Busiest Facility

Ammolite Unregistered

I'm sure that they must take this into account when comparing AFBs.

They also have the greatest # of squadrons.

sunny Newcomer ZLA

Their is no way Balad is busier than our level 12's. No doubt it's busy though...

ColtsATC Trusted Contributor Indy

Didn't realize they had 5 runways. Jesus, no wonder so few can check out at ATL Tracon. Pretty crazy when 2 arrival sectors work more traffic than an entire center. ZID is running around 5-6k a day right now. Even when they were busy, it was 9k a day.

A balad is an CERAP (Combined approach/center). Baghdad is a center. Kirkuk is a CERAP.

I don't remember who told me Balad is the 2nd busiest airport, cuz they are full of crap. Balad is the busiest DoD base.

Here is a good article about Balad ATC

http://www.dover.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123078463

Ramstar13 Senior Member

You can go to the FAA website and see the airport ranks based on ops from 2008. 1-ATL 2-ORD 3-LAX 4-DFW 5-DEN. I dont know the exact order after that but i do know DVT a VFR tower was in the top 10, crazy. I think i saw they did 300k+ T&G's.

polo708 Epic Member tower

Yeah, DVT in teh top 10 and they are only a level 8 facility... pretty funny huh. Busiest GA airport and they get paid crap because its General Aviation traffic and not airliners. A VFR tower IMO is one of the hardest to control at.

AlphaLima Senior Member Florida

Balad has slowed down since the good ol days. But we still get busy, we also work the approach for Baghdad Intl and things get interesting there since its still an active combat zone and there are UAVs and other tactical aircraft all over the place you still have to keep 5/1000 from. Along with fighter airspace and refueling tracks that like to be right where you dont want them.

PS, i hate UAVs, they are like gnats...that are attracted to other planes, and try their hardest to get in the way. <-- me all day today in Baghdad

ColtsATC Trusted Contributor Indy

UAVs suck, tactical airspace sucks, and Kingpin not telling you the correct altitude their aircraft are at suck. Especially with a not all that reliable radar.

Tarheel Newcomer

Kingpin!!! F!#k them. They like to park uav's at 5 mile final @2500' without telling anybody. We would call them on it and they would tell us the F16's i just gave a traffic alert to were "point-out approved", wtf?

The thing that makes Balad very difficult is complexity, hazardous airspace, huge range in a/c performance and very poor airfield design. By nature everything was completely random. As you can imagine, if dudes are shooting at aircraft in the pattern there won't be any VFR entry points like a normal base base would have. It is not uncommon for aircraft in the pattern to recieve small arms fire in the pattern, so pilots were not very enthusiastic about extending downwind or doing any type of spacing manuevers....

Im at a level 8, and Balad was way more challenging.

AlphaLima Senior Member Florida

Ya im not sure who thought making the runways 30/12 and 32/14 was a good idea. Hooray for converging finals and crossing departure corridors!

ColtsATC Trusted Contributor Indy

Kingpin caused an RA while I was working a few days ago. They had just told us a guy was climbing from 5k to 7k, so i was blocking that airspace at 7k cuz our radar isn't exactly the most reliable. I have a guy at 9k climbing to 10 and suddenly, "approach, we are responding to an RA" I"m like WTF?? I see absolutely no traffic on my scope around him til about 30 seconds later...there's KP's guy at 8.7 decend rather rapidly now. I called them up and they said we approved him at 9k, we said no we didn't obviously, then it was back and forth about them telling us to move for their guys, it's their a/s , blah blah blah. Our CCTLR called and ya...we won that battle.