Air Traffic Control: Be Careful Out There

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The pressure on controllers can vary from place to place. A few in low- traffic regions or in centers that are adequately staffed contend that they fight boredom rather than stress. That was not at all true of a frantic controller at the Los Angeles center at Palmdale, who, according to one airline captain, announced on a smoggy day: "There is more traffic than I can point out to you. Please be careful out there."

While relations between controllers and pilots usually remain professionally courteous, there are subtle tensions between the two groups. Christine West, a controller hired just after the strike, works in the New York radar-control facility. West is proud that "we do pretty close to twice the amount of work with half the staffing we had before the strike." But she is critical of many pilots. "We have their lives in our hands, but they relate to us like we were the enemy," she says. "It can be stressful when you're taking insults on a frequency and you have to be professional and cannot explain your reasons for doing something."

Keith Morris, another controller at the same center, complains that pilots talk too often on their radios and do not listen carefully to the controllers. When any pilot close to a control center presses his mike button, it blocks other nearby flight crews from hearing the controller. "It is not unusual to sit on a radar position and have a pilot respond that he's blocked over and over again," says Morris. "Radio discipline has become atrocious."

Pilots have beefs about the controllers. Contends Duffy: "Our pilots make calls to controllers and nobody answers. You can tell when one is under strain when his supervisor comes in and overrides him. More controllers are making errors. They are often fatigued. We just don't want to be handled by tired controllers." The basic problem, in the view of Delta Airlines Pilot Joseph Dorsey, is that "there are too many new people on both ends of that radio."

On Sept. 23, 1985, a Henson Airlines Beech commuter plane missed Shenandoah Valley Airport in Virginia by six miles as it tried to land through clouds and fog. The crash killed the two crew members and all twelve passengers. The NTSB investigation blamed navigational errors by the crew. But it cited a list of contributing factors: the cockpit was so noisy that the captain and first officer had either to shout or to use hand signals to communicate; both were relatively inexperienced; and Henson's training in its aircraft, which have differing instrument layouts, was inadequate. The crew members, who had flown together only twice before, were undergoing personal tensions that may have created stress. The captain, 27, was about to be married and was awaiting a job interview with Eastern Air Lines; the first officer, 26, had been with Henson only two months, duty that took her away from her husband, and she was planning further examination of a lump in one breast.