Aloft

by William Langewiesche

  For Dobkin the result was an inevitable irregularity in takeoff timing which translated into the inefficient use of 22 Right. Ground control worked to reduce the effect by bunching airplanes by type so that they could be launched in quick order. The success of this strategy then created another problem: Having landed on 22 Left and pulled onto the taxiways between the runways, the arrivals could not cross the departure runway to get to the terminals. They accumulated between the runways until, by threatening to block the runway exits for landing traffic, they forced Dobkin to hold the takeoffs. Dobkin tried hard to avoid such hangups by exploiting the natural gaps in the departure flow. He said, ‘It’s Traffic 101. You cross behind a heavy jet, a seven-two, a prop. You use every chance you’ve got. You don’t forget any part of it. You keep this traffic moving.’

  What he did not say was, ‘You keep this traffic apart.’

  Not that the lives-hanging-by-a-thread idea was entirely absent. I asked Dobkin about the toll on controllers in shattered health, divorce, and drink. ‘Sure,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘It’s hard sometimes – I’ve known guys who had to get out.’

  Earlier a controller had said to me, ‘Stressed out? If you’re the type, sure. But then it’s the freeway traffic when you’re driving to work that will really do it to you.’

  Pilots do not believe that air traffic control is in the business of keeping them alive, or that it should be. This is not a matter of principle or bravado but simple observation. The surrounding sky is so large that even when another airplane passes nearby it remains by comparison very small. Like other pilots who fly in crowded air space, I have had close calls with traffic. But ‘close’ can mean many things. Is it a crossing that surprises you, or one that requires an evasive maneuver, or one so tight and fast that no maneuver is possible? Or is it – most likely – merely the violation of an official standard that may to some extent be arbitrary? I talked to a controller involved in research with radar simulations, who said, ‘You’d be amazed how hard it is to vector two airplanes into each other.’ The sort of head-on encounter in which another airplane appears as a dot and within ten or twenty seconds fills your windshield is very rare. Neither pilots nor controllers need gunslinger reflexes. Airplanes sidle slowly toward each other. Can you wonder why a pilot would feel detached from the newspaper and television treatments of his experience? Airplanes will continue to collide, but the reporters who speak so urgently of confusion aloft, of all the accidents avoided by chance, seem to have discovered some separate sky.

  Moment-by-moment air traffic control has less to do with the safe operation of the airplane than with the forward progress of flight. From tower control, to radar, to tower again, a procession of voices accompanies each airplane across the map. Their presence is humanized by accents, moods, and informalities and by a shared sense of accommodation and competence. Good controllers are neither automatons nor traffic cops. At the start of a trip they deliver a ‘clearance,’ assigning the pilots a computer-generated route to the destination. In an uncrowded sky such a clearance might stand alone as a guarantee of traffic-free flying, eliminating the need for controllers. In the actual sky, it serves instead as a plan in the event of radio failure and as an approximate prediction for the actual flight path.

  The details fill in after takeoff. Controllers thread the departing airplanes through the first busy altitudes with headings and climb restrictions. Pilots are expected not to comply blindly but rather to judge and agree. They distinguish between the controllers’ wrongs and rights. By visualizing the subtleties of a changing technical geography, they can even predict their instructions.

  Eventually the pilots are turned loose to proceed high and fast on course, either along the airways that zigzag across the grid of navigational stations on the ground or, more commonly, in airplanes equipped with independent long-range navigational devices, directly toward the destination. Over the continental United States, the airplanes cruise under the surveillance of ‘centers’ – en route radar facilities whose role, despite the increase in traffic, remains less interventionist than passengers might imagine. Across a sky so deep and wide, ‘control’ consists mostly of monitoring flights as they proceed by routes and altitudes that have been approved by the computers but that remain essentially the pilot’s or airline’s choice. With controllers’ routine approval, pilots cut corners, deviate around thunderstorms, ride good winds, slide above or below the reports of turbulence. Controllers intervene if they see a traffic conflict developing, or if other controllers elsewhere ask for delays or route changes. The respective roles are clearly defined: Controllers may separate airplanes, but pilots still navigate them.

  Controllers do make errors, routinely. Pilots judge the errors, just as in turn the controllers judge theirs. For the participants it is hardly worth commenting on. Few of the errors are serious. The system works in any case only because of the unspoken compensation that goes on within it, the subjective reading of the traffic and the endless adjustments that define the art for everyone involved. You play with speed and descent rates, with bank angles and headings; you measure your transmissions and words; you anticipate the other pilots, their skills and their airplanes; you calibrate the controllers in their own calibrations of you. Busy air space functions on the inside like an ethereal community, a radio village rich with understandings. Machines move through it, but it is a community of the mind.

  It is obvious that you cannot just elbow your way through bad weather and into crowded airports. Still, let us imagine a total collapse, one day, of the nation’s entire air traffic control system. Even then, airplanes would not simply begin to blunder helplessly into each other. Transportation would of course grind to a halt and the nation would soon be paralyzed, but safety would probably not be affected. Pilots in flight would sit up and pay attention, but they would continue to fly and navigate normally. They would find frequencies on the maps, and talk to their airline dispatchers, and radio to each other as they do already at the many uncontrolled airports. If they were originally headed for hubs like Newark or O’Hare, they might turn and fly somewhere else. Some would have to revert to cumbersome arrival routes, and many would have to hold for a while. But few pilots would feel seriously threatened. This is all the more true in modern cockpits equipped with traffic displays. In the airplane I fly today, I often spot other airplanes electronically (not to mention by looking outside) before the controllers call them out to me.

  Certainly the air traffic control system has become an ill-planned patchwork with geographic overlaps, conflicting procedures, and chance redundancies that exist as remnants of earlier times. Airplanes move from one little zone of control to the next, are spoken to across overloaded voice-radio frequencies, are handed off from one controller to another, and are given the sort of customized service that often preempts the needs of the larger traffic flow. Individual control facilities function as parallel fiefdoms, each with its own traditions, procedures, and compromises, each speaking directly to (and quarreling with) its neighbors, without passing through a central command. If you were to design a system from scratch, you would never design this. Nonetheless, one consequence of the system’s haphazard structure, of its decentralization and its very inefficiency, is to scatter its many failures, and to provide pilots and controllers with a rich weave of choices when something goes wrong – a radio quits, a radar quits, a computer stops calculating. Perhaps partly as a result, no air traffic control equipment failure has ever yet caused an accident.

  I do not mean that the hardware is good enough but that as an educated user I do not feel threatened by its imperfections. Within such a large and complex system, we can assume that the equipment will wear out or become obsolete and that the government will compound the problem by reacting incompetently. It is of course absurd that the FAA has not yet replaced all the old unreliable IBM computers that contain routing information for flights. And it is annoying that the addition of new power supplies in several centers caused outages that i
n turn led to major delays. And it is disgraceful that the FAA wasted hundreds of millions of dollars between an overambitious attempt to consolidate control rooms and a poorly managed, ill-conceived, and now abandoned ‘advanced automation system’ – an attempt to automate a wide range of internal air traffic control transactions. But on what basis, exactly, do people care that a controller’s radar display does not contain the processing power of a personal computer? And why, precisely, do we worry that backup flight information is still written out on strips of paper? And what was the point, technically, when a secretary of transportation, who was an ex-mayor of Denver, held up an old vacuum tube for ridicule? The controllers, whose workplace he meant to improve, are said to have jeered at his theatrics. Even he must have known that vacuum tubes are not the problem.

  The real problem lies not in hardware but in human relations. From its origins in the 1920s among the agencies responsible for the fresh and bewildering endeavor of human flight, the FAA developed an institutional personality, unrestrained by history or tradition, that was raw, arrogant, and domineering – an exuberant expression, some observers still believe, of the twentieth-century form of big government. For generations most controllers came from the military, bringing with them a hierarchical view of organization, which was further encouraged by the nature of the work. The managers were controllers who worked their way up through the ranks, taking pride in each small step, savoring the distinctions which marked their rise. Those distinctions may have been subtle at first, but they grew and strengthened and eventually came to define the management’s style.

  To explain the resulting tensions then and now, a controller in New York mimicked his bosses for me. He said, ‘When I was a controller, I worked aircraft. It was easy. I told them what to do and they did it. Now that I’m management, I work controllers. Same deal. I tell you what to do and you do it.’

  But by the 1970s, a younger generation of controllers was no longer willing to comply. Faced with a rebellious work force, the bewildered FAA management commissioned a psychiatrist, Robert Rose, then of Boston University, to conduct a study of controllers’ mental health. The Rose report, published in 1978, confirmed the popular impression that controllers had stressful jobs (they suffered disproportionately from hypertension and certain psychological difficulties, including uncontrollable anger and anti-social behavior), but it concluded in typically stilted language that the causes had less to do with the pressures of traffic than with divisiveness within the FAA: ‘This finding of “It’s not so much what they are doing as the context in which they are doing it” holds definite implications for changes that might be considered in the work environment to reduce the risk for future morbidity.’

  In short, the problem lay with the way the FAA was run. Then came deregulation and the steady growth of air traffic. At New York Approach, a controller with tattooed forearms and a ponytail told me his insider’s history of the Newark sector. He meant it as the insider’s history of all air traffic control. He said, ‘For years you’re sitting around Sleepy Hollow eating your brown bag lunches, then one day you look up and, Jesus, you’ve got a hundred airplanes inbound and every one of them is low on fuel.’

  This happened with the deregulation of the airlines, when People Express, then Continental and others, rushed into the Newark void. The controller said, ‘The managers and headquarters types, the paper-pushers, they would have run away. The only reason the system survived was the skill of the guys working the mikes. They dropped their sandwiches. They threw away their manuals. They stood up to the traffic. They managed to patch things together.’

  The real history is less tidy, because nationwide in 1981 most of those same valiant controllers went on strike and lost their jobs, and it was then the turn of the managers and headquarters types, emerging from the back offices and reviving old skills, to stand up to the traffic for the year that followed. The pressure was eased by a stopgap reservation system and an enforced reduction in flights. Nonetheless, to everyone’s surprise, the managers actually did as good a job of controlling as had all those ‘irreplaceable’ union members. Working with small and enthusiastic teams, they handled nearly as many airplanes, safely, and demonstrated convincingly that parts of the old system had indeed been overstaffed. But to accomplish this they, too, had to ‘throw away the manuals.’ For several years after the strike very little of the normal paperwork got done.

  It should have been a lesson but was not. The frustrating part of this story is that after the FAA hired and trained a new and smaller work force of ‘permanent replacements,’ the managers returned to their offices and again lost respect for the job.

  The permanent replacements – strikebreakers by another name – were naturally compliant at first. They were blank slates, the sort of fresh young recruits harboring hopes for promotion who could have been made to share the perspectives of friendly, flexible, and competent management. They gave the FAA an opportunity that other troubled organizations can only dream of – to shed the burdens of the past and move beyond outdated concepts of hierarchy and conflict. But quickly then the recruits became working controllers and came face to face with the airline boom, the congestion around hub airports, the frontline problems of sequencing converging airplanes. To keep the traffic moving, they had to disregard a growing stream of impractical directives from the managers. There was no mystery to why the pre-strike pattern of distance, distrust, and hostility was reasserting itself (everyone involved knew the history), but it seemed all the worse for its institutional inevitability. At New York Approach, I met two brothers – one a manager, the other a controller – who had stopped speaking to each other because of it. In their anger and intractability I could see the emotionalism dividing all air traffic control.

  The resentment today is so strong that for many controllers their hatred of the FAA has become a burden against which the original pleasures of the job – the ‘slam and jam’ and giving of good service – has to be weighed. A controller from California wrote this to me:

  You seemed to be surprised that controllers now have a vested interest in the failure or embarrassment of the FAA. But ‘they’ have taken our profession and our air traffic control and completely screwed it up. ‘They’ have blown every opportunity to do what is right. ‘They’ have devoted their efforts to the goddess Bureaucracy. ‘They’ have relegated us to second class status. ‘They’ have completely forgotten why ‘they’ and ‘we’ are here.

  Management, for its part, must cope with a profound political uncertainty. This is usually explained as a confusion between two missions – the need simultaneously to promote and to regulate civil aviation – and though Congress has eliminated the agency’s formal responsibility for promotion, that confusion remains real. But the political uncertainty also stems in many cases from something even more difficult to legislate away: the managers’ envy of their natural adversaries, the unfettered executives of the airline industry. Those executives are the same people who crowd airline passengers into hub airports and then denounce the FAA for the resulting delays. And the FAA does not really disagree.

  The politics play like a cultural revolution in which disdain for government becomes an orthodoxy required of the government itself. This, too, we can now see in the still, fresh realm of the sky. Moreover, it is generally agreed that airline deregulation is an experiment that has worked and that the very growth of traffic is one proof of it. When forced, the FAA managers can still talk tough about maintaining standards, but they do not dare suggest that the market has created imbalances and that through re-regulation or more clever mechanisms the hubs may someday have to be abolished and the traffic dispersed. They cannot even state the obvious, that air traffic remains a classic example of the legitimate need for public control.

  Self-disdain is of course not the FAA’s official policy. The senior managers of air traffic control run 75 percent of the agency’s $10 billion budget and direct a force of 20,000 employees. They are strong operators, intelligent
, energetic, and decisive, but their work is also heavily saddled with bureaucratic procedure – the yearly uncertainty of congressional appropriations and the endless consultations which slow or kill their initiatives. But you need only to listen beyond their words to hear the themes of regret.

  The ambivalence at headquarters only reinforces a sense among the controllers, incident by incident, that their managers do not stand up for them but instead, for example, side with the airlines in the persistent and irritating disputes over delays. These disputes have become systematic because to a degree unimagined even by active pilots the FAA has surrendered to free enterprise, allowing the airlines to penetrate every level of air traffic control. Beyond taking a hand in the planning and architecture of the system, the airlines now employ full-time representatives at all the major facilities to question the smallest operational details – a certain flight forced to hold, a certain runway selected because of weather, priority given to one airplane or denied another, a routing or even an altitude assigned. For the airlines big money is involved. But among the controllers the feeling of abandonment is so strong in certain radar rooms that some controllers would be willing to take the entire structure down. The managers know it and in turn feel betrayed by the controllers.