Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  And so it was at bargain prices that the FAA finally started hiring like gangbusters in 2006. The plan is to bring aboard nearly 17,000 controllers in the next decade. Finding all those warm bodies is an issue. Gone are the days when controllers were expected to have college degrees. Now people can walk in off the street—McDonald’s or Piercing Pagoda or carnival washouts. Once hired, a recruit attends the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City for three months and then gets stationed at a tower or a TRACON or a Center, where one of the already overworked controllers trains him on each position. Gone are the days when training to become fully certified at the nations’ toughest facilities could take up to five years; new recruits are now fast-tracked in as little as two.

  The union fears the worst. Is anyone listening? The union says America’s skies are not safe if its controllers are exhausted, miserable, overworked, resentful, or inadequately schooled. The union says, Please, everybody, please remember what’s at stake. The union says it’s only a matter of time.

  Oh, relax! says the FAA, citing stellar safety records and accusing the union of trying to whip the flying public into a fear frenzy to get them to support the union’s whiny demands for a real contract.

  The union says it’s only a matter of time: serious runway incursions—those considered likeliest to cause a collision—are way up.

  Say this and don’t say that. Try this and don’t try that. Who did you talk to and what did he say?

  After months of deliberation, the FAA said okay, I could come into one of their facilities; they would pick one for me. The union was pleased—finally, maybe the real story of controllers would get some attention—but said the FAA would probably offer some little Podunk place with little traffic and little misery. A place that would show off some jazzy simulator or something that would make the FAA look good.

  Finally, the FAA offered LaGuardia tower. The union said, “Really?” and “That’s a good one.” Then they told me that controllers could get fired if they dared to speak the truth about how miserable they were, so I’d better take that into consideration. By the time I got to LaGuardia, I was imagining scared rats hunkering in corners of a cage.

  —

  BUT OF COURSE THAT ISN’T what I have found. I have found Cali and Brian, Lars and Eric, Tim, Andy, Joe, Franklin, Camille, and the rest of the C team, one of three groups of twelve controllers who man the tower 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There is little time here for pouting. Brian is my assigned guide. He is a compact man with ruddy skin and sharp blue eyes and a fatherly earnestness. Each day he brings a different coffee mug to work, on each mug a different photo of his four kids. “To remind myself why I’m doing this,” he says. He does not appear even a tiny bit miserable, and neither, for the most part, does the rest of the C team. Joe, the (nonunion) supervisor, is distinguished from the rest of the (union) group only in that he wears a tie. He also wears a lanyard covered with pins: Snoopy, the logo from the seventies band Yes, a shamrock, a pink ribbon for breast cancer awareness he has been wearing ever since one of the guys’ wives was diagnosed.

  The tower conditions, to be sure, are laughable. The plumbing, the leaks, the tired equipment. Most people, if they saw this, would not feel encouraged.

  Controllers here, as in a lot of towers, still use “strips.” Strips are pieces of pale green paper with flight data written on them—one strip for each departing and each arriving flight. Franklin, a happy old man, sits Geppetto-style in the corner, printing out the strips. At his side is a big white plastic bucket, the kind you salvage after home remodeling projects, filled with plastic strip holders. Strip holders look like the trays you put Scrabble tiles on. Franklin carefully threads each strip into its own little holder, hands them down to the guys working traffic. The guys slide the strips around in the holders to indicate things: a third out (or so) means you’ve contacted a pilot, half out (or so) means a plane is ready to launch, strips balanced over the console like diving boards mean something else. When they clear for takeoff, they slide the strip all the way out, stamp it with an old-timer time stamper—bonk!—then pitch the empty strip holder—clunk!—into another white bucket. Bonk. Clunk! Bonk. Clunk! The rhythm gets hypnotic after a while. You can close your eyes and tell how busy LaGuardia Airport is just by the bonk! and the clunk! It is a sound that makes you question what century you are, in fact, in.

  “I don’t quite know how to tell you this,” I say to Brian one day. “They have computers that can do this sort of job for you.” He looks at me. His eyes are all trust and innocence. I say even the local library long ago figured out how to ditch the card catalog. He nods. “We like the strips,” he says.

  Redundancy is a controller’s friend. Short-term memory is almost always maxed out. If you can’t remember what you told this pilot six commands ago or that pilot three commands ago, you can glance at the strips and know the story in an instant.

  As for the rest of the equipment, Brian refers me to Lars, a controller with a computer-geek bent who can’t help himself from desperately trying to keep the tower from suffering a complete analog collapse.

  “Don’t even get me started,” says Lars, when I ask him about the odd assortment of computer equipment, the whole Commodore 64 vibe. He’s a lanky man with a long, rubbery face topped with sandy-blond hair. After many sighs and shakes of his head, he finally finds words. “It’s such a mess.” He says the problem with the computers in the tower is that nothing matches, nothing is integrated, every piece of software comes with a dedicated monitor: It’s a fucking monitor farm in here. “A Unix thing here, Windows-based stuff here, stand-alone stuff here. Some contractor talked somebody in the government into buying it, you know. You can smell the backroom deals going around. It’s just . . . no big picture. No big picture. It drives me absolutely nuts.”

  I ask about the red phone labeled BLACK PHONE.

  “Standard operating procedure,” Lars says. “The book says use the black phone, but—”

  “Oh, that phone doesn’t work,” a controller says to him.

  “It doesn’t?”

  “It’s been broken since I started training.”

  “The black phone?”

  “Not the black red phone.”

  “No, the black phone.”

  “Not the red phone that’s black?”

  “There used to be a black phone that didn’t work.”

  I stand and look at them, blinking confusion and worry.

  “Look,” Joe says to me, “the red black phone calls the police garage, like, for a medical emergency, someone needs paramedics at the gate, whereas the other red phone is, okay, the airplane is coming in with minimum fuel, can crash or whatever—the real red phone. Then the tan phone is the Queens fire department.”

  “That’s the one that doesn’t work. The tan phone.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  For the sake of adventure, Brian has asked the crew if they’d like to go out after work for some beer and good times. So after work we go. Brian has arranged for Phil to be the designated driver, and seven of us ride in Brian’s silver minivan to a Holiday Inn in Queens.

  “So this is how air traffic controllers party?” I say in the van, all of us sitting up good and straight with our seat belts on.

  “We are so fucking responsible,” says Cali.

  I tell him it’s actually very encouraging to learn that the people in charge of keeping all those airplanes from bashing into each other are dependable geeks in reasonably good moods. “Word down at headquarters is that you folks are miserable,” I say.

  “Oh, so you’ve been talking to NATCA,” Lars says. The van erupts with laughter. They themselves are union members, but not “that kind.” Not, that is, the hard-core kind that shoots itself in the foot by whining all the time. They tell stories blasting management and the union, blaming both for keepi
ng this war going—especially at the TRACON. They tell of a union guy having a beer with a manager in a bar; another union guy walks in, sees this, You can’t drink with a manager; they almost come to blows. A union guy gets promoted to management—crosses over!—and the other union guys key his car in the parking lot. Management plans to do a Thanksgiving turkey at the TRACON until the union hears about it: You can’t do that! Nobody eats turkey with management.

  “A Thanksgiving turkey at the New York TRACON, are you shitting me?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “Like the Pilgrims and the Indians are going to sit down and eat together, are you shitting me?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  If there are hot spots of controller misery in America, the New York TRACON is, they say, among the hottest. They know this because many of them used to work there.

  “It’s two and a half years of my life I’ll never get back.”

  “I got out. I escaped. I survived.”

  “You sell your soul to work there.”

  “They offered bonus money, like, $75,000, to get people to work there, and still they can’t staff the place.”

  “Brutal.”

  “A black hole.”

  “A snake pit.”

  “You can’t get out.”

  “A shithole.”

  —

  NO SIGN ANNOUNCES the New York TRACON, a two-story ash-white warehouse beneath a tower with antennae and satellite dishes sticking out like whiskers. The building is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and is policed twenty-four hours a day by at least one remarkably gloomy security cop in a guard shack. Tall stacks spew dark stuff from a recycling plant on the other side of the parking lot. It is not a place that welcomes journalists—not for a long time now. I get in because Brian makes some calls. I feel an uncomfortable duty to be polite, like he’s taking me to his creepy, crazy uncle’s house and neither of us knows each other well enough to say, Whew. Creepy. Brian shamefully calls himself a TRACON washout. He tried to work radar two years ago, but couldn’t cut it. Unlike every other TRACON washout I meet, Brian expresses humiliation over his failure to succeed here. He wanted to make it. Surviving at the New York TRACON is, he says, the ultimate test of controller bravado. “But I hear all these other guys talk about washing out on purpose, and I guess I’m lucky.”

  Upstairs is where the action is: a windowless gymnasium-sized room, dark as night, sectioned off into sectors, each with lanes of glowing radarscopes. Supervisors (nonunion) sit perched on a raised throne in the middle, looking down upon rows of about fifty controllers (union) flopped in chairs like melting cheese, hunched over, mumbling into headsets. The supervisors are the ones taking me on the tour.

  “We handle about 6,500 flights a day,” one of them proudly tells me, “into and out of Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark, as well as forty-six smaller airports all within a 150-mile radius.”

  “It’s an awesome responsibility,” he says. “You get—I don’t want to call it a God complex, because that’s more for heart surgeons. But the ego starts. If you work here, you gotta start understanding where your ego’s at.”

  The job of a TRACON controller is to organize the flow of traffic leaving and approaching the airports. Think of a highway. The TRACON controller handles the merge and the highway itself. There are dozens of other highways at dozens of altitudes he likewise manages. Now, say, at any given moment, ten of those planes zooming at those altitudes all want to use the same exit: LaGuardia Airport. The TRACON controller manages that confusion, gets everyone lined up to exit, one at a time, then hands the organized traffic off to the tower controller. Time is everything, space is everything, keep each airplane at least three miles apart, don’t waste airspace, don’t allow gaps. Quick: Turn ten random jets into a necklace of jets making a descent toward LaGuardia, each plane zooming one mile every eleven seconds. It is not a job for thinkers. You can’t sit back and say, Hmmm. You can’t be a person who analyzes or ponders or wonders about the implications of anything. Success as a radar controller is about intuition and guts, repetition and feeling.

  “You gotta be able to dance,” the supervisor with the ego tells me. “You gotta be able to inject imagination in a moment’s notice. You can’t say, ‘Oh, this isn’t working—what do I do now?’ You gotta say, ‘This isn’t working—do this!’ Know the plan and know when to change it. Always have an out. Do some crazy stuff. What if that guy loses an engine? You gotta know. You gotta have ideas. You gotta dance. I go home and my wife says, ‘Don’t boss me around like an airplane.’ It’s true! Here, you say something and it happens. It happens. It’s not like that at home. You know, ‘You can’t talk to me like that! Shut up.’ I always had that problem. You get used to it. I’m not going to call it a God complex, but . . . free spirits, a lot of us are. You gotta be able to dance.”

  At one point, but only after I ask, one of the supervisors agrees to walk me down among the controllers working traffic. I want to talk to them, meet them, maybe pull one aside and hang out in the cafeteria for a soda and ask if there is anything at all to the TRACON’s reputation as a shithole, as the place where teams of disgruntled controllers sit and fume about their jobs—jobs that are about keeping thousands and thousands of otherwise helpless people safe as they’re flung through the sky. The controllers I pass are, of course, busy. But even those plugging out for a break, or just plugging in after a break, avoid my eyes. I feel like I’m being escorted on a tour of the villagers by Castro or something.

  “You’re kidding, right?” explains an unplugged TRACON controller I meet later at a bar. “No one talks, no one looks up, if management is around. That’s, like, not done.”

  The former and current TRACON controllers I talk to do so in whispers, saying please, please don’t use their names. They don’t want the FAA to know they’re bad-mouthing them, nor do they want the union to know they are (less so, but not insignificantly) bad-mouthing them. They feel trapped in the cross fire, little kids scrambling to dodge the rocks the big boys hurl at each other. None of them complain about the job itself. They feel proud of the work they do. (They continually mention God and heart surgeons: “But we have thousands of lives in our hands every minute, and the heart surgeon has, what, two a day?”) They hate everything else. They hate being treated like shit by the FAA, mandatory overtime, six days a week, no questions asked. They hate being exhausted. They hate spending so much time training young recruits, some of whom they feel to be lost causes. The dregs. “We’re getting people now who might not have any other options. When you think about the number of lives you have in your hands every day and the people they’re sending us to put through training, it’s scary.” They hate the mold or whatever the hell the black stuff was that used to pour out of the ceiling vents. They wonder if the black stuff is the reason so many of them have asthma. They have inhalers. They hate not being able to leave the building for lunch. “I just want to drive down the street to McDonald’s. They’re afraid I won’t be back in time. I’m, like, I have hundreds of lives in my hands every second, and I get them where they need to be safely. You’re telling me I can’t get myself back from McDonald’s?” They hate getting so little respect. They hate the chickenshit cowardice of their managers. “My manager won’t come out to the control floor, won’t show his face. I barely know what he looks like.” They hate the paper that went around, like, three times that they had to keep signing: You will not strike. It’s against the law. You’ll lose your job. It’s against the law. They hate plenty of the ways the union is handling the situation, expecting them to not impress management, to not go above and beyond the call of duty. “I was raised that you go to work and be the best possible that you can be. But it’s not really like that. We’re not supposed to impress our managers. We’re only supposed to impress each other.” Imagine being on a baseball team and you purposely stand there and take strikes just to
piss off the coach while your teammates cheer.

  Perhaps most of all, they hate being stuck. They can’t leave this mess without quitting altogether. Any FAA controller can put in a bid for a job at another FAA facility, but your existing manager has to release you to take the new job. Woefully understaffed, the managers at the New York TRACON can’t afford to release anybody. “You’re stuck here. And they’ll flat-out tell you that. You’re not leaving. I got told the other day that maybe, maybe, I’ll get out in five years.”

  Oh, they could have gone on and on with the complaints, so they did.

  They hate the shame of it all. “It’s such a good job. It’s a lot of fun. But the FAA takes every hope of enjoyment out of it. They ruined the industry. When I first got in, everybody was all about doing everything possible to get as many planes in line, in the shortest amount of time. And over the years, the FAA has just pushed us and pushed us and pushed us, and now people are, like, ‘I don’t care.’ They can hold the aircraft for hours, the aircraft will divert, and we don’t care anymore. Now we just work until we think we have enough in, and we hold the rest. It’s not the same mentality as it was. I’m sure you could look at the delays from five years ago to now and you’ll see much bigger delays now. People have stopped caring.”

  Factors influencing flight delays are, of course, numerous: airline problems, such as pilot shortages and mechanical breakdowns, and weather issues that cause ripple effects across the country. FAA critics have long pointed the finger at antiquated technology, to which the FAA has responded with the promise of a new, $22 billion satellite-based system (current projection: 2025).