Fear of Flying
A thick bank of clouds hung low in the sky.
Air traffic controllers call this condition a low ceiling, and for Jenny Tudor, who was a controller — as well as a meteorologist and a certified pilot — her duties in the radar room at Kansas City International Airport were about to get especially complicated.
Tudor, who had been a controller for 29 years, was used to doing many things at once. The low ceiling meant that in addition to directing the planes that were landing and departing at KCI and the region’s smaller airports, she also had to read coordinates to pilots who were flying blind, relying on their instruments for their final approaches.
When the weather is clear, controllers can tell a pilot to follow the plane just ahead of it in line for landing. But on a socked-in cloudy day like this one, planes might as well be flying inside a marshmallow. Controllers have to guide them verbally, making sure they maintain three miles of separation between one another as they come in.
Tudor sat in a windowless room, its lights dimmed to enhance the glow of green and white blips on circular radar scopes. The only noise was that of controllers’ firm voices on separate radio frequencies, punctuated by the sporadic beeping of alarms when computers warned that two planes’ trajectories could cross in the sky.
In addition to her other tasks, Tudor was sharing the final-approach position with another controller, feeding airplanes onto runways from the east as the other controller watched the west. In the past, when visibility was low and traffic was spiking, supervisors would call in someone from the break room to concentrate on planes on final approach.
Tudor glanced around for her supervisor. But they were so short-staffed that the supervisor was busy working two positions at once — and supervisors rarely pull on the headsets.
Everyone else on duty that day was already in the room. There was nobody in the break room.
She was on her own.
he head of the Federal Aviation Administration knew it would be a rough summer for air travelers.
Back in May, Marion Blakey told the Associated Press that a thunderstorm pattern was to blame. Blakey, who had been appointed to lead the FAA by President Bush in 2002, advised travelers to book morning or early-afternoon flights to avoid the summer’s late-day storms.
She was right to predict a bad summer — it turned out to be one of the worst travel seasons in recent memory. Nightly news reports told stories of anguished passengers who’d spent hours on sun-scorched tarmacs, prevented from taking off for reasons the airlines never explained. Last month, MSNBC reported that more than 909,000 flights were late through this past June — twice the number of delayed flights for the same period in 2002.
Elizabeth Isham Cory, public-affairs contact for the FAA’s Central Region (which includes Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska), says flight delays this summer were caused by a combination of factors.
“A lot of bad weather, both in the Midwest, on the East Coast and in between. Also, I know we’ve had a lot of bad weather out west. Weather’s going to account for a lot of delays.”
Cory also cited airline scheduling and an increase in the number of people traveling.
Kevin Peterson laughs when he hears the FAA blaming the weather for traveler’s woes.
The FAA’s stormy relationship with controllers is a more likely explanation.
Peterson is the head union representative for controllers who work at KCI. His union and the FAA have been at odds since labor negotiations between the National Air Traffic Controllers Association and the FAA collapsed in March 2006. A few months later, on September 3, 2006 — Labor Day — the FAA instituted new rules, compiled in what union members call “the white book” because they don’t acknowledge it as a contract.
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The white book set a new pay scale, freezing veteran controllers’ salaries and lowering the starting pay for new hires by 30 percent. Some controllers with 20 or more years of experience realized that it would be more lucrative to retire. Salaries in the tower were capped, but retirement pensions come with yearly cost-of-living raises.
No one knows more about the day-to-day state of air travel than the controllers. But while television cameras zoom in on photo ops such as Bush’s September 27 meeting with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters, where they discussed a passengers’ bill of rights, the media have essentially ignored the controllers’ dispute with the FAA.
Blakey fielded questions from reporters during an April 2006 breakfast at the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C. The event was sponsored by the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit research organization. The FAA had just declared that negotiations with the union were at an impasse, and a reporter asked whether she predicted another showdown such as the famous strike of August 1981, when thousands of controllers walked off the job. President Ronald Regan responded by firing more than 11,000 controllers. In April 2006, the majority of the controllers who were now eligible for retirement had been hired in the three years following that strike.
Blakey said she doubted that controllers “would act against their own self-interest” by retiring, given that many had mortgages and their children’s college education to pay. “There is not going to be any mass run for the exits,” she insisted.
But she has been proved wrong. Since the FAA’s work rules went into effect, resignations and retirements have emptied control towers across the country.
Though air travel is almost back to pre-9/11 levels (after reaching its lowest point in 2003), the number of controllers watching the skies continues to fall.
Six years ago, 43 fully certified controllers were available to work at KCI. Today, just 25 provide continuous coverage of KCI’s airspace, which extends from the ground to an altitude of 15,000 feet within 100 miles of the airport. Fifteen controllers left between September 2006 and September 2007.
Most of the area’s controllers work at the Kansas City Air Route Traffic Control Center — the Kansas City Center, for short — a beige, 1960s-era government building with turquoise window coverings just off the Interstate 35 and Santa Fe interchange, next to a microwave tower in Olathe.
These controllers are responsible for a long, slender chunk of airspace over the middle of the country, covering most of Kansas and Missouri, a piece of southern Illinois and a part of northern Oklahoma.
The facility is equipped with diesel backup generators and was built over a cistern full of water for flushing it clean of nuclear fallout in the event of a Cold War disaster. A full-time meteorologist from the National Weather Service is on staff to alert controllers about threatening weather patterns.
A year ago, 397 controllers worked there. Now, the number is down to 268.
As of September, there have been 339 incidents nationwide this year in which planes flew too close to each other or other objects. That’s up from 297 in the first nine months of 2006.
The day that Jenny Tudor faced a low ceiling and no help, she finally told the next pilot on the runway to hang tight, then halted departures from her eastern half of the airport until she had everything else under control.
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Stopping departures is an air traffic controller’s last resort — and controllers have been doing it at least once a day since their staffing crisis began.
he white book’s new rules have created other problems, too.
Controllers remember good old days when managers were on the controllers’ softball teams and acted more like drinking buddies than bosses.
Peterson says the cozy relationship ended last September, when the FAA convened a meeting of managers and supervisors for a conference in St. Louis. At that meeting, Blakey and other FAA officials briefed managers on the white book. The message, according to Peterson and his fellow union reps, was that after years of working like equally ranked colleagues, managers were to regain dominance over their controllers.
The managers returned, Peterson says, with the gusto of new converts to a religion.
Managers now told controllers when to eat, when to take a break, how to dress, when to take a vacation. More problematic was that managers questioned their subordinates’ use of sick leave.
The tower must be staffed around the clock. At Kansas City’s tower in years past, supervisors insisted that 11 controllers report to work at the beginning of each shift; five people worked in the glassed-in tower cab, and six people kept watch in the radar room. Now, supervisors have a hard time staffing the control rooms with more than seven people at a time — and that’s with three people a day working overtime, six days a week.
Peterson is sitting in a downtown coffee shop with Scott Hanley, the controllers’ union representative at the Kansas City Center, and Howard Blankenship, the regional vice president of NATCA. They’re explaining what the shortage of controllers means inside the towers. Peterson estimates that he has slept one hour in the past 30.
“It used to be that I’d come in, work an hour and a half, take a 30-minute break and repeat,” he says.
“And love every minute of it,” Hanley interjects. “Don’t get us wrong. We love working airplanes. Absolutely love it. But all this other crap makes us hate to go to work.”
“This is a job where you need downtime,” Peterson explains. “You get fatigued after staring at a monitor for two hours. Your eyes get tired. If you take a break, the manager is right on you saying, ‘I need you back in five minutes. Just get a drink, go to the bathroom or whatever and then get back.’ There will be three people on four positions, and we know you can’t close one or the planes stop. It’s going to happen that someone will — “
“Soil themselves,” Hanley finishes. He talks about a controller at the Kansas City Center who was feeling sick and pleading to go on a break. On his final request for a break, unable to hold it any longer, he threw up on his supervisor. Another controller had to throw up in a radar-room trash can before his supervisor would believe that he wasn’t feigning illness.
When traffic gets busier than the controllers can handle, they have a few last-ditch options. One is to hold departing flights on the ground. Another is for KCI controllers to call the Kansas City Center and ask them to keep incoming planes separated by 10 miles as they enter KCI’s airspace. These tactics used to be rare. They slow things down for controllers — and for travelers.
“It directly relates to this travel summer,” Hanley says.
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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.
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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.”
Retired controllers beg to differ. They say they earn executive salaries by making split-second decisions that keep thousands of passengers safe.
“The thing to understand is, our job is 24-7,” says Randy Meyer, who retired on August 3. “We work crappy hours over holidays and nights and weekends, and our career is over at 52 or 53. You get burned out, and you physically can’t work until you’re 59 or 60, like some people. So we should be paid more.”
NATCA’s Blankenship disputes the figures that Blakey and FAA spokespeople use to illustrate the average controller’s salary. He argues that the averages cited by Blakey and Cory are inflated because so many controllers are making high salaries at the end of their careers. Those controllers are leaving, he argues, so the FAA’s numbers aren’t an accurate portrayal of the agency’s financial future.
“The people who bring that average up are retiring and will retire. Now they are retiring earlier than they would have.”
And they’re leaving their younger co-workers to deal with a staffing crisis.
s an example of the indignities controllers endured under Blakey’s administration, Peterson and other union members point bitterly to Pat Kowal.
Kowal worked as a controller for 17 years in Wichita before moving his wife and five kids to Kansas City. He wanted to handle more traffic, and the pay was better.
On August 19, 2003, the family had been in Kansas City for just two weeks. That day, Kowal’s 17-year-old son, Michael, started football practice at Mill Valley High School. Positioned at defensive strong safety, he tackled an oncoming running back. The players’ helmets collided, and Michael’s C4 vertebra crunched inward, pinching his spinal cord and paralyzing him from his midchest down.
Kowal took time off to adjust to his family’s new situation and learn how to care for Michael. When his sick leave ran out, he enrolled in the FAA controllers’ Voluntary Leave Transfer Program — a system that lets controllers around the country donate their sick leave or annual leave to others who need it in an emergency.
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Kowal returned to work after four months, but he couldn’t stay long. He’d work for a month and take time off again if his wife, who by then was Michael’s primary caretaker, was called away. Eventually they hired a professional caretaker, but sometimes the caretaker would be late or unable to work.
On March 18, 2006, Kowal received a letter from the FAA informing him that he’d been terminated from the Voluntary Leave Transfer Program because his situation was no longer considered an emergency. The FAA took back all the hours of donated leave that he had saved up.
So Kowal relied on the Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires federal agencies to grant workers up to 12 weeks off every year if they’re caring for a family member with a serious health condition.
Last October 21, a month after the white book’s new rules went into effect, Michael’s caretaker called to tell Kowal he was sick and unable to be with Michael. Kowal’s wife was out of town.
His shift was to start at 3:45 the next two mornings. He put in a request to use sick leave so he could take off an hour and 45 minutes early on both days to help his son out of bed and through his morning routine (which can take three hours). His supervisor denied the request.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Kowal says. “Michael was expecting me to be home when he needed me.” It was the first time his sick leave had been denied, and the first time he’d heard of anyone’s Family and Medical Leave Act request being denied.
He sent a letter to U.S. Rep. Dennis Moore’s office. “I have not abused sick leave, nor has my supervisor ever advised me of any concern … I truly hope this is not the direction the FAA wants to take, but only the actions of a rogue manager,” Kowal wrote.
After Moore’s office checked into the matter, the FAA’s Regional Administrator, Christopher R. Blum, sent a letter to Moore. “The facility manager has asked Mr. Kowal’s supervisor to address any needs Mr. Kowal has to take care of his son and communicate more effectively in the future,” Blum wrote.
The FAA’s response is of little consolation to Kowal, who comes to work when he’s ill so he can save his sick days for when Michael may need him.
“This is supposed to be one of the perks of working for the government. You may not become a millionaire, but you get these certain benefits that make you feel secure in your career,” he says.
The way Peterson sees it, Kowal’s situation wasn’t just about sick leave. It was about managers’ fundamental lack of respect toward controllers — and it’s been that way ever since the FAA painted its employees as underworked and overpaid.
Peterson says managers routinely address controllers as “a bunch of crybabies” or “fucking kindergartners.” And though verbal altercations are nothing new in the tower’s stressful atmosphere, the yelling and screaming are more frequent, controllers say.
The tension came to a breaking point on July 13.
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.
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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.”
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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.
