Inside Scoop: Air Traffic Controllers
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It would be nice to imagine that the pilots flying you from point A to point B on America’s commercial airliners are happy in their jobs.
And it would be nicer still to imagine that the people directing those pilots around the sky -- the nation’s roughly15,000 air traffic controllers -- are also a contented bunch. After all, air traffic controllers have one of the most important jobs imaginable -- to safely land and choreograph a ballet in the sky that includes some 5000 planes flying over American territory at any given moment.
But air traffic controllers today are feeling far from warm and fuzzy.
Works rules instituted in 2006 by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that included salary freezes for veteran controllers and pay cuts for new controllers have led to a high rate of early retirement in the work force -- and forced mandatory over time for many of those controllers who’ve stuck around.
And while the FAA is hard at work hiring new controllers -- some 17,000 new controllers will enter the workforce over the next decade, according to an FAA spokesman -- the talk among controllers themselves is cause for alarm if you’re a member of the flying public.
Here’s what three controllers had to say:
The Veteran Controller
15 years experience at JFK airport’s control towerWe’re in a profession where you’re called upon to make three or four thousand decisions in an eight-hour day -- and every decision has to be right. We realize, from the passenger perspective, that you have a burning desire to get to your destination on time. So we’re striving to save you those 15 or 30 seconds -- that’s our goal -- but we never, ever do that at the expense of your safety.
The work environment, however, has changed. Four years ago at Kennedy, in 2004, I worked with 36 other fully certified Air Traffic Controllers. Now I work with 20. We have a lot of trainees, and despite what the FAA says -- that they’re hiring controllers -- the fact is, they’re hiring trainees. Imagine you go to the hospital and it’s a teaching hospital with first, second and third year residents -- that’s what air traffic controller trainees are. They don’t get to work by themselves, they’re always plugged in with someone else. And even when they first certify, you can’t replace my experience with two years on the job. We teach them to be safe, but we can’t teach them how to be as safe or efficient as I am. That takes time -- there’s no magic wand.
I am much more aware of the person working next to me when it’s someone new and inexperienced -- I double and triple and check things -- and my colleagues do the same thing. And while a lot of man-hours have gone into making sure accidents don’t happen, I guess it’s always in the back of your mind. I work with a lot of very professional people who are very good at their jobs who make sure mistakes don’t happen. But I also work with a lot of guys who are brand new and aren’t as efficient as I am, and sometimes there aren’t enough of us. And new people tend to make more mistakes than old people.
Flying is probably the only thing that people do on a regular basis that they have no control over. Passengers are in a completely helpless position, and I think that’s why there’s so much frustration.
There are times when the system is completely over burdened, and that’s when you get delayed. There are places we have so few Air Traffic Controllers these days.
In order to keep the level of safety where we need to keep it, if we can’t work 20 airplanes in 15 minutes then we work 18 planes -- you kind of shut the valve, which leads to delays. If noone’s physically there to help me, the only thing I can do to ensure your safety is slow things down. As a passenger, you might be in a hold in the air or on the ground.
The scariest thing I ever saw? It was 13 years ago, with two 747s -- one taking off toward San Francisco and one landing from London. The windows in our tower are 8X8 feet, and I saw both planes in the same window at the same time -- just 200 feet off the ground. One went into a bank behind the other one. I haven’t forgotten it, I never will -- it’s surreal how time doesn’t stop, but it absolutely slows down. Errors of that magnitude are rare, however.
I am retiring on my 50th birthday, I don’t want to work for an employer who doesn’t want me to work for them. And every one of my coworkers can tell you how many days they have left till they retire. As long as the FAA retains their punitive rule enforcement toward us that they adopted two years ago, my coworkers will depart in droves. The White House and FAA will say it doesn’t exist, but there’s a brain drain in the agency that’s unparalleled.