Aging workforce, work rules raise questions of air safety

Roughly once a minute, or on average 41,300 times a month, an air-traffic controller delicately guides pilots through a landing or takeoff at Philadelphia International Airport.

To the National Air Traffic Controllers Association union, the Philadelphia staff of 84 is barely enough to keep planes and their passengers safe. And now the problem is growing worse, they say, because of a high rate of retirement of veteran controllers.

"The margin of safety is decreasing because you're seeing an experience drain going on," said Don Chapman, head of the union at the Philadelphia control tower.

But to Federal Aviation Administration officials, 84 controllers here and about 15,000 nationwide are just right. The level was established in a recently adopted FAA plan that they say has helped the agency save money while matching the workforce to the number of flights at its 314 facilities nationwide.

"We're adequately staffed for the traffic levels we have," said Ed McKenna, manager of the FAA unit that oversees administrative functions at airports in the Northeast.

Safety is not being compromised, McKenna said, citing a sharp decline in the number of "operational errors" - when aircraft get too close to one another in the air or the ground - in Philadelphia's airspace.

The long-simmering staffing dispute between the FAA and the union boiled up this week as Congress was poised to consider a major piece of legislation that would establish a new method of paying for and modernizing the air-traffic system.

After months of negotiations, the union and the FAA failed to agree on a new contract last summer. A law adopted by the previous Republican-controlled Congress allowed the agency to impose its last contract offer on the union, which not only set staffing levels but froze pay for many controllers and set up a lower pay scale for new hires.

Some Democrats on the U.S. House Transportation Committee now want to rescind that law and force the Bush administration to reopen contract negotiations, union and FAA officials said. The legislation, with or without the controllers' issue in it, is expected to be introduced in the House next week, according to one congressional staffer who asked not to be identified.

At the Philadelphia tower, situated on Hog Island Road on the southern rim of the airport, the FAA and the union paint completely different pictures of what life is like these days for air-traffic controllers.

The agency has thousands of controllers who were hired in the early 1980s after President Reagan fired most of the workforce when their union then, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association, staged an illegal strike. Because of the stresses of the job, controllers must retire by age 56, and hundreds are becoming eligible for pensions every month.

In an interview in the lobby of a nearby hotel, Chapman, 44, an 18-year veteran, explained why the FAA was losing its most experienced people.

Controllers are unhappy about the wage freeze they are under, and say they have to work overtime too often, Chapman said. Working overtime in such a high-stress job can lead to fatigue, which, in turn, reduces the safety margins, he said.

The retirements and staffing levels have reduced the amount of time veterans have for fully training recent hires, called developmental controllers, Chapman said. It takes two to three years for a controller to be fully certified here because of the complexity of the operations.

Controllers at the Philadelphia FAA facility watch from the tower and communicate with aircraft on the ground, and use radar to direct traffic in and out of the airport and through the region.

"With senior controllers leaving, and the facility so short-staffed, they're holding back the developmental controllers," Chapman said. "This administration is trying to run the air-traffic system as if it were Wal-Mart. The public deserves the government to run the air-traffic system with a quality workforce."

FAA officials and the union agree on this much: Being a controller here is demanding. The airport was the 15th busiest in the world in takeoffs and landings in 2006, according to the Airports Council International trade group. Flight totals in 2006 and the first five months of 2007 were slightly below what they were in 2005, the airport's peak year.

"Philadelphia is tough," McKenna said. "It's got a lot of traffic volume. It's squeezed between Washington and New York."

McKenna defended the new labor contract, which did away with requirements for automatically increasing the workforce based on the growth in air traffic. It also gave managers greater flexibility to schedule more controllers to work on days of the week when airlines have the most flights, and to use overtime mostly when weather delays flights, he said.

The cost of overtime here dropped to $128,743 in the first three quarters of the 2007 federal fiscal year from almost $669,847 in the same 2006 period, McKenna said. He also said he was confident that the FAA could bring in a regular stream of newly hired controllers without overworking the veterans.

"We want to make sure we bring in enough people to replace retirees," McKenna said. "I think we're making a good effort to bring people in the door and get them trained."

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