Why did I want to be an air traffic controller? I was really annoyed at university in Sydney one day and saw an advert asking “do you want this job?” I clicked on it, and a year later was in training.

 

I’ve been up here for five years. I had a year training in Melbourne first, then a year at Moorabbin Airport. The course in Melbourne is very theory based, then after that you get posted to a tower. Moorabbin was a hell of a lot busier than Cairns, lots of small planes.

 

Air Services Australia is a government organisation that run all the towers in Australia. Once you’ve done your first posting you can apply to move. I was fed up of the cold in Victoria, thought “where’s the warmest place I could go?” and applied for Cairns.

 

From the tower, we control the airport itself and a small amount of airspace in the immediate vicinity: up to 500ft for the reef choppers. When we have flight training - the guys who do touch and gos and circuits - we have up to 1000ft or 1500ft.

 

We control the runway. One plane can land and takes off at a time. It takes 90 seconds to land, so we don’t clear anyone to take off at the same time. Otherwise we’d be in a world of hurt. You can’t put light planes after heavy planes because of the air disturbance, the wake turbulence. So we have a time or distance standard which can really slow things down if you have four jets waiting for a light plane.

 

The hard left after take-off is to avoid Bellenden Ker and Bartle Frere, Queensland’s highest peaks. They’ve decided it’s easier to turn and climb in clear air rather than over 1500m mountains.

 

We work eight to nine hour shifts, it’s a 24 hour tower. We’ve got Flying Doctors and EMQ through the night, post and bank flights. Eventually we get the Guam flight from the USA very late at night.