FAA Accused of Altering ’81 Controller Data

A House panel charged Friday that FAA officials lied under oath about payroll records prepared during the 1981 controllers’ strike and in some instances doctored time sheets to cheat the controllers.

The committee asked the Justice Department to investigate.

Faced with shoddy documents to justify the firings before the Merit Systems Protection Board, Federal Aviation Administration officials in Chicago for three months created attendance records to bolster their cases, lawmakers concluded.

The report by the Public Works and Transportation subcommittee on investigations and oversight capped a three-year investigation that included private hearings and documents subpoenaed from the Chicago Air Route Traffic Control Center at Aurora, Ill.

John Leyden, a spokesman for the FAA, refused to comment, except to say: “The FAA has received the report and will review it.”

The subcommittee said it was not judging the merits of the 450 firings in Chicago, which were among 11,500 nationwide ordered on Aug. 5, 1981, by then-President Ronald Reagan two days after members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization struck.

Rather, the subcommittee said, it was concerned with the actions of FAA officials while they were defending the firings in front of the board that considers appeals from dismissed federal employees.

For example, FAA officials corrected some attendance records to bring them up to date, but altered others, in some instances recording a controller who was on leave at the time of the strike as being absent without leave, to cheat the controllers, the subcommittee said.