Inside the Heathrow control tower: An air traffic controller reveals how the infamous stacking system works, that she's a 'bit of a nightmare' passenger and why her workplace is VERY quiet

General hustle and bustle and people sitting in front of radar screens with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths – that’s what many people think it’s like inside an air traffic control tower.

But the reality is very different, explained Jules Tarr, who’s been an air traffic controller at London Heathrow for 27 years.

The 52-year-old took time out from guiding aircraft into land at one of the world’s busiest airports - it handles about 1,300 flights a day - to give MailOnline Travel the inside track on her job – and she revealed that many people are almost disappointed when they visit the Heathrow control tower.

She said: ‘People think that if they visit the control tower it’s going to be noisy and busy, and that it’ll be very stressful and full of hustle and bustle.


‘But it’s really about as opposite to that as it’s possible to get. When I take visitors to the control tower they normally comment on how calm it is. We work so closely as a team with a lovely sense of camaraderie, everybody is doing their part of the job.

‘But everybody is dependent on everybody doing their job correctly, so I don’t think it’s as frenetic as people expect – I think people are sometimes almost disappointed. They expect it to be full of people sitting there with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths.’

It’s highly unlikely that anyone in the room ever feels worried about their responsibilities – guiding thousands of passengers a day safely into the air and onto the ground. Jules for one can’t recall a day on the job when she’s ever felt nervous.

She said: ‘We are so well trained. I don’t recall ever feeling nervous at work. It’s just not something that enters your head. You have airplanes to move and you have to move them as safely and expeditiously as you can. But you don’t think for one minute about anything that could go wrong. That’s not the mentality of someone who would become an air traffic controller.’

Jules, who works for Nats (formerly National Air Traffic Services), explained that there are three air traffic control teams in the tower, one for take-offs, one for arrivals and one that takes care of ground movements.

And they all operate at maximum sharpness, with breaks rigorously enforced.

Jules - who lives in the Cotswolds with husband, Richard, and Border Collie, Max - said: ‘So depending on what position you’re doing, you’ll do that position for an hour or an hour and a half. An hour and a half is the maximum that we can do and then we have to have a mandatory 30-minute break. So we’re quite heavily regulated from a safety aspect on how many hours we can do in a certain period.’



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