Chicago-area air-traffic controllers celebrated the election defeat Monday of the union's national president, who last year endorsed Mayor Richard Daley's plan to expand O'Hare International Airport despite local controllers' concerns about runway safety.
John Carr, a former O'Hare controller, was defeated in his bid for a third term as president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union announced.
Patrick Forrey, vice president of the union's Great Lakes region, received about 58 percent of the votes to Carr's 42 percent, said union spokesman Doug Church.
Carr, a critic of the Federal Aviation Administration's slow progress toward reducing the risk of runway incursions at busy airports, angered Chicago-area controllers a year ago when he met with Daley to pledge his full support for the city's $15 billion blueprint to expand O'Hare.
O'Hare controllers contend the plan for parallel runways is unsafe, in part because it would increase, from about 100 times a day now to more than 2,000, the frequency with which planes taxi across runways where others are taking off or landing.
"We had legitimate flight-safety concerns and John Carr went behind our back," said Craig Burzych, ex-O'Hare tower union president. "If you live by the sword, you die by the sword.
Forrey has been a controller for 18 years at the FAA's radar facility in Cleveland.
On the national level, Carr's inability to deliver on promises he made to the union in recent bitter contract negotiations with the FAA probably played a role in his ouster. The FAA and the union failed to agree on the terms of a new contract, despite a month of mediation, and under law the FAA last month implemented its contract offer.
Copyright 2005 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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