SEATAC, Wash. -- This year marks ten years since the airport tower opened at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The ramp control tower, as it is known to airport officials, is in charge of getting your plane in and out of the gate at the airport once it lands in Seattle.
“The ramp tower takes the aircraft, pushes them out from their gates, then they bring them to a certain spot and they turn them over to the FAA for taxi further out to the runways,” Ramp Tower Manager Jo-Ann Murray said. “Also, when they are inbound they take them into a certain spot, and we take them into the most expeditious way that we can to the gates.”
The task for the 13 employees at the airport tower has become more complicated over the years as Sea-Tac continues to boom.
“Our footprint is smaller than pretty much all of the other large airports. We have about 2,500 square acres, and we’ll be doing about 1,400 operations a day so that’s a lot of airplanes in and out,” Murray said. “When we first started in 2006 there were maybe 800 operations a day so in about ten years we’ve almost doubled.”
In order to get planes in and out as quick as possible they use a line-based system where planes are required to stay on a line as they taxi in and out.
“So we can move two airplanes in the space where we used to move one," Murray said.
Through the work of the controllers in the tower they potentially save the airlines 800,000 gallons of fuel per year and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8,500 tons per year. For every one minute reduction of taxing time, an airline operating a Boeing 737 saves almost four gallons of fuel.
