Fear of Flying

"It directly relates to this travel summer," Hanley says.

After work, controllers sometimes wash away the stress with beer at the Hooters on Barry Road near Interstate 29, four miles from KCI.

Here, trainees sit at the end of a long table filled with retired and still-employed controllers.

They fear that the FAA's salary cutbacks undermine the quality of candidates who might be interested in the work. The trainees say their salary at the FAA training center in Oklahoma City was $18,600, without benefits. A controller further down the table shouts out that he made more than that at the same training center back in 1982. A trainer in Oklahoma City tells The Pitch that one of his students made more money on unemployment than with his training salary.

These trainees can't be fully certified until they've completed three to five years working with a supervisor looking over their shoulders, so their presence in the tower does little to ease the staffing crunch. A controller not up to speed after five years of supervised work has to look for a new career.

Veteran controllers, meanwhile, speak of their nightmares.

"I had one recurring dream where I was in the tower cab and, for some reason, the mics never worked," one says.

"I dreamt I was driving down the road toward the tower," another says, "and there were planes falling down out of the sky, all around."

he retired tin pushers drinking at Hooters are tough guys who worked under mantras such as "You send 'em, I'll blend ´em." They used to joke that Boeing couldn't make enough planes to fluster them.

Their salaries match their egos, which is why, they say, the FAA is eager to phase them out.

When George W. Bush appointed Blakey as head of the FAA in 2002, it was her first aviation-specific job. Her Southern drawl and civilian background set her apart from her predecessor, Jane Garvey, a Clinton appointee who had previously run Boston's Logan International Airport.

Blakey was the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board in 1992 and 1993. From 1993 until Bush tapped her, she ran Blakey & Associates, a D.C.-area consulting firm that specialized in promoting traffic-safety issues such as buckling seatbelts and preventing drunk driving. (Blakey's sister, Leslie, and another senior consultant took over the firm in 2001; it's now called Blakey & Agnew.)

During her term, Blakely faced criticism for running the FAA like a private business — and told reporters she wasn't sorry for it. For example, in 2003, she privatized flight service stations, which provide pilots with information about weather and flying conditions. Lockheed Martin won the $1.9 billion contract.

Before her term ended on September 13, Blakey announced her new job: president and chief executive of the Aerospace Industries Association, the country's top defense-industry lobbying group. The AIA represents corporations such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Boeing — companies to which she'd handed contracts as FAA administrator.

Some analysts believe that Blakey's salary cuts are part of an effort to make the air-traffic-control operations more attractive to private bidders — that the agency intends to privatize air traffic control the way it privatized flight service stations.

Blakey's administration led "an extensive public relations campaign to convince the general public that controllers were overpaid," according to a recent congressional report. After studying the FAA prior to re-authorizing its funding, the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure issued a September 17 report noting that, among other things, committee members could not find "any other instance in which a Federal Government agency has tried to stir up public resentment against its employees."

Back in March, Blakey appeared on C-SPAN's Newsmakers show, where she was interviewed by Alan Levin of USA Today and Leslie Miller of the Associated Press. Blakey told the reporters, "[Air traffic controllers'] wages, their salary, all their compensation, when you roll it up together, it's over $175,000 a year on average." A month after her C-SPAN appearance, she told reporters that the the FAA aimed to bring the salaries more closely in line with the salaries of the FAA's other skilled workers.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the annual mean income for an air traffic controller in 2006 was $110,270, compared with flight attendants ($56,150) and aircraft mechanics ($49,300). Airline pilots, however, make $140,380. Those numbers don't include benefits such as health care, retirement contributions, sick leave and other compensation, which Blakey included in her statements to reporters.

FAA spokeswoman Cory's numbers were different from Blakey's; she told The Pitch that the average controller's compensation was $165,000 but that 10 percent of the controller workforce made more than $200,000 in salary and benefits.

When The Pitch asked Cory why the FAA wanted to change its contract with NATCA last year, Cory e-mailed an article written by Ronald Utt for the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank. (Utt, who has a Ph.D. in economics, has co-authored a book titled How Privatization Can Solve America's Infrastructure Crisis and has been cited as an expert who could help Philip Morris defend itself in lawsuits against the tobacco industry.) In the article, published on September 19, Utt contends that NATCA was awarded the "privilege" of bargaining rights in legislation enacted by the union-friendly Clinton administration. "With this new bargaining power," Utt writes, "the air traffic controllers in 1998 extracted a sweetheart deal of extraordinary generosity from a compliant White House."