Ever seen those videos of a retail store opening on Black Friday? The doors crack open. A tumbling mass of humanity spews in. Fights break out. People get trampled. Just good holiday fun... There are some days as an air traffic controller where it seems every single IFR airplane is filed the same route at the same altitude, jockeying for that same piece of sky. My job is to prevent them from trampling each other. What tools does ATC use to recognize when there's a problem, and then how do we resolve it? A good instrument scan is something you're taught from the first hours of flight school. During my first crosscountry training flight, my instructor noticed something I'd missed: Our Cessna 172's oil temperature gauge was running unusually high. We landed at a nearby non-towered airport, let it cool off, noted the oil level was on the lower side of normal, and added some oil. We gave it another go, flying higher for cooler temps, and everything ran fine afterwards.
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