Why Be Afraid

I've got some ideas of why to be afraid.

The Air Traffic Control system is going to implode soon. Let me explain.

In one day, several thousand peoples’ lives are in my hands. No, I don’t work for an insurance company; I am an air traffic controller.

Each workday (and I am working six-day weeks more often than not nowadays) I personally talk to a hundred or more planes, some small, most big. We have to keep them apart, missing by three miles and/or a thousand feet. I am new to one of the busiest radar approach control facilities in the world, having spent several years in a small tower and military approach. In the game for around fifteen years, I am hardly a new face in the FAA, but I am challenged by my new job in the radar.

Most people think that being an air traffic controller is like any other job. If you work at Store A as a cashier, then you go to store B, the register works pretty much the same. A CPA is pretty much a CPA. ATC is different each place. Yeah, the rules of separation are the same no matter where you are, but each facility, and area, has its own particular set of procedures that must be learned and practiced before you get to work it by yourself. It is kind of like internships for doctors or police officers in training, only the consequences of our mistakes are even more severe. If a police officer discharges his weapon or a doctor makes a mistake, one person might be affected. If I make a mistake, several hundred people might be affected, or worse, die. No wonder the average lifespan of an air traffic controller is merely 64 years.

Job stress is only half the problem. While most of us love what we do, our work environment is far from ideal. When contract talks broke down in 2006, the FAA imposed its own work rules on us, cutting salaries and some of our pay programs designed to retain highly qualified controllers. As a result, many of the most experienced controllers retired. In addition, new-hires are quitting, and some people who applied are turning down the job offers because of the salary cuts in the controller workforce, as well as negative labor/management relations. Of course, managers and higher-ups still get their same salaries (plus bonuses) while complaining about the exorbitant controller compensation, most of which comes from overtime because we are working short-staffed. The FAA cannot replace people faster than they are leaving and there is no end in sight to this problem. I am working mandatory overtime nearly every week with no end in sight. I haven’t had a real weekend in months.

Some reporter wondered in an article if we would strike over the problems and lack of contract. That reporter needs to do their homework; no Federal employee has the legal right to strike or participate in a job action. The strike in 1981 was illegal, and that is why those controllers were fired.

Each time we got a “Dear Colleague” letter from Administrator Marian Blakey, we cringed. She has never put on a headset and has no idea what our job entails, and she is no colleague of ours. According to her, we are overpaid and not worth it. Even though the Union warned for years that staffing was waning, the FAA did next to nothing. In the meantime, Headquarters engaged in its annual “talent” show so Marian could shake her booty with bells on it. A fine use of tax dollars. Seen her salary plus bonuses? Don’t worry, though. She is in the private sector now, working for the very people she appeased as the FAA Chief.

As a result, controllers like me are picking up the slack because the seasoned professionals are bailing out. I am a band-aid; a low-time apprentice, certified on a few positions, mostly used as a finger in the dike of escalating traffic counts and diminishing controller staffing. I am not alone.

You want to know why you are really sitting at the airport instead of flying? Because my co-workers and I are spending more and more time on position working more and more airplanes, with less rest than ever, and if I get just one more airplane, someone might get too close or die. If I am lucky, I get a handoff, a controller whose job is to talk to other facilities and adjacent positions and help me watch and plan my traffic so they don’t get too close. More often than not, though, it is just me, solo, watching big metal tubes zipping through the skies, doing what I tell them to do.

Of course, once in a while, that magic three-mile/thousand-foot zone gets violated, and then we are called on the carpet and sent through the wringer with a load of people telling us what we did wrong, asking us why we didn’t do it the right way. We call them “deals,” and no deal is good. Too many and it costs you your job. Forget the nice “Pushing Tin” idea you have of what we do: it is serious business and we take it seriously.

That is why the FAA mouthpiece’s mantra of “safety was never compromised” is a joke to those of us who know better. When a major ATC Center loses all of its radios or radar—and this has occurred recently—how can safety not be at risk? Ask yourself how safe you feel knowing that airliners are careening through the skies at 500 miles per hour with no one talking to them. Now put yourself in the seat of one of those planes and ask the question again. Ignorance is bliss to the flying public, because if they knew what really went on behind the scenes, Amtrak would be reborn.

Any accident makes all of us nervous. Controllers speculate about what ATC did or did not do, or could have done. Most controllers believe that one more set of eyes in Lexington tower might have saved the Comair flight in Kentucky. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer eyes out there watching the airplanes, even though air traffic is growing every year. The FAA just cannot keep up with retirements and people resigning. Couple that with the fact that it takes roughly three years—sometimes longer—for a controller to master the basics in a TRACON like mine, and you have the current system. No amount of automation or multi-billion dollar system touted as the solution is going to expedite traffic and put more airplanes in the air if there is no one to guide them. Naturally, if the ones who are guiding them are too tired to do it right, then more errors might occur. That fact is already in evidence, but many times it is simply whitewashed into a non-event to cover up the near-miss.

Part of the problem is that the FAA wants ATC to be a dollars and cents operation, but this is safety, not business. The Boyd Group, an aviation-consulting firm, stated in an independent study that the controllers and front line managers are the ones keeping the FAA afloat. More people may have to die before the system gets fixed.
In the meantime, overworked controllers will continue to keep up with the rise in air traffic and decline in controllers, working six-day weeks and ten-hour days to make up for the Agency’s “business” approach to ATC.