Today I took a tour with the Minnesota Chapter of the 99s to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport Control Tower.
First we went into the TRACON room which was almost totally dark, very quite and a bit warm (no photos or cell phones allowed in this room). In this room they look at traffic for miles away from the airport. It was fun to see all the airplanes coming in from various different states. They were just little blips on the radar. Actually all airplanes coming and going on the radars looked a lot like the game FlightControl, which I have on my iPhone.
Then we had a wonderful tour of the air traffic control tower and their fabulous 360 view. It took one elevator and a few stairs to get up to the tower. It was so much fun watching the planes land and takeoff. Everyone at the tower was very nice and answered all our questions. They really do a fabulous job of controlling the chaos. They are also way cool for letting me take a few photos.
