Pilots Tell Increasing Problems With Nation’s Air Traffic Control System
The safety hot line at the Air Line Pilots Assn. is ringing more frequently these days as pilots report increasing problems with the nation’s air traffic control system.
The pilots say that their complaints, which include accounts of misunderstandings and communications problems with controllers, reflect a shortage of experienced air traffic controllers at a time when the level of traffic is soaring.
“We have noticed a significant number of calls with unusual circumstances occurring,” said John E. O’Brien, head of the association’s engineering and air safety department.
According to one report received by ALPA, two passenger jets nearly collided over New York last fall when one of the pilots mistakenly understood that a clearance given to another plane was his. When he tried to double-check his presumed clearance, he had no luck because the air traffic controller was busy talking with one of his co-workers. So, assuming he had clearance, he climbed through the clouds just in time to be seen by--and barely missed by--another jet.
In another instance, the pilot of an airliner flying across country was suddenly confronted by the voice of a controller demanding: “What are you doing there? You’re not supposed to be there.” The information notifying the controller of the plane’s approach either had not been transferred from another facility or had been misinterpreted.
Although such snafus do not always put the nation’s airlines and air passengers in imminent danger, the ALPA reports underscore the fact that the nation’s air traffic control system is functioning with a far less experienced crop of controllers than was on the job before President Reagan fired 11,700 striking controllers in August, 1981.
Gaining Experience
At the Federal Aviation Administration, Jack Ryan, director of air traffic operations service, insists that the system is functioning well. “As every day goes by,” he said, “the people who are there gain more experience.”
He said the agency has compensated for the effects of the strike by centralizing its authority over the nation’s air traffic controllers. The FAA’s new flow-control system, which helps keep delayed planes waiting on the ground instead of circling in the air, has reduced air traffic at peak hours, he declared. And he pointed out that the FAA has introduced a computer monitoring program--nicknamed “snitch patch” by controllers--that automatically reports when controllers let planes get too close in the air.
But of the 14,000 controllers at work today, officials say that only 8,525, or about 61%, are ranked as full-performance-level controllers, qualified to handle a wide variety of radar positions. Before the 1981 strike by the defunct Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, according to Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), the FAA employed about 16,250 controllers, of whom 13,325, or about 82%, had reached the full performance level.
Lautenberg and other members of Congress, including Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) and Rep. Guy V. Molinari (R-N.Y.), have sponsored legislation urging the Administration to rehire some of the experienced controllers who were fired in 1981. Lautenberg said the controllers who lost their jobs have already paid dearly.
While the number of controllers is gradually rising, reduced experience levels and understaffing at certain busy FAA facilities remain concerns to William E. Jackman, spokesman for the Air Transport Assn., which represents the nation’s major airlines. “The capacity hasn’t grown to meet the demand,” Jackman said. “If we don’t keep up with the need for controllers, we’re going to run into problems.”
Airline industry analysts say that air traffic, spurred by super-saver fares, grew by about 11% last year and predict that it will increase at a more normal rate of 5% to 7% in 1986, boosting the total number of passengers above 400 million. “We’re not convinced the system will be ready for that kind of growth,” Jackman said.
All this is adding to the burden at many airport control towers as well as the 20 en-route centers that guide airplanes across the country.
“There are some peak periods that are kind of scary. You have a lot of traffic and you have to move it,” said Al Kivitt, 35, who gave up his job as a bank loan collector to become a controller at the Denver en-route center after the 1981 strike.
“The thing with experience is that you see situations that you’ve seen before. A lot of times I come up on a situation I haven’t seen before. I don’t think that makes it unsafe. It just makes the situation harder for the people who are working it.”
A controller from the Los Angeles Basin, who asked not to be identified, said: “There is no lack of competence, but there is a lack of experience.”
Not everyone in the control centers believes that today’s controllers are handicapped by their inexperience. Howie Barte, a 38-year-old controller at Quonset, R.I., who stayed on the job during the 1981 strike, said that many post-strike recruits “have been baptized by fire because of the heavy traffic in the system.”
“The controllers that have replaced those who left have the same strengths and weaknesses,” Barte said. “Those who are talented will be talented the day after they get checked out. Those who are mediocre will still be mediocre with a lot of experience.”
‘Assembly-Line Process’
But John Galipault, head of the Aviation Safey Institute in Worthington, Ohio, is not so confident. “Air traffic control is basically an assembly-line process,” he said. “The new controllers are developing, but they’re developing slowly, as would any group.”
Aviation experts point to such tragedies as last November’s collision between a corporate jet and a small plane over Teterboro, N.J., killing six people. Federal investigators are probing whether a controller might have done a better job of directing the corporate jet away from the smaller plane.
And an Eastern Airlines jet was forced to abort a takeoff at Washington National Airport last September when a helicopter crossed in front of it after a controller failed to warn it to avoid the jet’s runway.
The House Public Works and Transportation subcommittee on investigations issued a report last September concluding that controller staffing shortages, fatigue and an unseasoned work force were jeopardizing air safety. Rep. Norman Y. Mineta (D-San Jose), chairman of the aviation subcommittee, said in an interview that the more experienced controllers must bear more of the load and that supervisors must be “more alert to what’s going on.”
The FAA announced plans last September to hire about 1,000 additional controllers over the next two years. But that was before Congress enacted the new Gramm-Rudman law, which will require across-the-board and potentially deep cuts in most federal spending programs--including the FAA--if Congress cannot put the budget on a path toward balance by 1991.
“There is no way to avoid impacting on controllers when Gramm-Rudman comes down the chute,” Mineta said. “The question is not so much how many do we hire but how many we keep from being fired. It’s taken us 50 years to build up our air traffic control system, and in one or two fiscal years we’re going to be decimating it.”
‘Fiscal Terrorism’
The budget cuts could hit not only the controllers but also the electronic equipment they use. Howard E. Johannssen, head of the Professional Airways Systems Specialists, which represents the FAA employees who maintain that equipment, called the prospective cutbacks “acts of fiscal terrorism. They will almost inevitably lead to the death of passengers and aircraft crews in the increasingly crowded American airspace.”
Johannssen pointed out that the number of technicians has dropped from 11,600 at 19,000 facilities in 1978 to 7,200 at 22,000 facilities in 1986. “Competent, well-trained people who hold the fiber of the system together are leaving because the job is rougher,” he said. “It is beyond human endurance to do the job of two or three people, day after day.”
But it is the controllers themselves who are the focus of most concern. Not only are some of the control centers understaffed now, but they face a potential rush to retirement by many of the controllers who survived the 1981 strike.
About 2,800 of the nation’s 14,000 controllers are now eligible to retire, and a provision of the House-passed tax overhaul bill might encourage many of them to leave the job this year. The provision would eliminate one of the juiciest features of federal retirement benefits--their tax-exempt status for the first three years after retirement--but it would probably not affect those who retire this year.
Understaffing at the nation’s air traffic control centers--and the attendant problems of long hours and fatigue for those on the job--is propelling a movement to organize controllers into a new union to replace PATCO, whose strike contributed to the shortage of experienced controllers in the first place.
Two unions, the Marine Engineers Beneficial Assn. and the American Federation of Government Employees, are competing to organize the controllers, and John Thornton of the MEBA said: “There is more support now than there has ever been.”
