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.
"It's kind of scary thinking about going up there," she said. "So I don't mind being in the classroom for a while, because it's all new to me."
It's not that she's afraid of the new career ahead of her, said the calm 26-year-old, who switched to air-traffic control after working for a couple of years right out of college as an economic analyst for a tech company in New Mexico.
She just doesn't want to rush anything.
The FAA, on the other hand, is in a hurry to plug the holes that will be created over the next decade by retiring controllers; the mandatory retirement age is 56. FAA officials are constantly looking at new ways to speed up students' training time.
The agency boasted in a recent report that it had cut the security-clearance process for new hires by 45 days.
To stay ahead of retirements and the growing aviation system, the FAA says it will need to hire 1,200 to 1,400 recruits each year through 2016. That's more than 15,000 new faces.
Starting pay for controllers is relatively low.
While they're training for about three months at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, they're paid at a rate of $18,000 a year. That pay at least doubles once they graduate. It can go up more, depending on the size of the airport where they're training. D/FW Airport is at the top of the pay scale.
And as they pass various certification stages in the tower or radar room, they get raises. A controller hired this year will make an average of almost $50,000; the pay increases to $94,000 by the end of the fifth year.
Pay for new controllers has actually dropped by about 30 percent, union officials say, because of new work rules imposed by the FAA last year.
Right now, it takes about two to three years of training in a real tower or radar room to become an air-traffic controller. That's in addition to the training at the FAA Academy, from which Ellison just graduated.
The training has changed a lot in the past 20 years, said Lois Legako, an instructor at the academy who went through the training program in 1985, when it was a lot harsher. At that time, the failure rate was about 50 percent, FAA officials said. Today, it's less than 5 percent.
"I think it's a kinder environment," she said. "We're more training to succeed."
Up until about 15 years ago, the FAA Academy was used as a tool to weed out the less-successful candidates, said Rick Larson, another instructor. Now, there are other ways to weed out the candidates, including interviews and a grueling eight-hour entrance exam.
"We do everything we can to make them successful," he said.
"In the old days, we couldn't even be seen talking to kids in the hallway."
That's because others might think that their fellow students were gaining some kind of an advantage, he said.
Martindale still has one more week at the FAA Academy before heading to his on-the-job training at the Austin airport.
Looking back on it, Martindale will miss one of his favorite classes, known by many as "tabletops."
That's where students stand around a large table with a mock airport on it, holding little toy airplanes. While wearing headsets with long cords plugged into the table, they learn how to pass the airplane from one controller to another.
He knows that over the long term, the job won't be too stressful. He has learned what to expect, after hearing stories from his uncle, who works as an air-traffic controller in the tower at Houston Intercontinental Airport.
"If you're a high-strung person, that's where you hear the horror stories about people getting stressed out, panicking and freezing at the scope," said Martindale, who speaks like someone much older than his age. "You need to have that type B personality where you just go with the flow, handle the situation when it comes to you and not get so frustrated."
It's the sort of cool-under-pressure sentiment that other student controllers said they feel about the job as well.
But that doesn't mean that the first time he does it for real won't be a little nerve-racking, Martindale said.
"There's going to be a little bit of nervousness because we're not working real planes yet," he said. "It's all simulation.
"Getting out there on the first day and working real planes with real people on them, I'm going to probably be sweating it out a little bit."
Destination FAA
Ventris Gibson has a plan.
The FAA's head of air-traffic control recruiting is responsible for loading up the pipeline with an ever-ready supply of potential hires.
Her plan, which kicked off around the end of last year, is code-named Destination FAA. And it's like nothing the agency has done before.
It includes posting job openings on popular Internet sites such as MySpace, but it also includes reaching out to former military air-traffic controllers through Military.com.
She's also announcing jobs on diversityhire.com and has teamed up with CareerBuilder.com (the site is partly owned by McClatchy Newspapers, parent company of the Star-Telegram).
Destination FAA essentially replaces the FAA's old way of casting a broad net for new hires, which was through job fairs.
Those weren't working so well, Gibson said, because they limited the number of job applicants to those who lived within driving distance. And the FAA couldn't set them up in every city because of budget constraints.
Based on the success of private companies that conduct Internet job searches, Gibson said, "I have no doubt we will be equally successful."
She said she already has 1,300 recruits, which is close to the number that the FAA says it needs to hire this year -- 1,386.
But the controllers' union, known as the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, thinks that the FAA looks desperate in its recruiting attempts.
"If they had this huge list, then why are they advertising on places like MySpace?" said Mike Conely, president of the NATCA D10 local, which represents controllers at the D/FW terminal radar control tower, or Tracon.
"I don't think it's working worth a plumb nickel."
His Tracon facility, which is a windowless radar room at the base of D/FW Airport's central control tower, is understaffed and expecting about 14 retirements at the end of the year, he said.
The FAA officially projects 10 retirements.
By the FAA's own projections -- a report titled "A Plan for the Future" released last month -- there should be 83 to 101 controllers at the D/FW Tracon.
The report says as of Sept. 30, there were 83.
But Conely said that number is deceptive because there were only 76 certified controllers at that time. The rest were all in training, and every controller being trained needs a certified controller nearby.
Regardless, Gibson remains confident that her plan is working.
She said there's no desperation at all. She just wants to cast the widest net possible.
"We decided that we will be aggressive and constant in our recruiting methodology and strategy in making sure we have controllers," she said.
"I am highly confident we will meet our goals."
Controllers who are going through training, including Rees, Ellison and Martindale, are trying not to get caught up in the rhetoric between FAA management and union leaders.
News of controller retirements and future openings attracted many of the students in the first place.
Although they hope that their union leaders will push to increase their annual salary (which averages about $100,000 throughout their careers), the young controllers say they have a huge responsibility ahead of them -- taking over the profession.
"Everybody realizes this is kind of happening suddenly," Ellison said. "At the same time, I think the younger crowd is taking that responsibility knowing that they're going to be the new crew pretty soon."
Photos by Kelley Chinn
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David Wethe, 817-685-3803 [email protected]
