May Day Mayday

Tyler Collins 

South Atlanta QZ/ ARTCC, GA, US

Hi again everyone. 

I never thought I'd hear the word 'Mayday' on a radio outside of the movies. Given what goes on here, I was expecting to hear it again. Today I did.

Thursday's lift went well, but it was short. Most weeks have maybe forty military aircraft doing the big haul and a smattering of civilian planes. This week, there were maybe fifteen. We didn't ask why because they never answer our questions anyway.

This morning, a former FedEx plane, an ATR turboprop I think, was returning after a refuel somewhere in middle Georgia. They had an engine failure somewhere north of Columbus (Steve, the main ATC guy here, redirected him south towards Benning, hoping to use one of their airstrips). It was startling to hear their collected panic as the aircraft came down. They managed an emergency landing in a field somewhere but they were out of radar range and our repeater lost line of sight as it was falling below three thousand feet.

Someone probably alerted the QZ at Benning to search for them, but without a definite location not a whole lot of people want to leave the fences these days, let alone military types. Planes make noise, too, so there will probably be dozens of the groaners approaching the crash site. I hope they make it out okay.

Speaking of the dead, there's lots of the uglies marching along 19-41 right now. I have no idea why they're basically following the road, but we can see them from the higher floors, slogging along, heading south. 

A few of them have wandered nearby and we've had to eliminate them. I take routine tours of the bottom floors to make sure our boards are in place and nothing snuck in. The National Guard take care of the rest.

I'll take a look at some other posts and leave to do my rounds. Stay safe!