OF FRIGHTS AND FLIGHTS

There were two ways to get stranded at an airport in August: the New York way, which might be called terrorist-driven; and the California way, which might be called technology-jinxed. In New York City last Monday, the three big area airports briefly ceased business. The cause was a bomb threat to the obscure yet vital New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON), where 200 air-traffic controllers usher planes through a 150-mile radius around New York City. “There was reason to believe the caller had knowledge of the building and how it worked,” says Phil Barbarello, head of the local traffic controllers’ union. So the control center evacuated, and for 75 minutes no planes landed: tens of thousands of passengers across the U.S. were delayed.

Then there was California. In mid-August, Joe Dimas, a controller at the Oakland Air Route Traffic Control Center in Fremont, watched his radar screen go blank. Then the backup failed. And his radio died. “This was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen,” says Dimas, who with his colleagues was guiding 295 planes. A 20-year-old generator and its replacement had blown. During the 35-min. blackout, a United Airlines Boeing 757 nearly collided with an Alaska Airlines MD-80. Hundreds of flights were grounded.

And there were more bad air days in August. In addition to the New York episode, terrorist fears caused a partial evacuation of Philadelphia International Airport when a bomb-sniffing dog incorrectly drew attention to a rental truck, and at Houston’s Hobby Airport, where a flight was grounded after a college student joked to a ticket agent that her luggage contained guns, grenades and a bomb. Technological glitches wreaked havoc not only in Fremont but also in Miami, where an air-traffic-control center lost power for an hour because of a lightning strike. Both sorts of delay no doubt enraged stranded passengers; but slowdowns are usually proof of caution. Says Linda Hall Daschle, the FAA deputy administrator: “In every case, priority No. 1 is the safety of the flying public. We will sacrifice efficiency for safety’s sake.”

In fact, terror-driven stoppages may be a sign that the regulatory system is working. The New York delay, for instance, could be seen as an appropriate reaction to an ever more hostile world. Two weeks earlier the Federal Aviation Administration, citing worries about increased terrorist activity, had put all the nation’s airports on Level 2 of a four-level terrorism-alert system developed after the Gulf War. New York, where an alleged terrorist was recently arrested, had reason for special concern.

Technologically based slowdowns, however, are symptoms of a horrible disease. The Fremont blackout was the realization of every controller’s nightmare: the physical disintegration of the FAA’s massive–and antique–air-traffic infrastructure. Few of the systems on which millions of lives depend are younger than two decades old, and many are relics. Controllers claim that some of the equipment at Oakland’s TRACON made its debut at the 1962 World’s Fair. In Chicago engineers unable to find outdated replacement parts fabricate their own. FAA associate administrator for research and acquisitions George Donohue admits that his computers are slower and less powerful than most current laptops; and a vacationing controller was appalled to find a system several generations more advanced than America’s–“in Honduras, where the average income is less than $300 a month!”

Exacerbating the system’s deterioration is a personnel shortage that dates back to 1981, when Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 striking members of PATCO, the now defunct controllers’ union. As a result, New York’s Air Route Traffic Control Center, which employed 546 controllers in 1981, today has 305, handling 30% more traffic with the same equipment. Some see this as a recipe for catastrophe. Cooler heads, like Chicago controller Jim Poole, point out that “if you know the equipment’s going to fail, you build a margin [between planes] for yourself” in order to engage a backup system. Of such small margins are great delays made.

Much of the mess is the FAA’s own fault: it has resisted incremental improvements, favoring huge changes that never seem to materialize. Yet the agency is also hamstrung by byzantine procurement rules and misuse of the $12 billion Airport and Airways Trust Fund, which comes out of ticket prices and could modernize the system in the blink of a radar screen. Instead, successive Administrations have hoarded it to apply against the deficit. This year things look especially grim, as both Houses of Congress have proposed FAA cuts that may drastically reduce the number of controllers and the maintenance budget. In retaliation, the agency has produced a dismaying estimate: if the cuts go through, the number of equipment-related flight delays could rise from the current 4,000 a year to 50,000. And every month could be August.

–Reported by Dan Cray/Los Angeles, William Dowell/New York and Jerry Hannifin/Washington