Air safety at risk, controllers say

The problems include declining numbers of air traffic controllers, a looming wave of retirements that will increase due to the contract the government imposed on their union and low morale due to high stress on the job with no relief.

In a telephone press conference Feb. 13, Patrick Forrey, new president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, joined controllers from the Chicago area, San Diego and Atlanta took their case to the public.

They said the Federal Aviation Administration is imposing work rules which drive veteran controllers into earlier-than-planned retirements, and hiring and training people "just off the street" to handle extremely busy airport towers, such as those three.

The result, they said, is that safety is at risk, as the number of near-misses increases.

NATCA and the Bush administration are at loggerheads over a new contract for the nation\’s air traffic controllers. NATCA, formed after ex-GOP President Reagan fired all the nation\’s controllers in 1981 for their then union\’s strike–also over safety reasons–negotiated a pact with outgoing President Clinton\’s FAA by early 2001.

But Bush\’s government repudiated that contract, and NATCA and FAA bargained for years. Last year, Bush FAA chief Marion Blakey unilaterally declared an impasse and imposed her last contract offer. It establishes a two-tier pay system and freezes or cuts pay for veteran controllers for their remaining years on the job, Forrey said.

NATCA, which has 20,000 controller members, is lobbying the new Democratic-run 110th Congress to change the law, removing Blakey\’s unilateral power. It hopes that would push her back to the bargaining table, Forrey said. Meanwhile, the situation in the skies is getting worse.

The pact, coupled with past retirements, few replacements, and job stress–where controllers must handle up to 240 takeoffs and landings combined every hour–are leading more and more controllers to retire, the unionists said. Forrey added many controllers hired in 1981-84 to replace the fired PATCO controllers have reached the end of their working lives and the agency\’s mandatory retirement age. Already, the stress of the job and the short staffing have shown up in rising numbers of incidents, several of them harrowing near-misses the local controllers described.

"If a controller is working 15 planes at the same time, and you\’re on No. 15, you don\’t want the controller to forget you," said Atlanta controller Gary Brittain. "But when I talk to my colleagues, I hear the exhaustion in their voices and see the fatigue in their eyes and in their faces. The shrinking circle of expertise" that union president Forrey described "is more like a noose around our neck," with safety consequences for passengers, he said.

In the worst case the three discussed, Brittain described how an exhausted veteran controller last June routinely "cleared a departure (takeoff) and the plane shouldn\’t have been released" due to heavy incoming traffic at Atlanta\’s Hartsfield International Airport. Chicago\’s O\’Hare and Hartsfield are the two busiest airports in the nation.
That\’s because there were eight incoming planes to Hartsfield, one behind the other, and the outgoing plane was taking off headed right for them. That controller made the mistake because he had been working six-day weeks with extensive overtime under hugely stressful conditions for months, due to FAA policies which have left Hartsfield short 25 controllers of its assigned 59 for all of its shifts, Brittain noted.

"The plane was going down the runway at 140 knots (nautical miles per hour), two knots before takeoff speed" when the controller caught the danger. "The plane used its hot (emergency) brakes and it was our longest runway, so the takeoff was aborted," he said. The eight incoming planes were diverted, four to the north and four to the south.

But the miss was so narrow that even after the abort and a 45-minute delay for the plane to sit on the taxiway for its brakes to cool, when the pilot tried to return to the terminal, all his tires blew and caught fire. The controller "was fatigued and it was due to that" that the incident occurred, Brittain added.

But the FAA refuses to admit there is short-staffing in the controller force, even after a fatal nighttime crash in Kentucky several months ago–a crash that occurred because the airport tower was supposed to have two nighttime controllers, but had only one.

Instead, FAA is hiring former Defense Department controllers and graduates of college air traffic control programs and inserting them for training into busy towers and miles-wide control areas–called tracons–between airports, such as at San Diego and the Chicago tracon, outside Aurora. Usually, training qualified controllers for such busy towers takes 3-1/2 to four years, the unionists explained.

The FAA is also trying to break in a new control system while training these rookies, said Aurora tracon controller Jeff Richards. His tracon controls the airspace over five states–Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin–and the combination of trying to train a rookie and break in the system at the same time caused a near-collision over Dubuque, Iowa, several months ago.

"We had two planes coming head-on," within two miles of each other, Richards said. The accident was averted by the pilots.

Mark Gruenberg writes for Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.