Aloft

by William Langewiesche

  Of course, once the balls landed they would not rise again without the juggler. That, too, is the nature of air traffic control. Controllers have to work well and willingly in order to keep the air transportation system aloft. And only the most persistent glad-talker would deny that over the past decades controllers have had difficulty, for whatever reason, in living up to the demands placed upon them. But air traffic control’s core problems are both less tangible and more difficult to resolve. Yes, the hardware can be modernized, and with sufficient political support new airports can be built, but air traffic control’s greatest weakness is cultural and organizational and will not yield to the microchip and the dollar. This weakness lies deep inside the Federal Aviation Administration, a government agency now divided into two mutually antagonistic camps, management and the working controllers, each with its own traditions and memories.

  The FAA has other problems as well. It has been accused of waste and stupidity and on a regular basis has been held responsible for airline crashes because of its role in certifying airline and airport operations. In response, it has promised to streamline itself and to pay closer attention to detail; Congress has occasionally decreed other changes. But such reforms, to the extent that they touch it at all, only brush the surface of air traffic control, an individualistic profession which relies on the willingness and creativity of each on-duty controller but within which old-fashioned class resentments and labor discontent now rise like specters from the past. A generation has passed since the great controller strike of 1981, when Ronald Reagan fired most of the work force, giving the FAA the opportunity for a fresh start. But there is a new union now, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), and it is growing as angry as the old one. Among the controllers a quiet and as yet unseen rebellion has broken out. The consequences are serious, if not for safety then for something more important still – the routine human flight that already, after only a century, we have come to believe is our right.

  On a first visit to the cavernous radar room of New York Approach, the noise, commotion, and apparent chaos seem to validate the worst fears about air traffic control. Certainly air traffic control has become more dynamic than it was in days gone by – the days of men with crew cuts and white shirts holding binoculars and saying ‘roger.’ Controllers today wear T-shirts and jeans and have adopted the swagger of the street. Most do not work in towers. This place called New York Approach, which has responsibility for the low altitudes above the entire metropolitan area, is situated away from the airports, half an hour past Kennedy on Long Island. It is known throughout the world for the fury of its controllers, especially those assigned to the Newark sector, who work in a condition of permanent frenzy – shouting, complaining, joking, throwing plastic data strips the length of the consoles, staring at their screens with gum-chewing concentration, swearing at their supervisors, punching the keyboards, gesturing at the radio transmissions of the pilots who cannot match their pace.

  This is the sort of intense activity cited in cases of ‘burnout,’ and it obscures the actual functioning of air traffic control. I spent days at the Newark sector, absorbing the technical details, and came away with the appreciation that the intensity was mostly self-induced and was actually what many of the controllers thrived on. The opportunity to indulge in it seemed, in fact, to be what had drawn them to the job.

  The controllers did complain about the pressures, but largely because they would have been embarrassed not to. They complained also about the food in the cafeteria, the condition of the roads, and life on Long Island. One man finally admitted. ‘How can you go home from this and be satisfied mowing the lawn?’ It was practically a declaration of love. About the only time the controllers seemed genuinely upset was when they talked about their superiors in the FAA.

  I don’t mean to diminish the controllers or to belittle the experience and dedication they bring to the job. The sight of a radar scope swarming with little ovals, each representing a flight, is indeed daunting. But what does it mean that control rooms can sound like trading floors? Maybe only that air traffic control has become less regimented, more human, and more complex than originally anticipated. There is no doubt that air traffic control consists now of an accumulation of informal solutions pieced together at the last moment to cope with an overwhelming flow. In that sense it is a typically American institution – the problem coming first, the attempt to manage it coming afterward. And who knows, this may be for the best.

  On a mechanical level, the most pressing issue that controllers face is a surge in air traffic without a commensurate expansion of runway availability. Since 1979, when President Jimmy Carter deregulated the airlines, unleashing competition among them, the number of scheduled flights in the United States has grown by nearly 70 percent. And the growth has been lopsided: Of the several thousand airplanes aloft during a typical daytime rush, most are headed for the same few cities. The busiest fifty airports, out of thousands of airports altogether, now account for more than 80 percent of the nation’s traffic. The lopsidedness is in part a reflection of people’s final destinations, but it also results from the airlines’ competitive needs for efficient route structures centered on hubs – the now familiar passenger-and cargo-exchange airports that require flights to arrive and depart at about the same time, and that by their nature inflate the number of takeoffs and landings.

  Newark, for instance, does double duty as a New York destination and as a Northeastern hub for Continental, United Parcel, and Federal Express. Faced with all the inbound airplanes, its controllers have no choice but to greet them. They grapple with the core problems of overcrowded air space – that flight is fast, fluid and determinedly forward-moving; that every airport, airplane, and pilot is different; that thunderstorms, fogs, winds, ice, snow, or merely low clouds can block a route or slow a runway; that even under a clear blue sky airline schedules push airports past their limits. The slightest bump then ripples backward, forcing the controllers to scramble. A flight may miss an early turnoff from a runway, or come in too fast or slow, or ignore a call on the radio, or jump out of line with an engine shut down. A new pilot may be unsure of the local procedures. An old pilot may get huffy and insist on having his way. These things happen constantly. The resulting complications are measured in wasted fuel, money, and time – but not in lives lost, or even in levels of danger.

  Across the Newark controllers’ radar screens I watched the targets move in short jumps, dragging identifying tags behind them: Lufthansa, United, Continental – dozens of airplanes at a time. By assigning headings and descent paths, the controllers angled the flights down from the mid-altitude collection points known as arrival gates, joined them up to the south, and swept them into an arc which took them north past the airport and skirted LaGuardia’s air space before bending back around, straight in for the runways. The purpose of the arc was only secondarily to keep the airplanes apart. Its primary purpose was nearly the opposite: to give controllers the angular flexibility necessary to tighten the spacing and to exploit the occasional gaps by shooting airplanes in from the side, pushing them toward the airport ahead of sequence.

  The most basic geometry of air traffic dictates that departing airplanes naturally fan out and so usually diverge, that cruising airplanes only sometimes cross, but that arriving airplanes must inevitably converge. Moreover, the inbound traffic compresses accordion-style as the airplanes slow toward their touchdown speeds. The compression does not mean that the airplanes are in danger of rear-ending each other; closing speeds are low between airplanes flying in the same direction. The formal separation requirements, which are measured in miles, are dictated ultimately by the civilian orthodoxy that requires one airplane to taxi clear of the runway before the following airplane lands. Military pilots routinely take off and land in formation, and safely. I don’t mean that airline pilots should, too, but that the margins built into standard civilian procedures are large. That is why, between themselves, New York Approach controlle
rs take their pride not in the collisions they avoid – an issue that almost never comes up in the manner the public imagines – but in the pressure they keep on the runways.

  At the receiving end of that pressure stand the tower controllers at Newark International Airport. On the day I went to see them an overcast paved the sky. I wandered through the airport labyrinth to the service road that led between blast fences out across the vast concrete aprons toward the main runways. It was a bleak landscape, an industrial plain roamed by heavy machinery and scented by jet exhaust, a technical world that was practical and unadorned, a place to feel at home. At the end of the service road the control tower rose against oily winds.

  The door at the base had a buzzer and was unattended. An elevator carried me up to the mid-level, where I met the tower’s chief, an immaculate man who wore cuff links and a well-tailored suit in the typically dandified style of the FAA management. We sat in his government-issue office, with the clean desk and coffee table, the soft chairs, the FAA seal, the flag, the picture of the president. Drapes hid the view of the wasteland outside but could not exclude the roar of the jets, which regularly shook the walls. Airplanes were backed up fifteen-deep on the taxiways and for 200 miles out into the arrival flow. The chief volunteered that Newark had in recent times led the nation in delays, but he said the airport had improved its record for the current fiscal year. I asked him to be specific about the changes he had made. He admitted that the improvement was due mostly to an unusual stretch of good weather. I assured him that as a pilot I understood. I wanted him not to make the kind of excuses that would embarrass us both. You can do only so much with three cramped runways, and you can do less when the weather turns bad. Controllers do not fly airplanes. Controllers do not control the climate.

  I rode the elevator higher and climbed the steel stairs into the tower’s cab, the small glass-walled room where the work is done. The cab held a dozen controllers, ordinary-looking men in casual clothes, the sort of standard middle Americans bred by the outer city. In a shopping mall crowd you would never have picked them out. But if they were ordinary men, they were in this place, on the job, also impressively unsettled. Disdaining the swivel chairs, they worked on their feet, tethered by their headset cords, moving restlessly along the radio consoles, leaning toward the traffic outside, checking the radar scopes, issuing instructions, asking questions, barking into telephones, joking, swearing, shouting across the cab in a confusion of emotions difficult for any outsider to decipher.

  At the center of the turmoil stood a slight young man with blond hair and birdlike reactions whom I will call Dobkin. He wore a lightweight headset and held a transmitter switch down low in his right hand. It was Dobkin’s turn on the frequency known as ‘local,’ which gave him responsibility for the airport’s two parallel runways, the narrowly spaced ‘22 Left’ and ‘22 Right,’ running southwest beside the turnpike. The third runway, a short east–west reliever called ‘29,’ crossed the thresholds of the parallels and conflicted with their traffic. It was a cramped and awkward layout.

  Dobkin said, ‘We work with what we’ve got. The parallels were built way too close for simultaneous approaches. We use the outer runway for arrivals. We use the inner runway for departures. We try to run the props over there on 29, keep them out of the way of the jets, but we can’t cross them into the main approach. When the wind’s light we flip that runway back and forth, pump a load of departures to the west, then bring the inbounds around for landings to the east.’

  The idea that such a controller is somehow in the business of ‘talking airplanes down’ is the part of the myth fostered by the movies. Dobkin had ridden in cockpits a few times, but he knew little about the actual flying of airplanes. Between transmissions he told me how he had come to the job after a stint as a controller in the Navy. He had escaped home, had learned a skill, had grown tired of saluting, and had hired on with the FAA because the FAA was hiring. He had chosen a control tower over a radar room because he liked to look at airplanes. He had picked Newark for the money and action, and he sometimes now wished that he hadn’t. He concluded his story with the false regret of a man proud of his skills: ‘So here I am ten years later, just another keeper of the concrete.’

  He had a high-strung personality, encouraged by the work. If the purpose of his game was simple – to squeeze the maximum possible use from these three runways – in execution it was fast-paced, complex, and competitive. He said, ‘The hard part’s not doing it, but doing it right. You’ve got to use every chance, every gap, to move the traffic. Slam and jam. The job keeps you on your toes.’

  And safety? It intruded not as an active minute-by-minute concern but as a set of rules within which he had to perform, the most basic of which was the restriction against simultaneous operations on a single runway. Perspective is needed here. The deadliest airline accident in history was a runway accident that occurred in 1977, when two 747s collided on Tenerife (in a fog, one taking off, the other taxiing across); and other runway collisions have occurred. They have all, however, been freakish accidents resulting from multiple errors by both the controllers and the pilots. Except in the worst weather, or sometimes at night, pilots can easily see anyone lingering on the runway and on their own initiative can delay their takeoffs, or if they are landing can add power and climb safely away from the ground. It is primarily because such go-arounds waste valuable landing slots and further burden the final approach that controllers work to avoid them. In other words, Dobkin took the timing seriously, but as an efficient practitioner of traffic flow rather than out of a sense of averting disaster.

  I had been told at the FAA headquarters in Washington that the capacity of Newark’s runways was 180 operations an hour. When I mentioned this to Dobkin he said, ‘Forget it. Not even if every airplane’s a 737–400, and they’re all flown the same.’

  ‘Why the 400?’

  ‘Land short, slow fast, hit the high-speed exit.’

  He took a short break from the frequency and drank too much coffee. Washington’s arrogance ate at him. He said, ‘A hundred and eighty? With all three runways up and running, the most this airport can handle is 120 an hour. Weather slows us to 70. You tell me how headquarters is going to do better.’

  I said, ‘I think they’ve got ideas about personnel. They warned me about this place. They said the tower has been hijacked by union hotheads.’

  Dobkin passed this news along to the others. The man working ground control asked about my sources at headquarters. Among others, I mentioned the FAA’s administrator.

  Ground said, ‘Yeah? Who is he this week?’

  The clearance man answered, ‘He’s the guy with the “courage” to kill “advanced automation.” Didn’t you hear?’

  ‘How many billions did they burn on that one?’

  Radar said, ‘What a joke.’

  Dobkin said, ‘They should have asked you. You could have told them.’

  The talk was constant, a condition of the job. On the frequency and off, it made no difference. The controllers shared with pilots an ease with the transmitter switch that allowed them to superimpose multiple conversations without mixing the lines. At the back of the tower cab, the shift supervisor listened quietly with the placidity of a commander who could no longer keep the pace. A trainee came around with a takeout menu from a cheap Chinese restaurant. Dobkin was cruel to him. In his presence he said, ‘Here’s a guy who just can’t get the picture, but because this is the FAA he’ll never wash out. It’s a program they call “Train to Succeed.”’

  I did not mention what Dobkin seemed to have forgotten – that ‘Train to Succeed’ had been a union initiative.

  The airport beyond the glass walls crawled with airplanes moving slowly toward the runways. Thousands of passengers sat like patient prisoners strapped into their seats, but Dobkin’s attention went first to the traffic pouring down the final approach. He judged the inbound lights with a familiar mixture of confidence and concentration.

  The in
bounds tonight showed up first on the tower’s radar screen, where we watched the work of an unseen Approach controller who was pushing the flights closer together than the runways would be able to handle for any length of time. Dobkin asked the pilots for speed reductions, which worked at first but soon echoed backward. The tower supervisor telephoned Approach for better service and was told irritably that Approach itself was being force-fed by the long-distance controllers over at New York Center, who in turn were squabbling with their counterparts in Cleveland. In the meantime, because of Teterboro and LaGuardia traffic, New York Approach could not swing the Newark inbounds any wider. Approach threatened to make space by freezing the ‘commuter’ turboprop departures off of Runway 29, a restriction which would have crowded the turboprop departures over to the parallels.

  There simply was not enough space for all the airplanes, not in the air and not on the ground – at least not without delays. Dobkin cursed Approach nonetheless. He thought he was doing the controllers there a favor by cleaning up their mess on final. So far he had avoided any wasteful go-arounds, but the airplanes now were barely clearing the runway before the traffic behind flared down across the threshold. After a Delta flight checked in with a stately drawl, Dobkin knocked twenty knots off the Continental that followed. To me he said, ‘You learn to read the signs.’ Delta dawdled after landing. Off the radio Dobkin snapped, ‘Come on dumb boy, clear the runway.’ Delta did and Continental landed short, with company behind.

  The unfortunate consequence of Dobkin’s success was the speed with which it was filling up the airport. To make room for the new arrivals, ground control kept pushing loaded airplanes up the taxiways toward the departure runway, 22 Right. Dobkin cleared them for takeoff as aggressively as spacing within the outbound corridor allowed. With relief provided by Runway 29, the tower had managed to avoid gridlock on the ground; nonetheless, the departure delays were steadily growing longer. The reason had to do with aircraft performance: While descent angles and final approach speeds can be matched for most inbound traffic, optimal climb rates and speeds vary widely between departing airplanes; moreover, because the heaviest airplanes generate dangerous wakes immediately after liftoff, additional spacing behind them is required.