Take Some Pressure Off Controllers : By Bringing Pilots Into the System, We Could Have Safer Skies

Imagine driving 55 m.p.h. down a rush-hour Los Angeles freeway in fog so heavy that only the white lines are visible 10 feet in front of your car.

Imagine further that you and all the other unseen drivers around you are being directed by a central traffic-control facility--a voice coming through a radio headset making all the decisions for you on how fast to go, which lane to occupy, which way to turn, when to hit the brake.

Finally, picture a high-speed freeway without a median strip. Opposite-direction traffic can whiz by on your left and your right, kept from harm’s way only by the split-second errorless performance of the controllers, their radar equipment and computers, and by each driver’s ability to flawlessly follow their terse instructions and the established rules.

If you add to this picture the third dimension of altitude, you get a rough idea of why the job of air-traffic control over the Los Angeles basin--or anywhere in the United States--is one of the most technically demanding and nerve-racking functions of American life.

And life, in fact, is exactly what is at stake. As the disaster at Cerritos showed only too clearly, a simple failure by the air-traffic-control system--a small aircraft not displayed (or not noticed) on the radar scope and not spotted by the flight crew of an oncoming jetliner--can kill scores of trusting people in an instant.

As the National Transportation Safety Board continues its investigation of the Cerritos crash, we need to keep several realities in focus regarding our air-traffic-control system. Perhaps the most important is the simple truth that we trust it too much.

Airline passengers and the public in general have the erroneous idea that, once airborne, aircraft are securely in the “arms” of a control system that is capable of performing perfectly 100% of the time.

In reality, the Federal Aviation Administration’s system, which does perform flawlessly more than 99% of the time, does so only because of the dedication and talent of the human beings within it--diligent people who almost always manage to compensate for the system’s inadequacies.

But “almost always” is not sufficient, which means that in some respects air-traffic control is still a crap shoot.

The men and women who sit before relatively sophisticated computerized radar scopes driven by less-than-state-of-the-art FAA computer equipment try to be perfect, but, being human, they are subject to fatigue, inattention, interruptions, task saturation and a host of other well-documented frailties. They cannot guarantee that all conflicting air traffic will be seen in time to order other airliners around it. They cannot promise that they will never misinterpret a target or have their attention diverted at a critical moment by other traffic, a supervisor or a telephone call from another sector. Nevertheless, the system is built on the assumption that these intense, precise people will make no errors.

Since busy crews of high-performance jets cannot be expected to physically see conflicting traffic in time, pilots and passengers are as dependent on air-traffic-control perfection as are the drivers on our mythical “positively controlled freeway.” But even with the best training (which the FAA has yet to achieve), adequate manning (which is highly questionable) and sufficient equipment (seldom the case), we can’t expect any controller to be immune to mistakes in separating the aircraft darting ceaselessly through the thick aerial soup.

Cerritos, then, is symptomatic of a more profound, generic problem: We depend too much on a single element in the equation --the air-traffic controller--to know all, see all and protect all.

Instead, the pilots themselves must be included in the process--not to make or second-guess the controller’s directives, but to monitor them. The future of the air-traffic-control system will never include a solution to the generic limitations of a ground-based control system if the air crews are not “brought into the loop.”

What’s more, the communications technology to do this already exists. One type of proposed system, for example, could transmit information to computer screens in airborne cockpits--possibly giving pilots the same radar display being monitored on the ground by the controller and enabling them to catch a mistake or “pop-up” traffic before it presents a hazard. The new collision-avoidance system in final testing by the FAA will warn pilots of traffic conflicts independent of the controllers.

New equipment in a system that depends on people is never a solution by itself. But, by providing new methods to back up the controllers, human mistakes and omissions can be caught at an early stage. Regrettably, without a change of philosophy and a strong commitment on the part of the FAA and the industry (and resolute funding by Congress), many of these improvements will be decades away.