TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/81/81patco.2

Text File | 1992-08-29 | 8.9 KB | 172 lines

                                                                                August 24, 1981

NATION

The Skies Grow Friendlier


Reagan holds firm, and the air-control system regroups

By Ed Magnuson.  Reported by Gisela Bolte/Washington and Dean
Brelis/New York, with other bureaus.


For two hectic days Canadian air-traffic controllers refused
last week to handle flights across the North Atlantic between
the U.S. and Europe, violating international air-safety
agreements and creating chaos at passenger terminals in New
York, Boston, London and Rome.  Portuguese controllers promised
a similar boycott this week.  But after that flurry of
disruption, the U.S. Government faced the long-range task of
ensuring safe air travel without the help of some 12,000 fired
members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers
Organization, who left their jobs on Aug. 3. President Reagan,
who had warned the strikers that they would be fired if they did
not return promptly to work, insisted last week from his
California ranch: "There is no strike.  There is a law that
federal unions cannot strike against their employers, the people
of the United States.  What they did was terminate their own
employment by quitting."

The Reagan Administration had, in effect, decided to ignore
PATCO, whose increasingly discouraged members continued to
picket the Federal Aviation Administration's regional and
airport radar centers.  The struggle thus was reduced to a test
of the FAA's ability to carry on with some 3,000 supervisors,
5,000 non- strikers and 900 military controllers until new
replacements can be trained.  The system was operating at
roughly half of its former level of staffing.  Over the long
run, the key question apparently would be one of economics:
Could U.S. airlines, some of them already in financial trouble,
operate profitably at the reduced schedules required under the
FAA's strike contingency plans?  If not, would the airlines
apply pressure to increase flights, even if it requires rehiring
some of the strikers?

The profitability of the airlines, in turn, hung heavily on
whether the U.S. flying public perceives the curtailed
controller system as safe -- and, finally, on whether it
actually performs safely.  The public was not especially
reassured by Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis' assertion that
the FAA had recorded 17 instances in which either unidentified
voices or interfering signals had been heard on the radio
channels on which pilots communicate with controllers.  The FBI
and Federal Communications Commission were investigating the
illegal transmissions.  Lewis said there was no evidence that
they were strike-related.

Last week, as the FAA continued to cut prestrike flights in
half during peak hours at 22 major airports and limited flights
nationally to about 75% of normal, even the fewer airliners
flying were not full.  In what is normally the heaviest travel
month, millions of potential passengers were staying on the
ground, apparently worried about unsafe skies, or shying away
from the uncertain schedules.  The airlines reported losses of
nearly $30 million a day.

As TIME correspondents visited control towers, interviewed
substitute controllers and quizzed air-safety experts, they
found little cause for public fear.  Indeed, there was evidence
that the FAA's plan to reduce and smooth out the flow of air
traffic was making flying in some ways even safer.  The working
controllers were going about their jobs with an esprit de corps
that had been sadly lacking when the more militant unionists,
spoiling for a strike, were among them.  Declared Frank
Arcidiacono, a former controller now a supervisor at the Los
Angeles radar center, as he noted the pickets outside his
building: "It's a manager's dream.  The snivelers, the criers
and the whiners are out there in the sun.  Everybody who has
come to work has come to work!"

The FAA's computer-plotted plan, originally drawn up by former
Federal Aviation Administrator Langhorne Bond when he learned
more than a year ago that PATCO seemed determined to strike in
1981, requires each airline operating at a major airport to
reduce its flights by a specified percentage that varies with
every hour of the day.  At New York's La Guardia, for example,
the cutback jumps from 27% between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. to 49% in
the following hour.  At Chicago's O'Hare, the heaviest
reduction, 60%, is between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m.  Each airline is
free to cancel any flights it wishes to stay within the FAA
limits. Understandably, airlines tend to eliminate their least
profitable flights.

Air freight remains scarcely affected by the new restrictions,
since cargo flights normally operate in the relatively quiet
hours of the night.  Essential military flights retain top
priority.  General aviation, which includes private traffic
ranging from two-seaters to large corporate jets, has been cut
back the most.  The FAA is allowing its control centers to
accept only about 35% of the previous level of such aircraft,
which normally account for about 44% of the controllers' total
work load.  Both military and private pilots, however, can fly
freely outside of controlled airspace under visual flight rules
(VFR)-- and are doing so in a quantity that alarms some
controllers. Contends a supervisor at California's Oakland radar
center: "They've got too much damn military flying under VFR.
 It's impossible for them to fly under 'see and avoid'
conditions -- they're moving too fast.  They're going to hit
someone."

Just how good are the substitute controllers and how are they
holding up?  The supervisors who have returned to their scopes,
insists Irving Moss, the FAA's New York spokesman, are "the
college professors of the air controllers.  They know
controlling forward and backward.  They have been running more
traffic than we thought possible and they are bringing the
planes in under safer conditions than ever."  Moss insists that
the supervisors enjoy being relieved of paperwork and are now
"on a real high" because they "came in when they were needed and
kept the planes flying."

At the Los Angeles center, Controller Dennis DeGraff says that
"hatefulness and bickering" had injected new stress before the
strike, and that PATCO members "filed grievances on every
little thing and management retaliated, and there was harassment
on both sides."  Now, he says, "we can move three times the
traffic because we're all working together."  The most stress,
he adds, is crossing the picket lines.  Bill Kolacek, a
supervisor at the Aurora center near Chicago, compares running
the picket line to his Army experience in Vietnam.  Driving up
to the facility, he says, "I put my foot on the clutch, my left
leg starts shaking, and my back tenses up."  He feels sorry for
the older strikers who were near retirement and the younger ones
who were "used to an interesting job and are going to end up
pumping gas."  Not all will.  A recruiter from Saudi Arabia was
offering $85,000-a-year jobs, with two-month paid vacations in
Europe, to U.S. controllers.  Some 200 picked up applications.

Many of the working controllers do not want their former
colleagues back on the job, fearing that the friction would be
worse than before.  Declares Stan Recek, a nonunion controller
in Miami: "I'll work seven days a week, 16 hours a day, to keep
them from coming back."  Nor do the supervisors want to go back
to pushing paper.  "I'm having a ball," says Mike Hughes, a
supervisor in Miami.  "I'm happier with my job now than I have
been in the past three years."

Still, the crisis-generated "highs" of the substitute
controllers will surely start to fade.  The FAA's Moss contends
that controllers "perform best under stress -- they thrive on
it."  He cites studies showing that collisions in the air occur
mainly when traffic is relatively light and when "the stress is
off air controllers, and they are not paying attention."  Some
of the working controllers, who were still putting in 60-hour
weeks (they are scheduled to be cut back to 48 hours this week)
are worried about remaining alert as the months go by.  "I have
to ask myself.  'How long can I do this?'"  concedes Harry
Burke, a Los Angeles controller.  Admits a supervisor in
Oakland: "It's just not realistic to think this can go on for
two years." Safety Expert John Galipault, who heads Ohio's
nonprofit Air Safety Institute, takes a cataclysmic view of how
long the current system will last: "Until there's a midair
collision."

The FAA is well aware of the need to watch its controllers for
any sign of weariness and to keep air traffic limited to their
ability to handle it.  Reports Temple Johnson Jr., tower chief
at Denver's Stapleton International Airport, who checks each
controller twice a day: "I look them in the eye and ask, 'How
are you doing?  Tell me straight.'"  As of last week Johnson
was pleased at the answers he was getting.  So far, they were
doing well.