As Air Traffic Controllers Age, FAA Looks to Hire Many

Apr. 8--OKLAHOMA CITY -- Donald Martindale is barely old enough to buy beer. He has just been assigned to a new position in Austin, where he's looking forward to sampling the nightlife.

In a couple of years, he will be safeguarding your airplane from disaster.

The 21-year-old, who's bound for Austin Bergstrom Airport, is part of a new wave of air-traffic controllers who will be spilling into towers and radar rooms across the country in the next decade.

Martindale and others like him -- including Tara Ellison, who just landed at Dallas Love Field, and Larry Rees, who's training at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport -- are arriving not a moment too soon. Three out of every 4 controllers are headed for retirement in the next 10 years.

It's an employment crunch that the Federal Aviation Administration hasn't faced since 1981, when President Ronald Reagan fired more than 10,000 striking controllers. Replacing them today is a hotly debated issue between FAA management and the air-traffic controllers' union. The FAA says it's on target to fill the coming void, but union leaders say the agency is doing a poor job.

Their labor fight has been well-chronicled, but there are other unknowns, such as who will fill the jobs and why they would want to step into a profession with high stress levels and recently reduced pay.

If you haven't heard that the FAA is hiring, then get ready. An unprecedented, wide-ranging recruiting drive is coming to a newspaper and magazine near you. The FAA's two-week "blitz" will tear through Texas starting June 1. The nationwide hiring campaign has already seeped into the Internet through popular social-networking sites such as Facebook, Craigslist and MySpace.

Who can be a controller? The agency said it is fishing for "everyone."

"The FAA does all the training," the MySpace ad boasts, "so you don't have to know anything about air traffic control to be considered."

Who wants this job?

Larry Rees silently looks out the large, tinted windows onto the west side of D/FW Airport. From his perch in the control tower, 246 feet in the air, the controller-in-training can see tiny airplanes taxiing between the gates and the runways.

On this sunny Thursday afternoon, his headset is strapped on, the cord plugged in, but he doesn't say a word.

He is learning.

Other days, the 24-year-old, who played basketball for a small Division I school in Tennessee, would find himself alone on the other side of the control tower, watching the more experienced controllers. He would often practice by reciting a series of complicated instructions, just seconds before other controllers would give the real set of commands, word-for-word, to the pilots. The "phraseology," as controllers call it, sounds like another language to the layman.

But to Rees, it's starting to become more familiar.

Today, Rees just wants to watch and learn how to work the tower's ground-control position.

He likens it to his old role in basketball as a point guard. The ground controller tells pilots how to taxi around the seven runways at the world's third-busiest airport.

One of his on-the-job trainers, Clark Oldnettle, constantly tells Rees that being an air-traffic controller is just about the only job where he can expect to be scolded for making a mistake every 30 seconds.

It's OK the first few times, Oldnettle said. "But if we tell you the same thing 10 times, then we're going to get irritated. It's a big adjustment."

That side of the job doesn't seem to bring Rees down. It's not that much different from a coach breathing down his neck, he said.

"I love looking outside every day," he said during a recent break. "I love looking at airplanes. ... It's a cool job."

Then versus now

Tara Ellison spent her first week of on-the-job-training at Love Field last week in a classroom at the base of the airport tower.

Going through PowerPoint slides may not seem as glamorous as when she goes up into the tower to train in another week or so. But that's OK.