Monitors Every Trip : Air Dispatcher Is Pilot’s Partner in Flight Safety

Mike Heller worries about weather and he worries about weight. He worries about schedules and he worries about fuel.

He worries about repairs and he worries about logistics. And, always, there is the biggest worry, the worry to beat all worries: that one of his sleek, shining machines will fall from the sky.

Mike Heller is an airline dispatcher. A brochure put out by his union calls his job a “phantom” profession. Heller long ago gave up trying to explain his work; it is too complicated. People confuse it with being an air traffic controller. He is always being asked how his day went in front of the radar scope when, in fact, he doesn’t use one.

So he keeps it simple. He tells people he’s in flight operations for American Airlines at the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport. Period. End of job description.

“Even people within the airline aren’t sure what we do,” Heller said.

But, from his own point of view, what he and others like him do is run the airline.

Their job is to monitor everything happening to each airplane, on the ground and in the air, and to share responsibility with the pilot for getting planes and their passengers to the next stop. They do it in near obscurity from a sterile-looking office deep inside the American Airlines Flight Academy.

Heller can’t even see the runway when he looks out the window. Yet his job is to monitor everything happening to each of his flights right down to problems with rowdy passengers.

Across the nation, only about 1,000 men and women hold this obscure but vital job. Dispatchers keep track of the takeoff-weight limits for airports, which vary according to location and weather conditions. They follow the weather along the entire route and tell the pilots before and during flights where they will encounter trouble spots. They calculate how much fuel each flight will need, both for safety and cost-effectiveness, and where a plane should land if it is diverted. They are the watchdogs who make sure repairs are done and that the parts are on hand to do them.

1,500 Flights a Day

In the case of American Airlines, the dispatchers do this for more than 1,500 flights a day, worldwide. And most of those flights are handled from the airline dispatch office where Heller works.

In the old days, a pilot would drop by for an over-the-counter briefing. Now, the communication is all done by computer. Heller’s tools are a computer terminal, a printer, a two-way radio and a link with the national weather service.

It is quiet in here, for the men and women are intent on their work. Like Heller, many smoke, which bespeaks the pressure of the job; during an eight-hour shift, even a quick trip to the soft drink machine requires asking another dispatcher to monitor incoming calls. But, like pilots, they show a pride in coolness under the gun, a calm voice when the pressure is really on. If an engine goes out on a jet, the job is to get on the horn with the pilot and try to start it back up. Two heads are better than one.

“They’re fairly routine and there are redundancies (back-up systems),” Heller said, as if the loss of an engine were no big deal. Engines are machines, after all, he said, and sometimes machines will fail.

At 2 p.m., Heller strolled into the office dressed, like most of the other men, in a short-sleeve shirt and a tie. He is 41 years old, bald, the father of three. He likes to play golf and still speaks with a New York accent even though he has been away from there for 15 years, first in Chicago and then in Texas since 1980, when American consolidated its operations here.

Dispatchers work shifts around the clock in rotation, but Heller, who is not a morning person, and never has been, likes this eight-hour night stint and trades whenever he can to get it.

Heller’s wife, Kathleen, works for a structural engineer. His stepson, Harry, is 21 and installs telephone systems on Long Island, N.Y. His son Phillip, 18, attends a community college. The youngest child, Michele, is 16 and a high school senior.

Mike Heller’s world is a fairly uncluttered one and, almost from the first, airlines have been a part of it. His father worked for Trans-Caribbean Airlines in New York and, when the time came for Heller to support himself, he was hired there as well, in the crew scheduling department.

When American absorbed Trans-Caribbean, Heller took a job in the dispatch office, only to be laid off a short time later. He did a stint as a bartender, had a couple of sales jobs, worked briefly for Saturn Airways and occasionally collected unemployment before being recalled by American in 1972 and transferred to Chicago.

In fact, Heller has been lucky. Since the deregulation of the airlines in 1978, dispatchers have often found themselves bounced around the country as airlines sprang up, failed or were absorbed into others. At Heller’s office alone, eight dispatchers formerly worked for Frontier Airlines, and American’s takeover of AirCal, based in Orange County, Calif., has put dispatchers there on the American payroll as well, with the prospect that they will be moving to Texas.

The dispatch job is Heller’s life now. Although he wants to retire at 55, while there is still time to do other things, when he’s asked if there is anything he would rather be doing, his answer is no. Well, he says, reflecting, maybe a franchise operation, something like that. But ultimately--no. The lure of being on the front lines of American is too compelling.

And he is not alone. Dick Gromel, Heller’s boss, said that, once hired, very few dispatchers move on to other things. “It’s a challenge,” he said.

Angie Harten, the dispatcher Heller was relieving, leaned back in her swivel chair and did what she always does on a change of shift--she gave him the weather report and filled him in on any mechanical difficulties and delays. She had had quite a shift--both the air traffic controllers’ computer and the backup had gone down in Chicago, clogging the airways above the city.

“They just orbited for hours and hours,” she told him.

Heller took over Harten’s chair, leaned back and lit another cigarette. His printer started spewing data he would use later. At this desk, Heller was assigned 30 flights, all of them in the eastern half of the country. During the course of his shift, he would monitor them all, from the time the hand brake was released at the gate to the time it was reset at the destination.

Heller, as always, then ambled to the center of the room, where the weather briefing was about to begin. There were showers in the Dakotas, but nothing much in the Denver area. A large cell of bad weather was east-northeast of Dubuque, Iowa, and heading for Chicago, with winds gusting to 30 knots. Alternative airports in case Chicago’s O’Hare closed down were Detroit, Des Moines and Indianapolis.

Heavy thunderstorms were predicted for St. Louis later in the day and they were already building around New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La. Isolated thunderstorms were expected in Washington, D.C., and around Atlanta.

Broken Valve on Engine

He walked back to his console and began examining more data. There was, for instance, the problem of Flight 472, from Dallas-Fort Worth to Washington’s Dulles Airport. The inlet anti-ice valve on the leading edge of one jet engine was broken and it could not be opened or closed in the air.

“There is a possibility in Dulles that there might be icing conditions, so I’ll leave it open,” he said. That, however, could somewhat diminish the engine’s efficiency on takeoff, he said, so, “I’ll have to limit the weight. There are only 72 people leaving from Dallas so that won’t be a problem.”

He quickly calculated the plane’s new ramp weight. Having recorded that, Heller went back to his work sheet, deciding which planes would need alternative destinations in case of bad weather.

The latest weather advisory came up on the computer printer, warning that Chicago should experience moderate to heavy rain, wind gusts to 35 knots and probable hail. Heller turned and fed that information by computer to Flight 179, just off the gate at New York’s La Guardia Airport bound for O’Hare.

“He’s got a pretty good swig of holding fuel,” Heller said, explaining that the plane could circle for 30 minutes, fly to an alternative airport and still have the legal required minimum of 45 minutes’ worth of fuel left in its tanks on landing.

Now, things were picking up. A flight from New Orleans to Dallas called in over the radio, wondering how far west it was going to have to go to get around the looming bank of thunderstorms off to the right. A flight from Nashville to Baton Rouge called in, worried about the bank of thunderstorms ahead. The pilot finally decided to divert to Shreveport, La.

A plane was circling over College Station, Tex., waiting for the thunderstorms over Houston to move on.

“There’s more (problem) weather (in the United States) than any other place in the world,” Heller said. “As a rule, if you’re dispatching aircraft in the U.S., you’ll be dealing with it almost every day of summer and spring. In the fall, it’s fog; and, in the winter, it’s ice and snow.”

Then there was more. A flight from Nashville to Houston flew to Austin instead because of the thunderstorms. And St. Louis was getting worse. There was hail, wind was blowing at 46 knots and the holding pattern was getting filled up with thunderstorms. Indianapolis was out as an alternative landing site because that airport, too, was being deluged by storms. Ray Jennings, another dispatcher sitting close to Heller, said he had one plane that would not get into St. Louis.

“This guy has two hours of holding fuel and he’s not going to get in,” he said. “He’s being pushed farther and farther south, and he’s going to be over Memphis soon.”

Diversion Costly

Carrying more fuel means burning more fuel because of the added weight, but diverting to an alternative airport rather than remaining in a holding pattern can be even more costly for the airline.

Minutes later, the St. Louis airport closed altogether and dozens of jets, most of them Trans World Airlines planes, were looking for a place to land. Some of them were ordered as far away as Little Rock, Ark., and Tulsa, Okla. From over the airwaves at Heller’s console came the decisions that would cause hundreds of travelers, already jostled by storms, to land somewhere else.

“People normally understand weather,” Heller said. “If there is fog or a snowstorm, then they understand it. It’s when things they can’t see affect them that they get angry.”

The dispatchers at American were lucky. Only four of their flights into St. Louis were rerouted. Two of them were diverted to Chicago, two others to Memphis.

The shift went on. The plane out of Dallas-Fort Worth bound for Dulles with the de-icing problems had to be diverted to Baltimore because of storms. Another flight from Dallas-Fort Worth was late in departing for New York’s La Guardia, which was crucial because La Guardia has a midnight curfew on flights during the summer months. Before the plane took off, Heller had to obtain permission from the New York Port Authority to extend the curfew. The plane landed in New York at 12:45 p.m.

As often happens in his job, Heller never did have time to go to the airline cafeteria. Things were just too busy. He grabbed a ham-and-cheese sandwich from the machine in the next room.

And Chicago, the source of real concern at the beginning of the shift, lucked out. The storms never got to O’Hare, and the only problem was avoiding foul weather to the north and south during takeoffs and landings.

“Some of these things never materialize, but you’ve got to take them seriously,” Heller said.

His shift was winding down when a call came from a jet about an abusive passenger on board. Paul Brennan of the European desk handled it because the plane was on a nonstop flight from Dallas to London. The passenger was swearing at the flight attendants. The pilot discussed landing at New York’s Kennedy Airport to discharge the passenger before going on. But the man quieted down and the flight continued.

“You see,” Heller said, “there is always something going on.”

At 10 p.m., Heller’s shift was done. Not a bad day--just an average one. He drove to his house in nearby Colleyville, ate a couple of tacos and flipped on the television.