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‘No FAA Contract Makes Skies More Dangerous’ |
The announcement yesterday by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that it is hiring 15,000 air traffic controllers in the next decade is about three years too late to ensure a well-trained, experienced workforce, according to the union representing controllers.
Doug Church, spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), says:
They’re just staffing to budget. This is all about bottom-line economics over safety that we see all the time in Washington. Air traffic controllers are upset. They want the tools to do their jobs. They want to not be stressed out. Lots of them are working six-day weeks, and they don’t have time to spend a vacation with their kids or take off when they get sick.
Over the past few years, the Bush administration’s FAA repeatedly has cut staffing at air traffic control towers and decreased the amount of time between work shifts, forcing controllers to work even when they have not had sufficient rest.
Last year, the FAA unilaterally imposed a contract on the controllers that NATCA says poses real and potentially dangerous consequences for the safety of airline passengers and crews.
There aren’t enough controllers, Church says, and the FAA’s hiring plan will only bring the level up to what it was in 2003, when the cutbacks began, and that won’t be until 2016.
The FAA is losing trained, experienced controllers faster than they can replace them because the Bush administration refuses to negotiate a contract with the workers, NACTA President Patrick Forrey today told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation’s Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security. According to Forrey:
Morale among FAA employees is extremely low. Retirements are far exceeding FAA’s planning. Fatigue among those employees remaining is a major concern. And these are all effects of the unilaterally imposed work rules.
Members of AFSCME and the Professional Airways Systems Specialists at FAA also are working under imposed work rules.
In addition, Forrey says the FAA is not currently hiring air traffic controllers; it is hiring trainees. It takes an average of three years for a trainee to become fully certified. So with the agency’s current policy of only hiring a new controller when a current controller leaves, they are actually putting themselves three years behind the power curve, Forrey adds.
That’s why yesterday’s announcement is three years too late, Church says. Even if a new recruit is hired today, it would take three years before that person is certified, he says. By FAA’s own estimate, he says, 40 percent of the air traffic controllers will have less than four years experience by 2010.
Controllers are leaving the workforce at a rate of exactly three per day since the start of the current fiscal year, Forrey says. At the current pace, the number of controller losses this year alone would be 1,095—nearly 150 more than the FAA’s projection.
It is likely controllers who are eligible for retirement will choose to leave the system, he says, unless something can be done to keep them, like returning to the negotiating table under fair conditions with the intention of reaching a mutually agreeable contract.
While the FAA repeats the mantra that there is no correlation between staffing and safety, Forrey says the evidence seems to prove otherwise.
According to the FAA, there were 14,206 air traffic controllers working in the United States at the end of fiscal 2006. In 2003, there were 15,691, or 1, 485 controller positions lost over the past four years. Under the FAA plan announced yesterday, that number will increase to 16,000 in 2016, only 300 more than there were in 2003, when the cutbacks began. Of the 14,000 controllers working today, almost 2,000 of them are trainees and not fully certified. That was not the case in 2003 when there where were almost 16,000 certified controllers.
At the same time, and by no means by coincidence, Forrey says, operation errors are on the rise at the FAA’s busiest facilities, including airports in Atlanta and Southern California:
As an air traffic controller with 23 years of service within the FAA, I can assure you that those 1,485 controllers would make a significant difference in the level of safety in the sky. It would eliminate the need for mandatory six-day workweeks, forced overtime, the fatigue and the burnout felt by the overstretched controller workforce throughout the country. Without a concerted effort to attract experienced controllers and retain our current workforce, the ATC [air traffic control] system will continue to lose controllers and that will mean flight delays, runways incursions and increased chance of aviation disasters.
The lack of adequate staff and the resulting fatigue of controllers contributed to several incidents, including fatal crashes last year in Lawrenceville, Ill. and Lexington, Ky.
Just this week, the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department issued a policy statement calling for banning the FAA from imposing contract terms on its workers instead of resolving impasses through binding arbitration.
In a special report last December, Gannett News Service looked at the implications of these FAA moves for passenger safety.
Among the findings of the report, “Troubled towers: How safe are our skies?”:
- Nearly 1,100 fewer air traffic controllers are working in U.S. facilities than three years ago, despite increasing air traffic.
- The number of controllers who chose to retire exceeded the FAA’s expectations for the third year in a row. About 70 percent of the FAA’s controllers will become eligible to retire through 2015.
- Short staffing is causing some controllers to work 10-hour days and six-day weeks periodically, increasing the possibility of mistakes due to fatigue, according to the union.
- Mistakes made by controllers rose by 68 percent between 1998 and 2005, according to FAA data.
Read the full report here.
The only way to solve this crisis, Forrey says, is for the FAA to return to the bargaining table:
We’re dismayed that the FAA is actually doing everything it can to dis-incentivize recruits from joining the ranks as controllers, while at the same time pushing the veteran controllers out the door towards retirement.
This approach is bad for the safety of the flying public, bad for our economy and bad for the nation.
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