Fear of Flying

Tudor, who had been a controller for 29 years, was used to doing many things at once. The low ceiling meant that in addition to directing the planes that were landing and departing at KCI and the region's smaller airports, she also had to read coordinates to pilots who were flying blind, relying on their instruments for their final approaches.

When the weather is clear, controllers can tell a pilot to follow the plane just ahead of it in line for landing. But on a socked-in cloudy day like this one, planes might as well be flying inside a marshmallow. Controllers have to guide them verbally, making sure they maintain three miles of separation between one another as they come in.

Tudor sat in a windowless room, its lights dimmed to enhance the glow of green and white blips on circular radar scopes. The only noise was that of controllers' firm voices on separate radio frequencies, punctuated by the sporadic beeping of alarms when computers warned that two planes' trajectories could cross in the sky.

In addition to her other tasks, Tudor was sharing the final-approach position with another controller, feeding airplanes onto runways from the east as the other controller watched the west. In the past, when visibility was low and traffic was spiking, supervisors would call in someone from the break room to concentrate on planes on final approach.

Tudor glanced around for her supervisor. But they were so short-staffed that the supervisor was busy working two positions at once — and supervisors rarely pull on the headsets.

Everyone else on duty that day was already in the room. There was nobody in the break room.

She was on her own.

he head of the Federal Aviation Administration knew it would be a rough summer for air travelers.

Back in May, Marion Blakey told the Associated Press that a thunderstorm pattern was to blame. Blakey, who had been appointed to lead the FAA by President Bush in 2002, advised travelers to book morning or early-afternoon flights to avoid the summer's late-day storms.

She was right to predict a bad summer — it turned out to be one of the worst travel seasons in recent memory. Nightly news reports told stories of anguished passengers who'd spent hours on sun-scorched tarmacs, prevented from taking off for reasons the airlines never explained. Last month, MSNBC reported that more than 909,000 flights were late through this past June — twice the number of delayed flights for the same period in 2002.

Elizabeth Isham Cory, public-affairs contact for the FAA's Central Region (which includes Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska), says flight delays this summer were caused by a combination of factors.

"A lot of bad weather, both in the Midwest, on the East Coast and in between. Also, I know we've had a lot of bad weather out west. Weather's going to account for a lot of delays."

Cory also cited airline scheduling and an increase in the number of people traveling.

Kevin Peterson laughs when he hears the FAA blaming the weather for traveler's woes.

The FAA's stormy relationship with controllers is a more likely explanation.

Peterson is the head union representative for controllers who work at KCI. His union and the FAA have been at odds since labor negotiations between the National Air Traffic Controllers Association and the FAA collapsed in March 2006. A few months later, on September 3, 2006 — Labor Day — the FAA instituted new rules, compiled in what union members call "the white book" because they don't acknowledge it as a contract.

The white book set a new pay scale, freezing veteran controllers' salaries and lowering the starting pay for new hires by 30 percent. Some controllers with 20 or more years of experience realized that it would be more lucrative to retire. Salaries in the tower were capped, but retirement pensions come with yearly cost-of-living raises.

No one knows more about the day-to-day state of air travel than the controllers. But while television cameras zoom in on photo ops such as Bush's September 27 meeting with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters, where they discussed a passengers' bill of rights, the media have essentially ignored the controllers' dispute with the FAA.