The Skies Grow Friendlier

Reagan holds firm, and the air-control system regroups

For two hectic days Canadian air-traffic controllers refused last week to handle flights across the North Atlantic between the U.S. and Europe, violating international air-safety agreements and creating chaos at passenger terminals in New York, Boston, London and Rome.

Portuguese controllers promised a similar boycott this week. But after that flurry of disruption, the U.S. Government faced the long-range task of ensuring safe air travel without the help of some 12,000 fired members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, who left their jobs on Aug. 3. President Reagan, who had warned the strikers that they would be fired if they did not return promptly to work, insisted last week from his California ranch:

“There is no strike. There is a law that federal unions cannot strike against their employers, the people of the United States. What they did was terminate their own employment by quitting.”

The Reagan Administration had, in effect, decided to ignore PATCO, whose increasingly discouraged members continued to picket the Federal Aviation Administration’s regional and airport radar centers. The struggle thus was reduced to a test of the FAA’S ability to carry on with some 3,000 supervisors, 5,000 non-strikers and 900 military controllers until new replacements can be trained. | The system was operating , at roughly half of its former I level of staffing. Over the long run, the key question apparently would be one of economics: Could U.S. airlines, some of them already in financial trouble, operate profitably at the reduced schedules required under the FAA’S strike contingency plans? If not, would the airlines apply pressure to increase flights, even if it requires rehiring some of the strikers?

The profitability of the airlines, in turn, hung heavily on whether the U.S. flying public perceives the curtailed controller system as safe—and, finally, on whether it actually performs safely. The public was not especially reassured by Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis’ assertion that the FAA had recorded 17 instances in which either unidentified voices or interfering signals had been heard on the radio channels on which pilots communicate with controllers. The FBI and Federal Communications Commission were investigating the illegal transmissions.

Lewis said there was no evidence that they were strike-related.

Last week, as the FAA continued to cut prestrike flights in half during peak hours at 22 major airports and limited flights nationally to about 75% of normal, even the fewer airliners flying were not full. In what is normally the heaviest travel month, millions of potential passengers were staying on the ground, apparently worried about unsafe skies, or shying away from the uncertain schedules. The airlines reported losses of nearly $30 million a day.

As TIME correspondents visited control towers, interviewed substitute controllers and quizzed air-safety experts, they found little cause for public fear. Indeed, there was evidence that the FAA’s plan to reduce and smooth out the flow of air traffic was making flying in some ways even safer. The working controllers were going about their jobs with an esprit de corps that had been sadly lacking when the more militant unionists, spoiling for a strike, were among them. Declared Frank Arcidiacono, a former controller now a supervisor at the Los Angeles radar center, as he noted the pickets outside his building: “It’s a manager’s dream. The snivelers, the criers and the whiners are out there in the sun. Everybody who has come to work has come to work!”

The FAA’S computer-plotted plan, originally drawn up by former Federal Aviation Administrator Langhorne Bond when he learned more than a year ago that PATCO seemed determined to strike in 1981, requires each airline operating at a major airport to reduce its flights by a specified percentage that varies with every hour of the day. At New York’s La Guardia, for example, the cutback jumps from 27% between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. to 49% in the following hour. At Chicago’s O’Hare, the heaviest reduction, 60%, is between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. Each airline is free to cancel any flights it wishes to stay within the FAA limits. Understandably, airlines tend to eliminate their least profitable flights.

Air freight remains scarcely affected by the new restrictions, since cargo flights normally operate in the relatively quiet hours of the night. Essential military flights retain top priority. General aviation, which includes private traffic ranging from two-seaters to large corporate jets, has been cut back the most. The FAA is allowing its control centers to accept only about 35% of the previous level of such aircraft, which normally account for about 44% of the controllers’ total work load. Both military and private pilots, however, can fly freely outside of controlled airspace under visual flight rules (VFR)—and are doing so in a quantity that alarms some controllers. Contends a supervisor at California’s Oakland radar center: “They’ve got too much damn military flying under VFR. It’s impossible for them to fly under ‘see and avoid’ conditions—they’re moving too fast. They’re going to hit someone.”

Just how good are the substitute controllers and how are they holding up? The supervisors who have returned to their scopes, insists Irving Moss, the FAA’s New York spokesman, are “the college professors of the air controllers. They know controlling forward and backward. They have been running more traffic than we thought possible and they are bringing the planes in under safer conditions than ever.” Moss insists that the supervisors enjoy being relieved of paperwork and are now “on a real high” because they “came in when they were needed and kept the planes flying.”

At the Los Angeles center, Controller Dennis DeGraff says that “hatefulness and bickering” had injected new stress before the strike, and that PATCO members “filed grievances on every little thing and management retaliated, and there was harassment on both sides.” Now, he says, “we can move three times the traffic because we’re all working together.” The most stress, he adds, is crossing the picket lines. Bill Kolacek, a supervisor at the Aurora center near Chicago, compares running the picket line to his Army experience in Viet Nam. Driving up to the facility, he says, “I put my foot on the clutch, my left leg starts shaking, and my back tenses up.” He feels sorry for the older strikers who were near retirement and the younger ones who were “used to an interesting job and are going to end up pumping gas.” Not all will. A recruiter from Saudi Arabia was offering $85,000-a-year jobs, with two-month paid vacations in Europe, to U.S. controllers. Some 200 picked up applications.

Many of the working controllers do not want their former colleagues back on the job, fearing that the friction would be worse than before. Declares Stan Recek, a nonunion controller in Miami: “I’ll work seven days a week, 16 hours a day, to keep them from coming back.” Nor do the supervisors want to go back to pushing paper. “I’m having a ball,” says Mike Hughes, a supervisor in Miami. “I’m happier with my job now than I have been in the past three years.”

Still, the crisis-generated “highs” of the substitute controllers will surely start to fade. The FAA’s Moss contends that controllers “perform best under stress —they thrive on it.” He cites studies showing that collisions in the air occur mainly when traffic is relatively light and when “the stress is off air controllers, and they are not paying attention.” Some of the working controllers, who were still putting in 60-hour weeks (they are scheduled to be cut back to 48 hours this week) are worried about remaining alert as the months go by. “I have to ask myself, ‘How long can I do this?’ ” concedes Harry Burke, a Los Angeles controller. Admits a supervisor in Oakland: “It’s just not realistic to think this can go on for two years.” Safety Expert John Galipault, who heads Ohio’s nonprofit Air Safety Institute, takes a cataclysmic view of how long the current system will last: “Until there’s a midair collision.”

The FAA is well aware of the need to watch its controllers for any sign of weariness and to keep air traffic limited to their ability to handle it. Reports Temple Johnson Jr., tower chief at Denver’s Stapleton International Airport, who checks each controller twice a day: “I look them in the eye and ask, ‘How are you doing? Tell me straight.’ ” As of last week Johnson was pleased at the answers he was getting. So far, they were doing well. —By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Gisela Bolte/Washington and Dean Brelis/New York, with other bureaus