Tall Tales from the Tower

Book excerpt: Tall Tales from the Tower: The Real Hillbilly Elegy By: Stephen G. Morris It’s true. The USAF gave a seventeen-year-old West Virginian hillbilly, a high school dropout, a battery of aptitude tests and determined he could be a Tin Man. And it wasn’t easy. Only seven graduated ATC school out of twenty-two. After a year of intensive training at a high traffic control tower, Stephen G. Morris became a Tin Man, an air-traffic controller who can move heavy air traffic safely and expeditiously. After twenty-seven years as a Tin Man, Morris became the director of a Fortune 100 company and a senior vice president at the fourth largest integrated facility management company in the US; however, his biggest lifetime achievement will always be his time as a Tin Man. When he retired from the USAF in 1984, he took over a former FAA control tower on Cape Cod, one of the hundreds of facilities the FAA PATCO union walked out of and were fired by President Reagan. Tall Tales from the Tower is a peek into the control towers and RADAR air-traffic facilities at airports around the world with true stories of recovering lost aircraft, emergencies, safely landing seventeen fighters in severe thunderstorms, and air traffic control in a war zone.