Playing With Our Safety: The American Air Traffic Control System
Wrong time, wrong place, wrong air traffic controller. Comair Flight 5191 crashed and burned at the Lexington, Kentucky, airport just over a week ago, leaving forty-nine out of fifty of those on board dead; the copilot, just now waking up, may be a quadriplegic. Now a whole bunch of people, mostly lawyers slavering at the mouth, are trying to find out who’s really responsible.
You and I both know that lawyers are not the ones best able to determine this. There are two people directly involved in the crash who are still alive. They, better than anyone else, know what happened. One, the co-pilot James Polehenke, is just now, as of this writing, coming out of his coma. We’ll hear from him shortly, no doubt.
The other, an anonymous air traffic controller, was not paying attention to the pre-dawn flight as it rolled down the wrong, too-short runway to its doom. This is the man who will never be able to tell the whole story openly and honestly. Why? Because the ATC system will not allow it.
An Atmosphere of Secrecy and Fear
I am fortunate to have an inside angle on this story. A good friend of mine has worked for air traffic control in a smaller tower in the Kentucky area for nearly twenty years. For the eight or nine years I’ve known him, he has bitched about the way controllers are treated.
Here are some of his complaints:
- Air traffic controllers can take hardly any medication, including over the counter cold meds.
- But they are also heavily discouraged, under the threat of losing their jobs, from calling in sick.
- Air traffic controllers are regularly asked to work 16 hours within a single 24-hour period.
- Air traffic controllers are discouraged from whistle-blowing by a Byzantine set of rules which few of them understand.
- Air traffic controllers are regularly given comp time instead of overtime, which they usually lose because they are not allowed to use it before the end of the year.
The double-shift the controller in Lexington worked is a standard practice. My anonymous friend has done it many times. Here’s what happens: you work your normal day shift for a month. Then you get thrown one night shift before your day off, eight hours after your night shift ends. So you work your day shift and have to make yourself sleep for those few hours before the night shift. Every controller must do this. This case is not an anomaly. Instead, it is standard FAA policy, written or no. Before believing anything the FAA says about this case, keep this in mind: the FAA and air traffic controllers have had a dysfunctionally oppositional relationship (i.e., they fight all the time) for decades.
(Scuttlebut has it that the reason the FAA has a problem with sick time abuse is because so many air traffic controllers take extended medical leave, not because they call in sick all the time. My guess is that most of this medical leave would not be necessary if only the worker were given adequate sick time to begin with. Also, due to FAA policies, most ATCs are older—another extended sick leave contributor.)
The towers at secondary airports that so many airplanes depend on are typically staffed with minimal personnel. (For most of the last eight years and probably longer, in fact, there’s been a hiring freeze on controllers—again, this is right from the horse’s mouth.) This means there is NO cushion for your safety. If a tower is short-staffed, there is no one to call on.
Add all this together, and whose safety is at risk? The controllers are up in their towers. The FAA is in its offices in Washington. It’s you, the guy flying in the plane, who will crash and burn because the FAA forces one guy to work when he’s tired. And make no mistake—they do this all the time, despite their denials—or at least create an environment in which this practice is necessary.
Air Traffic Controller Fatigue
In the case of Comair 5191, the crash was caused by multiple problems: pilot unfamiliarity with runways, poor runway layout, and poor conditions for taking off as well as air traffic controller error.
But the single entity taking the most flak for this will be the poor air traffic controller – a veteran controller with seventeen years of experience. I don’t know what’s happened to him. I will bet, however, that he is on administrative leave, and will ultimately be fired for negligence.
Really.
How negligent is his supervisor for requiring him to work that second shift – which, by the way, he is not allowed per FAA rules to turn down.
How negligent is the FAA in forcing weary air traffic controllers to come in and do a mentally-challenging and highly stressful job that lives depend on, with little or no sleep, or while sick?
By the way, new regulations imposed AFTER THIS CRASH (which, remember, was complicated by a tired controller) will make it even harder for controllers to call in because they know they are too tired to work. An employee’s need for rest, they say, is not a good enough reason to call in sick. Neither is a cold.
Digest that for just a moment before you go on.
FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown stated just this week, “We would never have a controller controlling traffic who was too tired to work.” Through magic, I wonder? She says a tired controller is given administrative duties – but that assumes that, forced to come in when he’s not capable, he’s also willing and clear-minded enough to tell his supervisor (the guy who can fire him) he needs those duties. And then, the tired controller during this particular accident was alone – typical of these mid-shifts. Who was going to direct traffic? Laura Brown?
Does this sort of management make anyone safer?
Or does it just help the FAA avoid its job of fixing the system they have broken?
Consider this: American long-distance truck drivers are not allowed to drive with less than ten hours of rest, nor work more than fourteen hours a day. Many companies reduce this maximum to eleven or twelve, citing safety concerns.
You and I and anyone else with an hourly job will get overtime after working forty hours a week. ATCs are supposed to as well. But according to my friend, it’s more likely to be comp time, not actually overtime pay. Or they gerrymander things around so that the overtime flows into the next week – this is common with midshift scheduling.
There is much more wrong with the air traffic controller situation than this. Morale stinks. Stress-related illness is common – but not documented, because if you have a psychological illness you can be fired. Overwork is common. Short-staffing – yes, of the already skeletal staff – is also common. Despite the FAA’s denials and rules banning it, having a single controller in the tower during the mid-shift – from 10:30 pm to 6:30 am – is a common practice. Few towers are fully staffed, either by FAA guidelines or what the controllers say they need.
There are many thousand fewer air traffic controllers today than there should be – and about half of them are due to retire within the next few years. And our Congress is pressuring the FAA to decrease their costs while also hiring more controllers. Now how is that supposed to work? Besides, the new controllers being hired will be greenies—little or no experience—unless we get them from the military. With the current world situation, that is unlikely as well.
What I know about the system makes me afraid to fly America’s friendly skies (o’ course, I do prefer ships, me hearties). But what alternative is there?
Disturbing
What I find most disturbing is that this is an endemic problem – it’s been around for decades – it puts all of us at risk – forty-nine people have now died – and yet it is being all but ignored by the media. Why?
Not to minimize things – but forty-nine people dying at one go is a LOT bigger a story than most of the news stories that get covered. You know, the six kids who died in a fire recently? The one guy who was killed when the crazed San Francisco motorist decided he hated everyone? Even—forgive me, my hero Steve—the death of the Crocodile Hunter. (Though to be fair, much of that coverage is a memorial of a life well lived.) Or Katie Couric’s lame debut. Or the mythic child Surrey appearing in print.
Why are these stories more important than this one, the virtual collapse of a safety net we all depend on? You tell me. I can’t figure it out.
Let’s all just remember that forty-nine people, including a newlywed couple going on their honeymoon, are tragically dead because the FAA short-staffs towers. I think that’s something we can all agree to be upset about.
