|
January 17,
2008
It's "unsafe" at busy airports throughout the
country. There's a "staffing emergency" in air
traffic control facilities serving Southern
California. A "dangerous situation" in the skies
and on the ground is about to "get worse."
National Air Traffic Controllers Assn. President
Patrick Forrey made those allegations last week
in news releases and during a teleconference
with reporters in the latest salvo in a
long-standing labor dispute between the union
and the Federal Aviation Administration.
The disagreement over how to best staff air
traffic facilities that guide planes through
increasingly congested airspace and around busy
airports has gotten personal.
Union leaders and the FAA agree that the
nation's aviation system faces great challenges,
including replacing most of its controller
workforce in the next decade and modernizing the
antiquated air traffic control system. Even so,
transportation experts and FAA officials took
strong exception to Forrey's comments, citing
accident rates that are at historic lows.
"I have zero hesitation putting myself or my
family on any airplane at any airport in this
country, and the flying public should feel the
same," said Hank Krakowski, the chief operating
officer of the FAA's air traffic control
organization.
But the union is standing by its statements.
Veteran controllers say they see themselves as
"guardians of public safety," who must warn
travelers that there are too few controllers to
safely handle more flights. Most of the nation's
controllers -- many of whom are replacement
workers hired after President Reagan fired
striking traffic controllers in 1981 -- are set
to retire in the next few years.
"Our strategy is speak from the facts, to speak
from the heart," said Hamid Ghaffari, the
union's Western Pacific regional vice president
and a controller at the Los Angeles Air Route
Traffic Control Center in Palmdale, which
handles high-altitude flights.
"We're really trying to avoid a situation where,
obviously, we create any kind of panic among the
public," he said. "At the same time, it would be
absolutely irresponsible for us to pretend that
there's nothing wrong."
The intensifying rhetoric concerns safety
advocates, who say controllers have crossed the
line by trying to scare passengers as a way to
solve a contractual dispute.
"I think that anyone that is in a safety
position has a responsibility to not obviously
use inflammatory language and maintain their
comments on a factual basis," said Jim Hall, a
former chairman of the National Transportation
Safety Board, who now runs a transportation
consulting business.
Although many labor disputes, such as in the
auto or film industries, periodically turn
nasty, most don't so clearly affect the
well-being of people who use the product. For
beleaguered passengers already coping with fears
of terrorism, security restrictions and flight
delays, the labor dispute is just one more thing
to worry about.
"I'm concerned because I'm flying almost every
other week," said Kate Hanni, the Napa,
Calif.-based founder of the Coalition for the
Airline Passenger Bill of Rights. "Planes
clearly are not falling out of the sky, but
there are some problems that appear to be
creeping up that could become critical."
One of those problems, controllers say, is that
fatigue resulting from increased overtime is
leading to more close calls between aircraft on
the ground and in the air.
The FAA disagrees."We don't see any statistical
rise in fatigue or staffing-related events at
all," Krakowski said.
The controllers' argument was bolstered recently
by a federal report that found runway safety
gains achieved earlier this decade have been
eroded in part by tired controllers making
mistakes. The report led the Los Angeles City
Council to unanimously pass a largely symbolic
resolution calling on the FAA to hire more
controllers at LAX, which the union says is
short-staffed. The agency disagrees.
Controllers and the FAA have been in a heated
labor dispute since 2006, when the FAA declared
an impasse in contract negotiations and imposed
new work rules covering union members, including
new staffing requirements, cuts in pay for new
hires and a dress code.
The union has used a number of strategies to try
to persuade the FAA to reopen talks, including
asking male members to wear dresses to work,
filing repeated grievances with managers and
releasing dozens of news releases filled with
incendiary language.
The FAA says it is on track to hire thousands of
controllers by 2016 but acknowledges controllers
are retiring at a higher rate than they have in
the past. To stem the tide, the agency is
discussing offering incentives to keep seasoned
workers on the job, Krakowski said.
As the dispute wears on, it would behoove
aviation unions, who for decades played the
safety card to try to further contract talks, to
tone down the rhetoric, safety experts say.
"In my experience, I've seen excessive use of
language by all the parties in the system," said
Hall, the transportation consultant. "I've never
seen that that has really been a contributor to
solving the problems."
|
