FAA and Union Go Into a Stall Over Fate of Air Traffic Control

Jan. 24, 2006
While FAA insists that it only wants to get back some of its "management rights," the union says its members' jobs have never been worse than they are right now.

Aviation safety hangs in the balance as contract talks between the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the air traffic controllers' union have stalemated. While FAA insists that it only wants to get back some of its "management rights," the union says its members' jobs have never been worse than they are right now.

From the FAA's point of view, the agency's loss of administrative control over air traffic control (ATC) staffing issues, in particular, combined with soaring controller compensation levels, has put the agency through "the death of a thousand cuts," says Greg Martin, FAA's communications director.

Meanwhile, a union official that claims to represent 85 percent of the nation's controllers, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), says current staffing is "ridiculously low."

In December, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Int'l Airport (ATL) served as a proxy for this struggle between FAA and the union. The union says FAA reneged on a deal to adequately staff the tower in Atlanta by cutting back on 10 promised new controller positions. Not only is Hartsfield-Jackson now the busiest airport in the country, but it also has more runway crossings than ever, the union argues.

But according to FAA, there was never any such deal, Martin tells Air Safety Week.

There are other airports that are at least as bad off as Atlanta, the union claims. Both Los Angeles Int'l (LAX) and Oakland Int'l (MCO), for example, are two of the lowest-staffed facilities in the country, union spokesman Doug Church insists. Overall, it's a system that is "straining very badly," he adds.

So, right now, the FAA/union negotiations, which started last summer, do not appear to have an end in sight. Talks were scheduled to resume last week in New Orleans, Martin says. And several more rounds are already scheduled: In Washington, D.C., on Jan. 23; in Seattle on Feb. 13-14; and back to D.C. on March 6-10.

The pace of negotiations has indeed been "frustrating," FAA's Martin admits. The two sides remain far apart, especially on issues related to compensation.

Whenever the negotiations end, it'll likely mean that both sides will have given in somewhat, resulting in the continued deterioration of the ATC system, says aviation safety consultant Billie Vincent, who worked in ATC for 24 years, ending his career as chief of the New York center. If events are true to their historical patterns, when the next bad incident happens, Congress will quickly jump into the fray. Then the innocent will be fired and the guilty will get promoted, he asserts.

Unless Congress does get involved, FAA will attempt to impose a contract on the controllers that is simply not fair, and will wind up stretching the existing workforce further and further, Church tells Air Safety Week. That eventuality will have "big safety implications."

For its part, the FAA's Martin casts the agency's arguments in terms of the controllers' rapidly escalating pay levels -- which now stand at $166,000 for an annual yearly average, the agency says -- and the eroding of those "management rights." With the former, FAA's Martin points to a 74 percent pay increase over the life of the current five-year contract. That agreement also originally came with a $200 million price tag for the first three years; but in actuality, it turned into well over $1 billion in extra costs over the same time period.

The FAA's "management rights" demands include things that on their face may seem like what most corporate officials take for granted -- like being able to set the work schedule, determine seniority, adjust staffing levels, as well as the use of part-time workers, how new technologies are implemented, and limiting the costs of certain job entitlements.

In the last couple of years, for example, not only has airline traffic increased, but there have been shifts in the routes the airlines want to fly, Martin explains. FAA doesn't have the ability nowadays to shift staff to different areas to respond to the shifts in air traffic. It doesn't make sense to keep the same staffing levels at all locations while traffic patterns change. But that's what FAA has had to do for the last five years, and it has really hurt operations, he says.

In some ways, Vincent shows empathy for FAA's side in the dispute. Part of the difficulty is that the previous FAA administrators "gave away the world" to the union and the controllers, he tells Air Safety Week. Other groups of FAA employees, including the agency's attorneys, felt compelled to organize themselves in order to protect their own interests.

Now the current FAA administrator, Marion Blakey, has put a priority on wresting a lot of the control back from the union, Vincent explains. As a result, relations between FAA and the union have greatly deteriorated -- so much so, in fact, that the union in many cases has taken over the job of scheduling controllers for work.

Part of the union's beef with FAA is that while the agency allegedly has been shortchanging the controller workforce, it also has "stocked management to 100 capacity," Church says. It would greatly help the situation if the FAA brass at least put a moratorium on filling the administrative desk-jockey positions, which have been overwhelmingly promoted from the ranks of controllers. For a long time, the controller-to-supervisor ratio was about 10:1; these days it's more like 6:1.

Barring that, it would be nice for FAA to return ATC staffing levels to where they were just two years ago, Church adds. But that would require a sudden commitment to re-stock the national workforce with 1,000 new controllers.

But it takes about 4-5 years to transform a new hire into a "journeyman controller," Vincent says. The agency should have started bringing in about 2,000 new people about two years ago, but avoided taking that action for reasons that are not clear.

Moreover, the union is right when it says that the controller workforce is always short of bodies, Vincent says.

Then again, it helps to understand the average controller mindset, he adds. Controllers have a "supreme sense of self-confidence," are "very bright," and also are something of a self-selected elite. Very few make it to what is considered the pinnacle of the position -- a controller in a high density area. Controllers also have an attitude that they are never satisfied with what they get, and always want more, Vincent says. Unless the FAA negotiators understand this, the agency's problems with controllers will just continue to grow.

All in all, there is not much optimism within the union over the negotiations, Church admits. There's more hope for progress in the area of technological improvements that FAA has been working on. One such area involves runway-based surface radar, which could give controllers a clear picture of runway conditions -- of every airplane or vehicle on them.

Meanwhile, the Air Traffic Control Association, a non-union professional trade group, is offering no comments on the negotiations, its director, Garland "Cass" Castleberry, tells Air Safety Week.

>>Contacts: FAA, (202) 267-3883; NATCA, (202) 628-5451; Billie Vincent, (703) 322-1900<<

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