Thanks for talking to us Akacia. Give us a quick background on yourself, what you’re studying, and your longer term career ambitions
So I’m a student of Vaughn College, majoring in Aeronautical Science with a minor in Air Traffic Control. My long term goal is to get a role at the FAA, working either in the tower or TRACON. It’s a four year course, and I have one semester left, finishing in May.
As a part of the course we undertake a summer internship to get some real hands-on experience in the aviation sector, and I was lucky enough to join the team at Downtown Skyport for a couple of months.
Talk us through what you got up to during the internship
I was mainly helping out in the radio room, assisting the team in managing radio communications and optimizing ramp operations.
As a part of this I also had a hand in helping to develop the radio room manual. Downtown Skyport is a non-towered heliport, so I was helping to formalize the language on how we manage our airside operations.
It was great to get some real life experience on how it all works (the team let me practice and takeover the radio) and see first-hand some of the complexities of managing operations at one of the world’s busiest heliports.
The heliport is also undergoing a wider program to provide a more premium passenger experience, so I helped research some ways that we could upgrade the look and feel of the facility.
What was your top highlight during your time at Downtown Skyport?
There was one particular day where the weather was great and we had pretty much a full day of flights and traffic.
It was really cool to see how the team handled it all; having to be adaptable and thinking on their feet. So it would be advising a helicopter to land at a certain stand, and then planning forward so another could land and refuel, and then advising wider helicopter traffic around it.
It was insightful to see how the team made it run like clockwork when it was so busy. I was also on hand to enter all the flight data, so it was cool to be a part of it.
What is the best skill you learned during your time at Downtown Skyport?
Actually getting some real, hands-on experience on the radio, and speaking to the pilots, was really valuable. While we study it in depth, nothing can replace real-life experience.
What would you say is the most surprising or unexpecting thing you learnt about aviation during the internship?
It was interesting to find out more about the challenges of operating in a built up urban environment, and how Downtown Skyport operates alongside the local community. It seems there’s a good balance, with the tour flights finishing at 5pm.
It was also interesting to learn a bit more about Skyports’ drone operations when I was there, and all the different use cases of drones (I thought they were just for filming!). It was cool to learn about the advanced software they use for managing the weather and flight conditions, and all the similar aviation rules and regulations that govern flying drones. It wasn’t something I was expecting to learn about whilst at a heliport!
How do you think the internship helped support your longer term studying and career goals?
For me it was really seeing firsthand how in aviation the team comes together to manage operations and make sure everything runs safely and smoothly.
It was great to experience this teamwork firsthand and learn how it all interlinks. Studying it is one thing, but being a part of it isn’t something you can learn as well from the classroom.
As a soon-to-be graduate coming into aviation, where would you like to see aviation going?
Something that has really surprised me more generally with aviation is the technology that some of the industry is using – some of it feels pretty outdated! You still see some organizations using pretty clunky equipment from the 90s, and you even see old floppy disk computers.
It’s good to see that Downtown Skyport is making a big effort to digitize a lot of the systems, and bring everything forward to the 21st century.
I had a really good time during the internship, and am thankful to the team for having me! It was a great couple of months.
