Weather watcher warming up for thunderstorm season

Bob Everson doesn't need to scan the sky if he's worried about rain.

Instead, the Federal Aviation Administration official turns to two state-of-the-art screens on his desk where images of air traffic and oncoming weather show real-life conditions.

Everson, 54, director of tactical operations for the FAA's Air Traffic Organization, works with a team of experts to coordinate airplane movements when storms strike in the Midwest region.

If your plane is delayed or diverted flying into O'Hare International Airport, Everson likely had a hand in the decision.

The Schaumburg resident, who is married with four grown kids and two grandchildren, is this month's Someone to Know in transportation.

He got his start in aviation by serving as an air traffic controller in the U.S. Air Force in 1972. Everson also worked as an air traffic controller and manager in New York, Chicago and Milwaukee.

Walk into the former football coach's office in Des Plaines and you know he's an aviation guy. To his right is a map of O'Hare's latest runway layout, to his left are shelves with career mementos, and above his desk, six model airplanes are proudly displayed.

The center of attention is two brightly colored computer screens indicating the progress of flights and climate conditions across the country. Green on the screen means precipitation, yellow means intense rain and orange equals thunderstorms.

As the spring thunderstorm season heats up, Everson is expecting a lot of orange.

"We know thunderstorms are always going to be there. What we try to do is maintain a safe operation," he said.

Q. What does a director of tactical operations do?

A. One of my focuses is to mitigate delays. We never want to launch airplanes in an area that's questionable weather-wise, so what we try to develop are alternatives to get airplanes in and out of major metropolitan areas, like O'Hare.

At O'Hare, sometimes we cannot land on all the available runways based on weather conditions. Our mission is to balance air-traffic demand with system capacity.

Q. What happens when thunderstorms are imminent?

A. We have a teleconference with all the stakeholders - the airlines, the corporate world, general aviation and all facilities affected by the storm. We strategize how to get the airplanes around this particular weather cell. We have playbooks with alternate routes, just like in football. For example, if the (bad) weather is down by Joliet - you want a route north and west of Joliet. Another big thing is we don't want to conflict with departure traffic. We want to make sure departure traffic has a route out and arrival traffic has a route in.

If things are extremely severe, we'll stop everything on the ground. Then we have breathing room to figure out how to get the airborne inventory in once the storm breaks and how to get traffic on the ground out.

Typically in Chicago, storms come from the west and move east to the Ohio valley. As storms approach from the west, we start bringing in arrivals because we know the storm will keep moving. Very seldom does it go east, hit the lake and come back. Our folks are experienced enough to know how quickly the storm is moving and when to bring the arrivals in.

Chicago has got very good at this with a number of strategies that they use because of the volume (of flights) at O'Hare.

Q. It sounds like a stressful job.

A. I love it, this is my passion. After a storm has gone through, I like to hear what we did right and what we didn't do so right.

Q. What can go wrong?

A. Sometimes we have a plan to get departures out and a cell will regenerate or because (in summer) it's so hot, a cell - we call them popcorn cells - will show up out of nowhere. We can't predict those, and sometimes when they pop up, it affects arrival traffic. So while we have a plan to get departures out - if arrivals start to create a problem for departures - we'll have to hold the departures until the cell goes away so we can manage arrivals better. Those are the times when you get frustrated.

Q. What are your greatest challenges?

A. It's the unpredictability - although we get better tools every day. One is the CIWS program, a really neat weather tool that gives a prediction two hours in advance of what to expect.

Q. What's the most memorable moment in your career?

A. I would say the American Airlines Flight 191 crash (in 1979 near O'Hare). I was at Midway at the time. I was a supervisor and we took a lot of traffic scheduled to land at O'Hare that was diverted. It was very traumatic, I remember looking out of the tower cab window and seeing a huge ball of black smoke.

(Another memory) is being a controller at O'Hare with an aircraft that had smoke in the cockpit. That was on Christmas Eve and it was snowing. I was able to work him in. (The pilot) came over to the tower and gave me a big hug.

Q. The last word is yours.

A. Sometimes people think that all we're focused on is efficiency but our No. 1 focus is safety.