When weather wreaks havoc on the country’s air traffic control system,
there is a good chance that Alan Stensland is at the center of the
action. Working out of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Southern
region office in Atlanta, the general engineer and his team of four are
responsible for tracking and helping to restore services to area
airports that are knocked off-line by storms or equipment failures.
The team members’ job is to take control and manage the situation until
the crisis is over or the problem fixed. But until two years ago, the
information they needed to get that job done was not always readily
available. It might be buried under piles of paper, on errant sticky
notes, or on one of a small herd of whiteboards smeared with hasty
erasures and sprawled with barely legible notes.
“When airports are going off and online quickly, new information comes
in by the hour — sometimes by the minute,” Stensland said. “By the time
we’d find the information in the printout, it might be out of date.”
That information chaos is largely a thing of the past since the office
started using a new type of software known as a mind-mapping tool.
Using Mindjet’s mind-mapping tool MindManager, Stensland’s team enters
the names and status information of the stricken facilities so they can
view a graphical presentation on a computer screen. That view shows
them the relationships among the different airports so they can
identify at a glance by color-coded graphics which ones are down, which
nearby ones are available to take over from those that are off-line,
which are close to being back in operation, and so on.
Stensland likens the graphical display to a football game plan. “The
coach has the plan, and as he sees what is happening on the field, he
makes the needed changes,” Stensland said. “That’s how we’re working
with the software.”
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