If you flew into Philadelphia last year, there's a good chance Laura or Rick Heckman guided your plane.
In a word-association test, "high-stress job" and "air traffic controller" would seem like a natural duo, but Rick Heckman says the couple has been directing jumbo jets so long that it's no more stressful than driving home on the Schuylkill Expressway.
"The stress level is what people make of it,'' he says. "Sure, when the weather is really bad and there's snow or fog, it's more stressful than a beautiful day. But, the movies kind of overplay what we do."
The Heckmans are among the controllers who guide 25 million planes over Delaware, Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey each year from the up-and-down control building at Philadelphia International Airport on Hog Island.
Downstairs, controllers run radar sectors that show the planes within a 60-mile radius of the airport. Upstairs is the straight-out-of-the-movies glass tower where controllers deal with arriving and departing planes within five miles of the terminal.
Rick Heckman, who has been working planes in Philadelphia for 15 years, says he sees them in only one dimension on the radar screen, so it is easy to think of them as just planes until the rare close call. "We only work airplanes," he says. "You never realize that you have 200 or 300 people inside until something happens by mistake or accident or sheer volume. Then, you realize you had all those people on board who were counting on you to ensure their safety."
Heckman says the worst day he worked was Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorist-held jetliners crashed at 8:45 a.m., 9:03, 9:43, and 10:10, and there were still a few planes aloft in U.S. airspace at 12:30 p.m.
"Personally, being a person who was working and trying to get the planes down, it was gut-wrenching," he says. "Just to hear the news and know what was going on and trying to get everybody to land. It was a day, like everybody says, that nobody will ever forget. It was devastating."
The Heckmans say they look forward to work. "It's a very exciting job and it changes every day,'' Rick Heckman says. "We both have done it for so many years now that there's nothing that we'd rather do."
There are unique advantages, too. Laura Heckman says people she meets almost always remember her name and what she does for a living. "People remember us because we are air traffic controllers and there are not a lot of us. There are only 15,000 throughout the country," she says.
She says the job's rotating shifts might be a drawback for some people but it has worked for her and her husband. One of them was always available to care for their daughter, Jessica, now a UD sophomore.