COMMUNICATIONS DE PARTMENT
LAS VEGAS MEMBERS SAFEGUARD AIRSPACE THROUGH TRAGEDY
After Las Vegas Tower member Christina Stewart escaped the Oct. 1 Las Vegas
shooting and alerted the facility, she joined fellow members at Las Vegas Tower, Las
Vegas TRACON, and Los Angeles Ce nter in working to redirect operations, preventing
further emergency.
" I think we all know that as aviation safety professionals we are public servants, and we
are instrumental in the flying public ' s safety," Stewart said. Added LAS FacRep Jamaal
Haltom: " I don ' t throw the term hero around loosely, but I believe our very own Christina
Stewart to have displayed true heroism," LAS FacRep Jamaal Haltom said. "She was at
the concert when shots rang out. She ran as everyone else did, but when she got clear,
sh e immediately turned her concerns to her coworkers and the flying public."
L30 FacRep Anthony Borgert: "I ' m proud of how we all performed. Everyone pitched in,
ZLA performed great and were instrumental in keeping the situation from spiraling out of
contro l," Borgert said. "LAS tower personnel could see the mayhem unfolding several
hundred yards away and maintained their composure, and the TRACON controllers
made a bad situation a little better by staying flexible and continuing to update their plan
as new information became available. Nellis Approach readily accommodated our
requests, and facility security kept us posted with information on what was happening
just outside our facility."
In the NATCA Insider last week, Sarah Zilonis provided a detailed repo rt of how the
entire evening unfolded, including the full story from Stewart's perspective. She and her
fiancée Dale Cooper were just 75 feet from the stage at the Route 91 Harvest Festival at
the time the shooting began. Read the full story here .
Press Conference at LAS/L30 Oct. 12: We worked with FAA Public Affairs, Haltom,
Borgert, and LAS and L30 management to hold a NATCA press conference at the facility
on Oct. 12. It was a very compelling story for the local Las Vegas news media and each
major newspaper and television outlet sent reporters and photographers to hear Stewart
recount her story. She was joined by Borgert in d iscussing the very busy and multi -
faceted ATC operation that evening. Here is a list of hyper links to the press clippings,
which include both print and, in some cases, video of the press conference:
Las Vegas Review - Journal
3 News Las Vegas (NBC affiliate)
Fox 5 Las Vegas
Las Vegas Now.com/Channel 8 (CBS affiliate)
ON YOUR SIX: INTERVIEW WITH JIM ULLMANN, NATCA DIRECTOR OF SAFETY &
TECHNOLOGY
From Aireon: "We'd like to introduce a new blog series, "On Your Six." In this se ries,
we'll be sitting down with industry leaders and ask them, you guessed it, a series of six
questions relating to today's aviation industry. To kick things off, we're excited to share
our first post of "On Your Six" with NATCA Director of Safety & Technology, Jim Ullmann.
In September of 2015, Jim retired from the FAA after 26 years as an Air Traffic
Controller and is uniquely suited to offer insights as to today's ATC environment a mong
other aviation hot topics. And o n that note, on to the questions
