Directing Air Traffic Just for Thrill of It

Mike Finucane got me in more trouble than just about anybody I can remember. He certainly got me more death threats.

Mike Finucane was an air traffic controller and a member of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). On Aug. 3, 1981, PATCO went out on strike and Ronald Reagan fired all 11,000 of its members.

At the time, I thought that was a little harsh. True, the members of PATCO had signed an oath not to strike. But police officers and firefighters have signed similar oaths and have gone on strike repeatedly around the country.

True, the average PATCO member was making $33,000 a year, which certainly did not help their popularity with the public.

But, as I wrote at the time, the average baseball player was making $180,000 a year--they went out on strike shortly after the air traffic controllers did and nobody hated them.

And no baseball player ever kept 15 planes on a radar screen from bumping into each other.

The fact was, I wrote, if the name of the union had been Solidarity instead of PATCO, the strikers would have been hailed as standing up for what they believed in. Instead, they were fired, and the air traffic control system in America would pay for it for years.

The phone calls and mail I got were savage. And I, like PATCO, I suspect, was completely unprepared for the vehemence of the reaction. Ronald Reagan had judged the American people correctly:

He knew that the only raise an American is really for is his own raise. He knew that if a strike inconveniences the public, the public will react very strongly against it. And he knew that if he stood up to the strikers, he would be viewed as a strong and determined leader.

Ronald Reagan gave the strikers 48 hours to return to their jobs. Most refused. They were fired.

It is now 10 years later and, in some ways, the system has still not recovered. While air traffic has increased 30% since 1981, there are 2,000 fewer fully trained controllers today than back then.

The Federal Aviation Administration says those figures are misleading but admits that its current staffing falls 16% short of what it considers full strength.

After he was fired, Mike Finucane became a bartender for a while and then did construction work. I lost track of him for years until I found him last week.

He told me he had become the one thing that Ronald Reagan vowed he must never again become: an air traffic controller.

“I asked my boss about this, and he said it was OK to talk about it, but I’m still a little nervous,” Finucane said. “I’m an air traffic controller for the U.S. Army. The Defense Department began hiring ex-PATCO guys about two years after the strike. Everybody was quiet about it. The public still hated us.”

Don’t they still hate you? I asked.

Finucane paused a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess they do. They don’t consider us as bad as that guy in Milwaukee who cut up all those people. But, yeah, the public still hates us.”

Finucane had joined the Air Force right out of high school in 1963 and was trained as an air traffic controller. “My first time?” he said. “Sure, I remember it. I was in a control tower in Japan and I was nervous. Very nervous. I was 19 years old, at an airport with combined civilian and military traffic, and there is this sergeant standing over me.”

And it was scary?

“It was a thrill,” Finucane said. “The biggest thrill of my life. And the thrills never stopped. I knew it was what I wanted to do.”

I have talked to about a half-dozen air traffic controllers over the years, and they all talk about the same things: the thrill, the love of airplanes, the sense of accomplishment.

When he got out of the Air Force, Finucane immediately signed up to become a civilian air traffic controller. After serving a time in Rochester, N.Y., he had a chance to go to Kennedy or O’Hare airport.

For him, there was only one choice. “O’Hare was the Big Show,” he said. “That’s what we called it. I admit it, it was an ego trip. In the radar room, all dark except for the green glow of the screens, you with 15 to 20 planes under your control. Oh, God, I remember some of those days.”

Tell me.

“We’d call them Blood Rushes,” he said. “The weather is bad, you’ve got planes everywhere, and the planes would start to get too close, and the blood would just rush to your head, and you’d break out in this sweat. I’ll tell you a story: One day, I had airplanes all over the place. I was buried, really buried, and my supervisor, a great guy named Denny, he comes up behind me and says, ‘Lemme take it, lemme take it.’ So he took it, and it’s still a mess, and the weather is getting worse, and I am sitting there, and I feel this rain on me. It’s Denny, the sweat is dripping off him and falling on me. Those were the days.”

Those days ended with the strike. Finucane had been making $46,000 a year by working six-day weeks and lots of overtime. He found himself on the picket line making nothing, no unemployment compensation, no food stamps.

Did you ever hope that during the strike a plane might crash and they might need you back? I asked. Did you ever hope it just a little?

“Naw,” he said. “Maybe a few guys did. But not a lot of us. And I’ve got to tell you, when that controller put one plane on top of another in Los Angeles a few months ago, remember that?”

On Feb. 1, 34 people were killed when a USAir 737 was directed to land on top of a smaller Sky West jet at Los Angeles International Airport.

“Well, I felt really sorry for that controller,” Finucane said. “This is going to bother that woman forever. I don’t think she’ll ever go back to the boards.”

Leaving the boards, that was the worst of it. Finucane worked at odd jobs for years. Then he applied for a job at an Army base in Upstate New York, and on Aug. 3, 1988, he got the offer: He could become a military air traffic controller.

“It was the seven-year anniversary of the strike,” he said. “I’ll never forget that date.”

Today he is at Ft. Drum, outside Watertown, not far from the Canadian border, directing Air Force F-16s and A-10s engaged in joint maneuvers with the Army.

Soon, the radar tower will open at Ft. Drum, and Finucane will be working not just with military aircraft but with all the civilian aircraft in northern New York.

There are 15 air traffic controllers at Ft. Drum, and every one of them used to belong to PATCO. There is a union they could join, but none of them has.

“And I’ll tell you something else,” Finucane said. “Some of the other guys working here had been strikebreakers during the strike. Yeah. But we all get along now. These guys are my buddies. All of them.”

And you’re happy?

“I’ve died and gone to heaven,” Finucane said, even though he is making less now than he was making 10 years ago. “I really missed the pump and bang.”

Pump and bang?

“Pumping the planes in and banging them out,” he said. “That’s what I loved. Sometimes I put on my old PATCO baseball cap and think about it.”

I had saved the tough question for last: If you could turn back the clock 10 years, would you go out on strike again?

“Don’t you think I haven’t asked myself that every day for 10 years?” Finucane said.

You get an answer yet?

“I probably would not go out on strike,” he said. “Too many people suffered. And that includes the flying public. We just jumped into it. Naw, I wouldn’t go out again. But that’s over now. That’s the past.”

And then he told me he had to get to work. He had to do a little pumping and banging in the silver skies.

He sounded very happy about it.