Air Controllers Chafe at Plan to Reduce Staffing Levels

By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: September 20, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/20/washington/20control.html?th&emc=th

DALLAS, Sept. 13 — A drive by the Federal Aviation Administration to cut the number of air traffic controllers nationally by 10 percent below negotiated levels, and even more sharply at places like the busy radar center here, is producing tension, anger and occasional shows of defiance among controllers.

At the radar office that controls planes around Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and at a cluster of other airports where staffing levels are falling fast, unhappiness is usually not visible in the darkened radar centers where they work, except when it is glaringly obvious.

Like the recent day when a controller here went to work in lime green pants and a clashing brown jacket, along with hair dyed blue, to protest a new dress code. Elsewhere, male controllers have rebelled by going to work in dresses.

Most controllers here say they are far more concerned with workplace changes that do not involve wardrobe, including salary caps, lower pay for new hires and stricter control of vacation schedules and sick leave.

The F.A.A. imposed the changes on Sept. 3, three months after it declared an impasse in contract talks. Most of the changes have had little effect on the public. But one in particular may have safety implications, controllers and some outside experts said. That is the ending of contractual protection against being kept working on a radar screen controlling traffic for more than two hours without a break.

The agency has been defensive about staffing rules since a plane crash on Sept. 1 in Lexington, Ky., in a case where the workload of the lone controller on duty violated policy.

Having just one controller on duty “degrades the safety net,” said Pat Forrey, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, “by not having another set of eyes and ears.” Mr. Forrey and others make a similar argument about keeping controllers at their work stations in positions that require intense concentration for extended periods.

The president of the union local here, Michael Conely, said that with the number of controllers now scheduled, “you can’t staff all the positions properly.’’

“You are on position longer, watching more airplanes, and it becomes a tired-eye syndrome,” Mr. Conely said.

The aviation agency says that traffic is down in the Dallas region and that the goal is to “staff to traffic” and not to an arbitrary standard.

Controllers, who earn more than $100,000 a year, are too expensive to leave idle, the agency says, and nationally, it has a goal of gradually increasing each controller’s workload 10 percent. The manager here, Dan Gutwein, said controllers spent five and a half hours a day at their radarscopes, up from four hours historically.

In an interview, the administrator of the agency, Marion C. Blakey, said the goal of the changes was to make the agency run more like a business.

“You can’t serve an industry that’s largely teetering on bankruptcy and ask for a bigger slice of the pie,” Ms. Blakey said last month in a speech. Explaining why the dress code matters, Ms. Blakey said there are “folks who push outside the norms of what is professional dress and what’s professional behavior.”

The dress code bans jeans, as well as T-shirts and shirts with big lettering and requires that controllers not appear “disheveled,” rules that are not onerous, she said.

Ms. Blakey is trying to reshape the agency as two-thirds of the controllers face retirement in the next 10 years. That bulge is a result of extensive hiring in the early 1980’s to replace thousands of striking controllers whom President Ronald Reagan fired.

The controllers, many with two decades in positions in which they are entrusted with thousands of lives, say the changes make them feel trivialized. A cartoon that controllers circulated by e-mail shows a radar screen with two converging airplanes and a picture of a man’s sneaker, banned under the new dress code. The caption asks which should be the priority.

The agency says the controllers’ attire must not “erode public confidence,” although most work in windowless rooms, out of public view. The lighting in the radar room here is so dim that it is not easy, at a glance, to tell whether controllers are wearing the now-banned sneakers or sandals.

Mr. Conely said in an interview that the dress code was about more than clothes.

“It’s absolutely a power thing,” he said. “They want to show they’re in charge and this is how we’re going to do it and if you don’t like it quit.”

Some controllers are convinced that quitting is what the agency hopes they will do. Under the new rules, their replacements will earn substantially less. By the union count, 86 controllers worked here as of Jan. 1. Ten have retired, the union says, with some leaving early because of the new rules.

In the late 1990’s, the controllers and the agency negotiated a national staffing pact that called for 117 controllers here. The agency disagrees on the current count and says many changes that grate on controllers are needed for scheduling flexibility.

The agency says that controllers are no longer guaranteed two consecutive weeks of vacation and that vacations can be canceled at the last minute. Controllers scheduled to work on holidays can be called off a few hours before and lose the holiday pay.

Management also gave itself the flexibility to keep controllers on their scopes for more than two hours. Two hours is still the goal, but controllers can no longer file grievances if they are there longer.

A former controller, Craig Carlson, now a co-director of the Air Traffic Control Program at the University of North Dakota, which provides initial training in air traffic control, said, “When it’s really busy, it gets really taxing on you if you are sitting there for a full two hours.”

Referring to tougher schedules for controllers, John Cox, an aviation safety expert and a former safety official at the Air Line Pilots Association, said, “This is exactly what the airlines have done with pilots.”

“The airline pilots today are flying more hours, flying more days, and they are being more efficiently scheduled, and fatigue is an issue for them,” he said.

A longtime controller here said what the agency had done with the changes “feels awfully retaliatory.” The controller, who insisted on anonymity because of fears that managers would take offense, and others did say that some people had, in fact, abused sick leave, but that the remedy should not be rules that made everyone’s lives miserable.

Nonetheless, the controller said, he loved his work and would not quit despite significant pay cuts and the difficulty in planning vacations.