By NADIA PFLAUM
Air traffic controllers told The Pitch last year, in this story, about the poor working conditions in the tower at the Kansas City International Airport and at the Kansas City Air Route Traffic Control Center in Olathe. A block of veteran air traffic controllers, hired in the wake of the air traffic controllers' strike of 1981, are retiring, and the FAA hasn't hired enough new trainees to replace them. A staffing crisis has resulted. Controllers are overworked, finding it hard to take a break after two straight hours watching their positions. When they are able to get a break, it's usually only enough time to go to the bathroom or smoke a cigarette before they're back in front of the monitors. On top of that, the controllers are working under what many consider to be a hostile contract, imposed without their union's approval.
One year later, the situation hasn't improved, according to Kevin Peterson, the head representative for KCI in the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA). He and all the other controllers at KCI work 6 days a week. When he met with me yesterday, it was during a break between shifts; he'd worked 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and was due back in the tower at 10:30 to work until 6:30 in the morning.
Federal Aviation Administration representatives claim that they are hiring enough trainees to match the drain of retiring controllers, but the numbers say different. Seven years ago, 42 fully certified controllers were available to work at KCI. Last October, that number was down to 25. Today, that number remains at 25. Meanwhile, the staff of controllers at the Kansas City Center in Olathe has dropped from 291 in 2006 to 266 in 2007, and is at 246 today. The NATCA representative at the Kansas City Center, Scott Hanley, says that the 246 number gets smaller every week as trainees wash out and vets become eligible to retire.
Where the staffing crisis becomes scary, according to Peterson, is in the number of deviations (a nice way of saying "mistakes") for which the KCI controllers are responsible.
"We had six operational deviations in October," Peterson says. "That's more than we normally have in a year."
An operational deviation isn't as serious as an operational error. In the error instance, two planes fly closer to each other than the minimum 3 miles of separation mandated by the FAA. In a deviation, a plane enters an improper airspace but does not come closer than 3 miles to another plane. Nonetheless, the deviations are serious. The FAA contends that the increase in deviations -- a nationwide occurrence -- is the result of new hires receiving on-the-job training in the towers. Currently, nine new controllers are in training at KCI, working toward full certification. But Peterson says that the new eyes aren't the source of all the mistakes. He says the mistakes are being made by seasoned controllers, thanks to burnout after long hours, scarce breaks and six-day work weeks.
"It's because we're tired and trying to train people at the same time, which is stressful," Peterson says. He provides an example: When a controller gives a command to a pilot, the pilot repeats the command back to the controller. If the pilot repeats the wrong command back, it's up to the controller to catch the mistake and correct the pilot. If he fails to do so, it's the controller's mistake when the pilot follows the wrong command. This happened three weeks ago, when a controller accidentally cleared the second-in-line southbound plane over Lawrence for a landing, rather than clearing the pilot in line ahead of that plane. The second-in-line pilot dropped the plane to 10,000 feet in preparation for landing, as directed. The controller expected the plane to be at 12,000 feet, waiting to be cleared. The incident didn't threaten any other planes in flight (then it would have been an error) but is serious nonetheless -- the controller should have recognized, when the pilot read the instructions back to the controller, that he'd given the wrong command. The controller was disciplined, according to Peterson.
There are other complaints, too: that a very competent trainee was fired by management without explanation, and that the trainee guidelines are lower than they were in the '80s. (A trainee can be hired with entrance exam scores of 70 percent and above, rather than 90 percent and above, which was the norm 20 years ago.). Approaching the heavy holiday travel season, air traffic controllers are still running on empty.
like
dislike
