AFTER AN EARTHQUAKE - COMBAT CONTROLLERS CRUCIAL TO HAITI RELIEF EFFORT

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. J. Paul Croxon
  • Defense Media Activity, San Antonio, Texas
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AFNS) --  Thanks to a specialized group of Airmen used to working in austere locations, safe airlift operations in Haiti were possible in the initial days after an earthquake destroyed much of the capital. These Airmen paved the way for the airport to become one of the busiest in the world.

Combat controllers are used to working in locations devoid of functioning air traffic control. Armed and trained to set up and help secure new airfield operations, these Airmen made aerial resupply missions to Port-au-Prince International Airport possible.

"One of our primary jobs is to take over and set up an airfield in an austere environment and provide air traffic control for follow-on aircraft ... (here) it's really just the same (as other missions) except we're not getting shot at," said Staff Sgt. Joshua Craig, a combat controller from the 23rd Special Tactics Squadron at Hurlburt Field, Fla. "We came in, we set up an airfield in an austere environment, and immediately after 20 minutes we started bringing in aircraft and aid to Haiti."

The Airmen had a number of hardships to overcome.

"In the initial days there were so many aircraft and so much humanitarian aid coming in, they compared it to the Berlin Airlift with aircraft every five minutes," Craig said. "Right now, with another airport opening up and the port opening up, it's lessened traffic."

Controlling one of the world's busiest airports under austere conditions is made even more challenging when not everyone speaks the same language."

"The language barrier was kind of difficult," Craig said. "We had pilots from all over the world trying to talk and were trying to use the same phraseology, air traffic control phraseology, but sometimes it's hard to understand pilots from different nations."

Another challenge they faced was limited physical space to park aircraft at an airport that was never designed to handle more than 100 planes per day.

"It's a small airport, and we had so many aircraft coming in it was kind of hard to find the coordination between (radar approach control), which are the guys bringing them in, out, and holding, to the amount of space available," Craig said. "We put aircraft in the grass, utilizing as much space as we could at the airport."

While it's difficult to find space for known aircraft, Craig and the other combat controllers also had to find places for aircraft they'd never seen before.

"We got birds in with types that we never heard of so we asked them: 'What's your wingspan? What kind of a bird are you? How fast are you?' " he said.

As soon as a portable tower was up and running and replacement controllers were brought up to speed, the combat controllers handed over the "keys" to the airfield and departed almost as quickly as they came.

"Our job is austere airfields," he said. "So once they set up towers, it's time for us to go."