Behind the scenes: What it takes to keep Seattle-Tacoma International Airport running

SEATAC, Wash. -- Perched high atop the packed airport's Central Terminal, a team of three air traffic controllers peers out onto a sun-baked expanse of asphalt, concrete, and dead grass from Seattle-Tacoma International's sole ramp tower.

Departing passengers directly below them will soon be briefly in the care of one of these controllers. Their mission: safely and efficiently shuttle all of Seattle's 1,250 daily flights from FAA-controlled runways and taxiways to their respective parking spots.

"Our main goal is to create, in our heads, a plan that will allow for the most airplanes to get to the gates in the shortest amount of time -- not distance -- but time," says ramp tower manager Earl Hadler, a nine-year veteran.

In doing so, Hadler and his team must grapple with an ever-changing life-size puzzle where the goal is efficiency.

Ramp controllers at Sea-Tac, as the airport is known, have only one major taxi lane under their control. It links most of a nearly 2-mile stretch of smaller alleyways, gates and parking ramps. Crews must juggle everything from small commuter planes to giant Boeing 747s on what essentially amounts to a one-way road -- an unusual set-up for such a busy airport.

During the morning rush, Sea-Tac's limitations aren't too severe: The vast majority of aircraft are all headed outbound in the same direction. The afternoon, however, is a different story.

"The afternoon rush is complex, because now it's not all one direction outbound," Hadler says. "Everybody's coming in and going out at the same time."

He pulls out a large foam-board map of the airport and places it onto a conference table. He traces a seemingly endless number of contingencies and options that controllers employ every day to keep the show going. "Few facilities have as much traffic as we have concentrated in such a small place. You have to be pretty sharp-minded," he says.

Sea-Tac's traffic, already at record levels, is likely to keep on going up. "I fully expect that they're going to jam 1,300 operations in here next year; I can't see how they're not," predicts Hadler. "We have a lot of competition right now between the airlines."

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The number of flights to and from Sea-Tac has indeed risen dramatically over the past five years. About a dozen new international flights have been added to the airport's daily schedule. And domestic traffic has soared thanks to an undeclared turf battle between incumbent Alaska Airlines and Altanta-based Delta Air Lines. The result has pushed Seattle into the top fifteen busiest airports in the U.S., moving ahead of historically busy hubs like Detroit Metropolitan and Newark Liberty International.

"We are refereeing that competition as it grows," Hadley says about his team's role in guiding the increasing number of aircraft.

His small army of out-of-sight controllers is just one of several hard-to-see layers of infrastructure at Sea-Tac. For example, most travelers likely would never know there are even more levels below the ground floor baggage claim. Those levels -- two additional floors -- are home to dozens of personnel, working below the feet of fliers waiting to collect their bags.

Likewise, most fliers will never set foot in the state's largest fire house -- located near the FAA tower. Or the police station on level three. And they probably won't meet the airport biologist, or Mr. Hadler up in the ramp tower. But every visitor interacts with the work they do in at least some small way.

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While many of Sea-Tac's unsung workers are out of sight, airport duty manager Paul Pelton isn't one of them. At the crisp hour of 5 a.m., he can be found strolling through the ticketing side of the terminal, offering a smile and polite "hello!" to bleary-eyed passengers.

The sun hasn't even come up yet on one April day as he passes through a security door and steps into his bright yellow SUV to start his shift. His first order of business? Checking the active runway for "foreign object debris," otherwise known as FOD.

Pelton radios the tower for clearance. He then speeds down runway 16R/34L in between landings. His eyes are sharply attuned for anything that could possibly cause damage to a jet: animals, engine parts, plastic bags, screws. Anything bigger than a tack, really. Nearly two miles later Pelton pulls of the runway having found exactly what he hoped for: nothing.

"Our main goal is to maintain continuity of operations," he says. That means everything from ensuring runway safety to managing crowd control in the terminals to busted water pipes: "If something is affecting the airport's normal business operations, it is up to us to try to get the airport back to normal operations as quickly as possible."

The remainder of his shift presents a smorgasbord of issues: A morning update meeting with the head of Sea-Tac TSA, negotiating a repair schedule for a jet bridge and playing traffic cop on the ramp. Pelton even helps remove baby barn owls from a nest for relocation. And this was a slow day, he says.

Later in the morning, Pelton is out again on the airfield. He spots a trio of hawks flying low above the runways. Birds are one of an airport's biggest safety concerns, and one need look no further than the famous US Airways "Miracle on the Hudson" crash-landing in 2009 to see what can happen when airplanes and birds meet.

While that strike happened several thousand feet up, Port of Seattle wildlife biologist Steve Osmek says most bird strikes occur on the ground or within about 500 feet of it. Thus the hawks have to go.

Pelton calls in the birds' position to the operation folks back in the terminals and grabs a black flare gun from his SUV. With a burst of light and sound, the gun goes off in the direction of the hawks. They continue circling above as though nothing had happened. Eventually, though, they soar up and away.

It is likely that the trio of hawks also managed to engage one of Sea-Tac's more unique features, avian radar, located in a non-descript trailer parked between the center and east runways.

Introduced in 2007 in collaboration with the University of Illinois, the radar system was the first of its kind at a U.S. civilian airport. If it detects any bird larger than a crow, an alert is sent back to a monitor in the terminal, where someone like Pelton can be summoned to deal with the threat.

But that radar system is aging. Osmek says the airport is ready to move on to bigger and better version.

"We've had it since 2007, it needs updates," he says during an August tour of the airfield. "Right now what [the radar shows] is presence and absence of birds. That doesn't help you if you have an aircraft coming in; you could go around each and every time a bird is detected, but it doesn't make sense."

Osmek says a new system would add additional information -- such as altitude or the size of the bird -- that would better aid controllers and airport officials. Osmek hopes to have the upgrades in place within two years.

However, not every bird-aversion tactic is quite so high-tech. Osmek later pulls up to a series of wooden bird traps that dot the perimeter of the runways. Each contains a handful of bait pigeons, which are safely separated from the main trap by metal wiring. The traps are meant to attract raptors. Most captured birds -- such as starlings -- are euthanized. But the airport releases raptors back into the wild with the help of a local trapper.

The efforts have paid off, says Osmek. Bird strikes at the airport are down to 17 per 100,000 flights, well below the airport's goal of 20.

Not your average fire house

Sea-Tac's fire department is located in an unassuming building on the north side of the airport. As far as fire stations go, it has all the usual hallmarks: gleaming fire trucks, strapping firemen (and firewomen), everything but a clichéd Dalmatian.

But it certainly isn't your average fire house. Unlike a normal station, this one is filled with something called "crash trucks." The gigantic vehicles can bust through fences, go off-road and even drive through fire. They can do all that while hitting a target with water and foam at 1,200 gallons per minute.

For the most part, the trucks never see action. The station might get several dozen calls in a day, but almost all of them are medical; things like chest pains or falls.

The type of heavy-duty calls that these trucks are meant to handle are -- happily -- exceptionally rare. Sea-Tac has only suffered one fatal passenger air crash in its 71-year history, an Alaska Airlines accident in 1947.

"This can be a boring place," says assistant fire chief Keith Taylor during a recent visit to the sprawling firehouse, the largest in the state. But that doesn't mean Taylor and his crew sit around and wait: "[We spend] thirty years training for a three-hour event," Taylor says.

The training regimen includes surprise crash-response drills. Taylor says his crews need to be able to reach the mid-point of the furthest runway in three minutes flat. For Sea-Tac, that's over two-thirds of a mile, as the crow flies. "They have no idea when they're going to happen, all they know is the alarm is going to go off, and that [the airplane] is out there somewhere. And they better get there," says Taylor.

Firefighters spend hours every day honing their skills. One day it's a class on foam firefighting tactics. Another could be a live practice at the airport's on-site training fuselage. Or another surprise response drill.

At the end of the day, Taylor says all the training comes down to a single question: "Are we ready? That's what I'm continuously thinking about."

Hopefully, they'll never have to find out.

'It's hide-and-go-seek'

Soft rock music wafts gently over the South Satellite Terminal train station as Sgt. Kyle Yoshimura steps through a security door and onto the platform. A ten-year veteran of the Port of Seattle Police, Yoshimura is one of nine officers on duty during this morning's 12-hour-long morning shift.

"We do things here that you would never do at a traditional law enforcement agency," he says.

Responsible for policing an entire international airport, the sergeant estimates his force serves as many as 60,000 people on a daily basis. "That's the size of a small city," Yoshimura points out.

The force fields around 200 calls per day. As you might guess, they get a lot of variety. A single day may see everything from simple surveillance to sex crimes, stolen rental cars to drug interdiction. And there are the expected items, such as traffic flow and unattended bags.

This morning, Yoshimura is responding to a disturbance. That's one of the most common calls for airport-based officers. A middle-aged man has been accused of assaulting a TSA agent over a misplaced laptop. Now it's up to the sergeant and a colleague to sort it out.

The suspect is eventually taken into custody on the platform as a handful of passengers gather to gawk. A Taylor Swift song plays softly in the background, and within a few minutes the scene returns to just another busy part of the airport.

Later that afternoon, a four-legged colleague of Yoshimura is sniffing up a storm inside an Alaska Airlines cargo facility. Seven-year-old Iskandar, an adorable yellow Labrador retriever, is part of the Port Police K-9 force.

"What we're looking for is explosive," K-9 officer David Irons says as Iskandar pauses to double-check a cargo pallet full of motor oil.

Irons has hidden a small amount of explosive material under a cargo pallet further down the row. The exercise is part of the regular training regimen that the two must undergo.

"It's hide-and-go-seek, that's what we do all day," says Irons, "it's all about building [the training] into him."

Sure enough, Iskandar catches a whiff of something and quickly zeroes in on the target. Irons rewards him with a few minutes of fetch before they continue into the ticketing area of the terminal for a walk-through.

As Iskandar and Irons patrol the terminal for anything that looks out of place, the afternoon rush has dwindled. Hours ago, lines to bag drops and ticket counters snaked out onto the curb. Now they're gone. Traffic on the access road has returned to normal, the wait for a cup of coffee at the Central Terminal Starbucks back to tolerable. The airport and its staff get to collectively take a breather before the evening commuter rush.

And then another cycle begins again.