Fear of Flying

It was 6 a.m., and Richard Brinker was about to get off work; he'd been in charge of both the tower and the radar room since 11:45 p.m., handling overnight traffic: mostly cargo planes for UPS and Federal Express.

Brinker had worked the previous day, too, from 6 a.m. until 2 p.m. He'd had nine hours off between shifts.

Six in the morning is one of the busiest times for controllers at KCI. Another controller had come in for work, so Brinker was "splitting off the midshift" — allocating half the work he'd been doing all night to the new controller. Meanwhile, he was clearing planes to land and take off, watching the traffic on the ground and keeping an eye on every plane taking off and landing at every airport in KCI's airspace.

A pilot was calling for Brinker to give him a compass direction for landing. Brinker could see the plane out the window, flying fine, so while he took care of more pressing issues, he let the pilot ask for the direction several times before replying.

Meanwhile, a supervisor who was just getting to work, Jeff Johnson, entered the empty radar room, where the tower's radio frequencies are audible through speakers. He got on a microphone and demanded that Brinker answer the pilot. Afterward, he called Brinker downstairs to the radar room.

Managers generally tolerate a little crankiness from controllers, given the stress of the job and the egos involved. But the summer's working conditions had worn Brinker down. He was tired and ready to go home.

Peterson says a witness in the tower recounted that Johnson was already in a foul mood that morning. The witness, Peterson says, heard Johnson say to the tower in general, "I'm tired of you fucking children acting like you do."

The following dialogue is according to Peterson, who is authorized to discuss Brinker's account of the incident because he's Brinker's union representative.

"I wonder how far that plane had to fly before he got his heading [direction]?" the supervisor asked.

"What does it matter?" Brinker replied.

"It matters to me!" Johnson shouted. Then he allegedly popped Brinker in the chest with an open hand. Physical confrontations in the tower are major transgressions.

Brinker responded, "Don't touch me!"

Police arrested Johnson on a charge of causing offensive contact. He is scheduled to go to municipal court on October 18. (His attorney plans to argue that the municipal court has no jurisdiction over what happens on FAA property; any discipline of Johnson by the FAA would be an internal personnel matter.)

Rather than fighting the system, controllers such as Randy Meyer are simply giving up.

Meyer retired on August 3. "One morning, I'd worked from 11:45 the previous night to Saturday morning. Then the 6 a.m. push starts. I'm working ground control, clearance delivery, and I'm in charge of the tower. We have 35 departures. I'm just inundated and working on four or five hours of sleep, probably less. And you just cope. You hang in there, and you keep your sense of humor. You smile and you do your job the best you can. But there's no reason that we're in that position except that management decided that that's an acceptable level of safety. There's nothing safe about it. You just have to tell the pilots waiting to take off, 'Stand by.'"

Jenny Tudor also retired on August 3, at 48 years old, after 29 years and six months of service.

Tudor loved her job and the people she worked with. "It was a rewarding experience," she says. "You knew you were getting people where they wanted to go. It was just fun ... I worked with so many guys so many years. You weren't married to ´em, but you knew almost everything they did and when they did it."

But after that cloudy day in February, she realized that the risks were no longer worth it.

"Something's going to happen, and it's going to be beyond the controller's control," she says. "They're overloaded."

These days, she spends time on the St. Joseph farm that's been in her family since 1835. She drives her kids to out-of-town horse shows.

She'd rather drive — even all the way to a show in Texas.

Until she hears from her old friends that things in the tower are different, she's not setting foot on a plane.