The YNG (Youngstown, OH) air traffic control tower
Interesting Article Mentioning Me
as An Air Traffic Controller

Me at work in the YNG tower (late 1970s)


I was an air traffic controller from 1973 until 1981 when President Ronald Reagan fired me (and several thousand other controllers) for going on strike1. Recently2, I did a Google search on my name, Rick Shabsin, and, amongst other things, very surprisingly, found this article3. The interesting part (of interest to me, and the reason the article is here at all) can be found in the 8th and 9th paragraphs of the English Circle of Jerks article embedded in the main German article (the red vertical lines were added by me). The German at the beginning of the article is translated here4 (I believe the word Lotsen, translated as pilot, actually should be guide, referring to an air traffic controller), and the single line at the end is translated here.

I'm pretty sure I know who the author of the Circle of Jerks article is; he gives himself away at the end when he reveals that his initials are C.T. And though I trained an awful lot of people during my years at Youngstown Municipal Airport (I know it was Youngstown due to the runway 14/32 reference), I remember C.T. was a pilot, and the writing style seems like it might've come from him. In regards to the "Bob Dylan look-alike" comment, well, I'm not sure where that came from (this? Not even close), though I did sing a lot of Bob Dylan songs in those days. Oh, well....


1 The strike began on August 3, 1981. Read more about it on Wikipedia.
2 I did the Google search on my name on September 4, 2012.
3 I turned the article I found at http://www.pilots.de/ubb/NonCGI/Forum8/HTML/000250.html into a GIF to display here, just in case, at some point in the future, it disappears from the web.
4 I believe this article is from a discussion thread on a German airline pilot forum about the relationship between pilots and air traffic controllers. Of course, the Google Translate translations are not perfect.