Fear of Flying

Blakey said she doubted that controllers "would act against their own self-interest" by retiring, given that many had mortgages and their children's college education to pay. "There is not going to be any mass run for the exits," she insisted.

But she has been proved wrong. Since the FAA's work rules went into effect, resignations and retirements have emptied control towers across the country.

Though air travel is almost back to pre-9/11 levels (after reaching its lowest point in 2003), the number of controllers watching the skies continues to fall.

Six years ago, 43 fully certified controllers were available to work at KCI. Today, just 25 provide continuous coverage of KCI's airspace, which extends from the ground to an altitude of 15,000 feet within 100 miles of the airport. Fifteen controllers left between September 2006 and September 2007.

Most of the area's controllers work at the Kansas City Air Route Traffic Control Center — the Kansas City Center, for short — a beige, 1960s-era government building with turquoise window coverings just off the Interstate 35 and Santa Fe interchange, next to a microwave tower in Olathe.

These controllers are responsible for a long, slender chunk of airspace over the middle of the country, covering most of Kansas and Missouri, a piece of southern Illinois and a part of northern Oklahoma.

The facility is equipped with diesel backup generators and was built over a cistern full of water for flushing it clean of nuclear fallout in the event of a Cold War disaster. A full-time meteorologist from the National Weather Service is on staff to alert controllers about threatening weather patterns.

A year ago, 397 controllers worked there. Now, the number is down to 268.

As of September, there have been 339 incidents nationwide this year in which planes flew too close to each other or other objects. That's up from 297 in the first nine months of 2006.

The day that Jenny Tudor faced a low ceiling and no help, she finally told the next pilot on the runway to hang tight, then halted departures from her eastern half of the airport until she had everything else under control.

Stopping departures is an air traffic controller's last resort — and controllers have been doing it at least once a day since their staffing crisis began.

he white book's new rules have created other problems, too.

Controllers remember good old days when managers were on the controllers' softball teams and acted more like drinking buddies than bosses.

Peterson says the cozy relationship ended last September, when the FAA convened a meeting of managers and supervisors for a conference in St. Louis. At that meeting, Blakey and other FAA officials briefed managers on the white book. The message, according to Peterson and his fellow union reps, was that after years of working like equally ranked colleagues, managers were to regain dominance over their controllers.

The managers returned, Peterson says, with the gusto of new converts to a religion.

Managers now told controllers when to eat, when to take a break, how to dress, when to take a vacation. More problematic was that managers questioned their subordinates' use of sick leave.

The tower must be staffed around the clock. At Kansas City's tower in years past, supervisors insisted that 11 controllers report to work at the beginning of each shift; five people worked in the glassed-in tower cab, and six people kept watch in the radar room. Now, supervisors have a hard time staffing the control rooms with more than seven people at a time — and that's with three people a day working overtime, six days a week.

Peterson is sitting in a downtown coffee shop with Scott Hanley, the controllers' union representative at the Kansas City Center, and Howard Blankenship, the regional vice president of NATCA. They're explaining what the shortage of controllers means inside the towers. Peterson estimates that he has slept one hour in the past 30.

"It used to be that I'd come in, work an hour and a half, take a 30-minute break and repeat," he says.

"And love every minute of it," Hanley interjects. "Don't get us wrong. We love working airplanes. Absolutely love it. But all this other crap makes us hate to go to work."

"This is a job where you need downtime," Peterson explains. "You get fatigued after staring at a monitor for two hours. Your eyes get tired. If you take a break, the manager is right on you saying, 'I need you back in five minutes. Just get a drink, go to the bathroom or whatever and then get back.' There will be three people on four positions, and we know you can't close one or the planes stop. It's going to happen that someone will — "

"Soil themselves," Hanley finishes. He talks about a controller at the Kansas City Center who was feeling sick and pleading to go on a break. On his final request for a break, unable to hold it any longer, he threw up on his supervisor. Another controller had to throw up in a radar-room trash can before his supervisor would believe that he wasn't feigning illness.

When traffic gets busier than the controllers can handle, they have a few last-ditch options. One is to hold departing flights on the ground. Another is for KCI controllers to call the Kansas City Center and ask them to keep incoming planes separated by 10 miles as they enter KCI's airspace. These tactics used to be rare. They slow things down for controllers — and for travelers.