Air Traffic Control: Be Careful Out There

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--"There are not enough controllers, and too many of them have a low experience level," claims John Galipault, president of the Aviation Safety Institute, a private foundation in Ohio. The number of controllers is down from 16,300 to 14,700 since President Reagan fired striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1981; more significantly, only 62% of them are qualified at "full performance level," vs. 80% before the strike. United Airlines Captain Mel Hoagland declares bluntly, "The air-traffic-control system is at the ragged edge of coming unraveled for lack of fully qualified controllers."

--"We have a lessening of the experience level of flight crews," contends Jim Burnett, chairman of the highly respected National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates civil aviation accidents. The number of hours the average airline pilot has spent in jetliners has dropped from 2,234 in 1983 to 818 in 1985. "The demand for pilots is high, and the supply is going down," observes NTSB member John Lauber. "The carriers are getting closer to the FAA minimum training standards."

--Some of the most economically troubled airlines are deferring maintenance whenever possible, and a few have been heavily fined by the FAA for violating safety standards. The impact of these varied trends, says Patricia Goldman, vice chairman of the NTSB, is that there is a "narrowed margin of safety."

Most of the critics cite the 1978 deregulation of airline competition as the villain in this erosion of confidence in the system. While deregulation has reduced fares and opened air travel to enormous numbers of new passengers, the era of do-or-die rate-cutting competition has pressured carriers to slash costs and take risks. No one claims that safety rules have been relaxed. Indeed, the vast majority of controllers, pilots and federal inspectors are working hard and competently to avoid accidents. But, says Jerome Lederer, founder of the private Flight Safety Foundation, "from now on the problem will be to discern who is obeying the rules. When passenger safety vs. profits is involved, these are questions of conscience." One pilot, speaking anonymously, sums up what he perceives as the all too common attitude in airline executive suites: "It's a business. Make the buck and take the chance."

Yet all the gloom overlooks an important bottom-line statistic: 1986 was among the safest ever for U.S. air travel. There was not a single fatality among the large American carriers even though they flew a record 6.2 million flights. That is a remarkable turnabout from the previous year, which set a worldwide high of 1,835 airline fatalities, 526 of them on U.S. carriers. For all of civil aviation, including airline, business and private flying, 1985 was dismal: 2,773 accidents that caused 1,231 deaths in the U.S. alone. For 1986 the number of U.S. accidents fell to an estimated 2,580, with 860 fatalities.