The skill/dificulty lies in being able to controll the locations of aircraft and predict their routs so that they pass safely through the airspace. Propper spacing, timing or T/O and Landings, runway incursions and so on is the hard part. Talking on the radio is not hard.
Clearly the father had everything done correctly, just let the kid to the easy job.
This would be the same as me gathering all the Zoning information, doing a building code analasys, design, drawing all the plans/sections/elevations/details and when Im done letting a child hit the print botton.
This sounds more like what happened, but the bigger issue I see is why is there anything/anyone present in the room that could distract the workers? I havent been in a tower, but I can imagine there are buttons and switches there that could have a huge impact if toyed with, so why take a kid who will most likely feel the need to mess with stuff. Honestly, I dont know many adults who wouldnt get in the way somehow just looking at stuff.
the controller should have a display showing air traffic he/she is monitoring, tiles with flight numbers in order that they must be issued/read back clearance or given clearance to t/o, land or transision trough the airspace. Since the controll is on frequency all the time, I dont think they change it often, in smaller airports you will change your frequency as a pilot a few times from approche to tower to ground and so on and speak with the same person. [Lancaster and Reading airports in PA are prime examples of this] So I don’t really know how much the kid could have messed up. Maybe if he knocked the tiles off the rack, or rearanged them the ATC could have given clearance to an airplane which was not at the runway yet, but then the pilot would have still been talking to ground control, not the tower so he would not have even heard it. This was JFK so they have seperate people doing approche/departure, tower and ground.
If the kid told a plane to take off that was not on the runway, they would have come back and asked to retransmit, by that time, the dad would have cought it.
It happend to me once, I contacted Ground and asked to taxi to the runway. I was given permission, about 100 yards after I started taxing and about .8 miles before I got to the runway, tower came on and said I was cleared for t/o lol. This was Lancaster Airport so the tower/ground and approch were all the same guy, even though you change the freq. on your radio, and call them using different names, the same voice answers. My GF heard the transmission and looked at me like “WTF, they want you to take off from the parking lot” I laughed and got back on the radio saying they had made a mistake and I was just starting to taxi. He laughed as well cause he just realised that he cleared me for t/o on the ground frequency and I was not even close to the runway.
The point is, that people f’up all the time in this field. And when it comes to a transmission like the ones the kid was making, its no big deal. Even if he told Jet Blue 171 to take off from the gate, the pilot would have known this was a mistake and cought it as fast as the kid’s father would have and nothing bad would have happend.
Being a former Army Aviator (Instructor Pilot) and commercial aviator (PIC and line Check Airman) for 24+ years and 17,000+ hours of flight time, I thought the story was pretty cool, BUT, the fact remains, the kid was not a FAA Licensed Air Traffic Controller. What if I brought my 8 year old nephew, who’s a master at flying microsoft flight sim programs, into the cockpit of my aircraft and had him fly and answer radios for a major airline? I would be just as guilty of bad judgment and need I say, criminal negligence in the performance of my duties as the pilot in command. The kid had not met the FAA certification required to perform the duties of the job, even if supervised by his father. He could have accomplished the same thing in a simulator with faux radio traffic, and the flying public and his job, would not have been in jeopardy.