Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  It’s hard to quantify the human factor that goes into airport delays: teams of overworked, pissed-off, unmotivated controllers in radar centers that feel to them like prisons. It’s hard to know if the human factor translates to real safety concerns, although the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Transportation has been warning about that one for a while. Testifying before Congress recently, the OIG reminded everyone that in 2003 it had reported that “almost 90 percent of controller operational errors [when a controller allows two aircraft to get too close] were due to human factors” such as fatigue and “situational awareness.” In May 2007, the OIG reported that the FAA had “made little progress in this area.” Progress, according to the recent congressional testimony, had come slightly, in the form of NATPRO, a program designed to sharpen controllers’ “mental skills most closely associated with visual attention and scanning.”

  Visual attention and scanning are important, but so, you would think, is the other human factor: These people are miserable.

  Does it matter? America has enough to worry about. So some radar controllers are cranky. So some of them have stopped caring.

  —

  ON FEBRUARY 24, 2009, a controller testified before Congress about a recent day at work, indicating the degree to which a controller’s job can absorb the whims of worker apathy, or lethargy, or the moral conflict of a man who knows he should care but is too pissed off to bother. One month previously, pilot C. B. “Sully” Sullenberger had famously landed US Airways Flight 1549 on New York’s Hudson River, saving the lives of all 155 people aboard the plane.

  Good morning, Chairman Costello and Ranking Member Petri. My name is Patrick Harten. I have been an air traffic controller at the New York TRACON and a proud member of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association for the past ten years.

  While January 15, 2009, is forever etched in my memory, it began unremarkably. I arrived at work at 12:30 PM to begin my eight-hour shift. At 3:12 PM I was assigned to work the LaGuardia (LGA) departure RADAR position. This position handles all departures from LGA airport. At 3:25 PM, the LGA tower controller advised me that Cactus 1549 was the next departure rolling for takeoff.

  It was a routine westbound departure off of Runway 4 traveling due north on a 360-degree heading and climbing to 5,000 feet. I instructed Cactus to climb to 15,000 and turned my attention to give instructions to another aircraft under my control.

  I then turned back to Cactus 1549 and instructed him to turn left to heading 270, heading the aircraft towards its destination. That is when the Captain advised me that they suffered a bird strike, lost thrust in both engines, and needed to return to LGA for an emergency landing.

  I made a split-second decision to offer him Runway 13, which was the closest runway to his current position and turned him left at a 220 heading so he could return to the airport. I then immediately contacted LGA tower to ask them to stop departures and clear the runways for an emergency return.

  While I have worked ten or twelve emergencies over the course of my career, I have never worked an aircraft with zero thrust capabilities. I understood how grave this situation was.

  After I gave him his instructions, the Captain very calmly stated: “We’re unable.”

  I quickly vectored an aircraft that was still in my airspace and then gave 1549 a second option: land on LGA Runway 31.

  Again the Captain said, “Unable.”

  I then asked the Captain what he needed to do to land safely. At this point, my job was to coordinate and arrange for the pilot to be able to do whatever was necessary.

  The pilot told me that he could not land on any runway at LGA, but asked if he could land in New Jersey and suggested Teterboro.

  I had experienced working traffic into Teterboro from my time working in the Newark sector, and after coordinating with the controllers in Teterboro, we were able to determine that Runway 1 was the best option. It was the arrival runway, and clearing it for an emergency landing would be easier and faster. It also meant that 1549 would be landing into the wind, which could have assisted the pilot in making a safe landing. I called Teterboro and explained the situation. The controller at Teterboro reacted quickly and prepared Runway 1 for the emergency landing.

  I then instructed the Captain to turn right on a 280 heading to land on Runway 1.

  The Captain replied: “We can’t do it.”

  I replied immediately, “Which runway would you like at Teterboro?”

  The Captain replied: “We’re gonna be in the Hudson.”

  I asked him to repeat himself, even though I heard him just fine. I simply could not wrap my mind around those words. I believed at that moment, I was going to be the last person to talk to anyone on that plane alive.

  I then lost radio contact with 1549, and the target disappeared from my radar screen as he dropped below the tops of the New York City skyscrapers. I was in shock. I was sure the plane had gone down.

  Less than a minute later, 1549 flickered back onto my radar scope. The aircraft was at a very low altitude, but its return to radar coverage meant that there was a possibility 1549 had regained the use of one of its engines. Grasping at that tiny glimmer of hope, I told 1549 that it could land at Newark, seven miles away, on Runway 29, but I received no response. I then lost radar contact again, this time for good.

  It was the lowest low I had ever felt. I wanted to talk to my wife. But I knew if I tried to speak or even heard her voice, I would fall apart completely.

  I settled for a hasty text message: “Had a Crash. Not ok. Can’t talk now.”

  —

  BRIAN, MY GUIDE, invites me home for dinner. Home is Blue Point, Long Island, over an hour away, a commute he does not mind. In the minivan, he tells me his Little League coach was a controller. He would look at him and think, Wow. In the 1980s, when Top Gun came out, Brian imagined himself a fighter pilot instead. He took flying lessons, anticipated glory. But reality won out over imagination, as it does for responsible men, and he found himself at the FAA Academy. A lot of the other controllers I talked to had fallen into the career, as if from outer space, a Plan B for dreamers. Joe studied to be a history teacher, Lars studied geology and chemistry, Andy was a graphic-arts major, and Cali, too, wanted to be an artist. He grew up on Long Island, and remembers passing LaGuardia tower often; from the road, it looks like a vase, gently narrowing in the middle. As far back as Cali can remember, he wanted to work in that tower, because the shape was so beautiful.

  At home, Brian’s wife, Kathy, makes spaghetti. Brian loosens the tie he is still getting used to, rolls his head around and around. “It feels like a leash.” A few days ago, he got promoted to supervisor of LaGuardia’s C team. The guys made fun of the tie, of course. What this means, though, is that Brian has left the ranks of the union and crossed over to management. Crossed over. This fact has hardly raised an eyebrow with Cali and Lars and Tim and the rest. Just a nice thing for Brian. Brian is washing out the mug he took to work today. This one says WE LOVE YOU, DAD. His own dad died when he was five. He’s being the dad his dad never got to be. A breadwinner. A responsible man. And now a supervisor.

  Kathy makes whopping quantities of extra pasta, having recently learned you can freeze it. She makes homemade sauce even though Brian consistently sings the praises of Ragú. She makes a homemade apple pie. The kids say please and thank you and admit they’re showing off because their dad asked them to be superpolite. We sit down to eat, and my phone rings. I ignore the call, but then it rings two more times. I excuse myself to check the voice mail to find a message from an upset union rep who works at the TRACON. He and I had plans to meet later. He was going to talk to me on the record about conditions there. On my voice mail he says, “Forget it.” He says he’s learned that I am “speaking to management,” and therefore he will not speak to me.

  Management? Does he mean Brian? Brian?
And how does this union guy know I am with Brian? Does he? Are my tires getting slashed somewhere? I close my phone and go back to the table. I don’t tell Brian. I don’t want to ruin anyone’s appetite.

  The next morning, just before dawn, I meet Lars, Cali, Tim, and Eric at the Family Dollar in East Northport and ride in the carpool lane with them to LaGuardia. Eric can’t hear because of the Papa Roach concert he went to last night. Tim is mad at his busted Xbox. Cali is thinking about how much he enjoyed the book Kitchen Confidential. Lars is driving. I tell them about the voice mail.

  “Get out! That is beautiful! Oh, that-is-beautiful!”

  “I can’t stand it!”

  “That’s the TRACON, baby! You didn’t properly genuflect to the union!”

  “They’re so warm and cuddly I just love ’em. I just love ’em.”

  “That’s why we still have no contract. That. THAT!”

  “That’s bullshit. NATCA used to be king of the jungle, and now they’re not, so they’re pissed.”

  “Even when they were kings, they were pissed-off kings.”

  “Aw, man, that is beautiful.”

  It’s not so much that these guys are sympathetic to management as they are unsympathetic to management and the union both. Just so sick of the whole stupid war.

  We sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Whitestone Expressway and wonder why morale at the LaGuardia tower is so completely different than it is at the TRACON.

  Lars goes out on a limb and says maybe the reason LaGuardia isn’t a shithole like the TRACON has something to do with Leo, the LaGuardia tower manager on the ninth floor. “For all his bravado, Leo is still his own guy, you know?” You can talk to Leo. You can ask for a day off to go to your kid’s soccer championship and not be laughed out of Leo’s office. Leo isn’t another FAA talking head. Leo, with his monthly pep talks downstairs in the stuffy conference room with the cardboard jammed into the windows to keep out the glare; Leo loving his power, drinking his power, and spewing it out in a fountain of sharing-the-love: “I trust you with everything I have. I do that every day. It’s what I have. Trust. Because you gotta have the important parts of ‘What-am-I-really-doing-here?’ When you go to sleep at night and you wake up in the morning, are you confident that you’ve done it right? I can’t help you with that. It’s not my burden. It’s yours. It’s about safe transportation for the public. Pay attention! Are you paying attention? When bad things happen, that’s what I look at. In this split second of time, what were you looking at, what were you thinking about, and why did it take you x, y, z seconds to respond? You can explain it to me, or I’ll give you the chance to walk down on the concourse to a full waiting lounge of passengers, and you can raise your hand and tell them, ‘Oh, I’m the air traffic controller that’s going to work your flight, and oh, by the way, I have a problem with paying attention.’ Look, if you think the distance is that far between your actions and their lives, you’re kidding yourself. You are kidding yourself. That’s what you are. Kidding yourself.”

  It would be complete cornball stuff were it not so frighteningly true.

  The pep talks are usually only once a month on training days, required refresher courses. Then you watch movies of runway incursions at other towers and wonder what you would have done differently. Then you watch movies of all the ways the FAA is going to get-this-technology-thing-down and move away from Smokey and the Bandit CB radios and into, like, GPS or something awesome like that. It used to be you could go home after the movies were over, but now the FAA says you are not allowed to leave until you have put in every last second of your eight hours of training, so whatever: you read the paper or eat some crackers and bullshit about the chicken wings you had for dinner last night. Whatever. It’s not that bad. It’s no reason to alert your union representative.

  The point is: the team. Whose team are you on, anyway?

  “The carpool” is what everyone calls Cali and Lars and Eric and Tim, who move as a unit each day in one car or the other and hopefully not Eric’s stupid little truck. They’ve rejoined the rest of the C team up in the tower, everyone again battling rush hour, again and again and again, the morning moves jackhammer fast. Bonk, clunk, bonk, clunk, bonk, clunk. Cali’s craning his neck, watching an MD-80 he just launched on runway 4. Is this asshole going to go, or what? This is an American Airlines MD-80, which in controller language means: geriatrics. You soaking your bunions there, buddy? Nobody understands what the American pilots in those MD-80s do that takes them so long to roll. Cali watches, hopes. Up in the air, he’s got an RJ on approach for runway 31, tells that pilot to square the base, which means don’t cut corners, make a nice wide, square turn in the sky. You’re gonna need the extra time, dude. I’m launching an American MD-80 down here. Square the fucking base.

  “I don’t think you’re going to make it,” Camille says. She’s back here on cab-coordinator position, overseeing. It’s kind of like the outfield. The cab coordinator watches the backs of the guys on Local and Ground, a second set of eyes.

  The MD-80 gathers oomph like an old lady getting out of a chair down runway 4. The RJ appears first as a glimmer just past Shea Stadium, bigger and bigger until it fully reveals itself. These airplanes are headed toward each other on intersecting runways. Too fast. Too soon. Here it comes. The MD-80 is not over the threshold. . . . Fuck. “Go around!” Cali says into his headset, instructing the RJ to abort its landing. It’s too close to the MD-80. It’s too close. . . . The plane swoops down, then up abruptly, like a gull with a fresh kill.

  “Go-around!” says Camille, putting everyone on alert. “We got a go-around!”

  Cali asks Eric, who’s monitoring all the little choppers and private planes zooming around, if he’s got anything at 2,000 feet that might get in the way of the go-around. Eric says he’s got nothing. Cali takes the RJ up to 2,000 feet over Rikers Island; Camille radios the TRACON, says we got a go-around you’re going to have to resequence.

  “Yeah, I knew it was a tight shot,” Cali says to the team, apologizing. LaGuardia has thousands of go-arounds a year. At an airport like this, everything is a close call, everything is dependent on split-second decisions, snap judgments, jets constantly barreling toward each other. It’s people, just people, with nerves of steel and uncommon courage, keeping the planes from bashing into each other.

  “I knew it was tight,” Cali says again.

  “Nobody’s gonna shed a tear over that shit,” says Lars.

  “If those guys would have played nice, it would have worked,” says Joe. If the American would have rolled faster, it would have worked. If the RJ would have squared the base, it would have worked. If the TRACON would just give more fucking separation between arrivals, it would have worked. If Kennedy with its whiny-ass delays hadn’t . . . Well, Kennedy hasn’t really bothered LaGuardia at all yet today, but it will. It will.

  Us versus them. It depends on what team you’re on, and this is the team. This is the C team. This is the family. This is what is so awesome.

  Joe stands at a computer monitor, poking it as if trying to revive a dead cat. “Yo, Tim,” he says. “I can’t make my touchy thingie work. Can you insert that Cactus RJ in front of Flagship?” He summons Lars. “Our touchy-screen thingie is not touching again,” he tells Lars.

  “Christ—”

  —

  ONE DAY, LEO, the almighty tower manager, invites me out a little gray door on the tenth floor to see the tower observation deck and to have a smoke. He’s tan, square, a little bit short, a little bit rascal. “Back in the day,” he says, “people paid money to come out here on this observation deck and watch aviation. Okay? There was a time when this was interesting. It was important. It was a place to be.”

  It’s windy, hard to get a lighter to light. The sky is crisp blue, crested white. Manhattan looks manageable from here, neatly laid out as if you could weed it.

 
“We’re not Phoenix, you know?” Leo says, shouting over the harsh growl of a launching 757. He’s a big cheese. He’s in charge of twenty-four towers in the region, including Newark and Kennedy, but the LaGuardia tower, such as it is, is his baby darling. “Nothing against the fine people of Phoenix,” he says, “but there’s history here. They showcased this tower at the 1964 World’s Fair, okay? And Amelia Earhart, she flew into this airport. . . . So did all the early airplane builders, people that not only conceptualized aviation but built it themselves with their own hands. This same piece of ground is where they flew into.”

  He pauses dramatically. He squints toward a world beneath that is his, all his. “I make these new controllers understand the history of where they’re at, okay?” he says. “Because this is a place that has a heart and soul. It’s all about the great people who were here before and their stories. And the stories can be a burden on people’s souls forever. I try to make my people understand that this place is unforgiving, and a mistake here will be a burden on your soul forever.”

  I suppose it makes a difference having a guy at the top who is all romance and conscience and chivalry, the sort of fellow who makes you want to purse your lips, wag your brow, and give him an attaboy punch on the chin. I tell him he’s awesome. I never say “awesome.” It’s a word that invades my vocabulary only here, at the LaGuardia control tower. We turn toward the south, speculate about the choppers hovering over what’s left of a crumbled Shea Stadium. We marvel at LaGuardia’s new-tower-next-year; the actual empty promise has been standing right here for almost a year now. It is massive, of course phallic, a 233-foot concrete stalk. Lately, it’s been draped in scaffolding, a very encouraging sign. A gigantic red crane hangs over the top, frozen in place, as if painted there.

  “You’re looking at $63 million,” Leo says. “It’s our new tower. We’re moving in next year. No, they really mean it this time.”