” Bowers said.

With this regional award under his belt, Bowers has been automatically nominated for the National Flight Assist of the Year award which will be announced April 1.

“The nice thing about this award is that it’s not the FAA. It’s not any pilot groups. It’s coming from Air Traffic Controllers,” Bowers said. “It’s coming from the big group of my peers. It’s like I’m ending my career on a high note.”

Bowers will be retiring in the next three years so this award seems to be coming at the right time. In all 24 years as a controller he hasn’t lost one person, and he attributes that success to his experience as a pilot and his natural ability to do his job. It’s just who he is.

“You can teach people to be a controller, but you almost have to be born to be a controller,” he said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s the personality. It’s an attitude and a personality.”

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