Air Traffic Control: Be Careful Out There

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Veteran airline pilots may be even more critical of the lack of experience among some of their younger flying brethren (and, increasingly, sisters). A generation of crack pilots trained in military transport and combat aircraft is fading into retirement. According to the Aviation Safety Institute, only 40% of today's pilots came out of the military. Yet the demand for more top- rated airline pilots keeps rising. Their ranks, which have been growing steadily during the past few years, now number greater than 81,000. More pilots and fewer fully qualified controllers, says a senior captain at United, is a "prescription for catastrophe."

The expanding number of pilots is exacting a price at some airlines, especially the feeders, which are requiring less experience and lower qualifications than they did in the past. Newcomers are being promoted from the flight engineer's chair to the right-hand seat (the first officer's) and then to the left seat (the captain's) after logging fewer flying hours. "The , apprenticeship system doesn't exist anymore," claims ALPA's Duffy. Three major airlines -- United, American and Piedmont -- are for the first time hiring pilots who are past the age of 50.

In the tight market, pilots searching for higher pay often jump from the smaller to the larger airlines and from one type of aircraft to another. Crews have less time to learn to work together. Caught at the bottom of this turnover spiral are the commuter airlines. Henson Airlines, based in Salisbury, Md., for example, lost 54 of its 195 pilots in 1985.

"The place where you are going to see the system break down first is the commuter airline," says Pete Pedigrew, a captain with Pacific Southwest. Tony Levier, an industry-safety expert, is in agreement. "A lot of these airlines are operating on shoestrings. They may meet the FAA regulations on paper but not in reality." On some commuter flights, both cockpit seats may be occupied by inexperienced officers. That, too, observes John Lauber of NTSB, "can be a lethal combination."

On the large airliners, passengers have another reason to be uneasy. After studying 30 cockpit flight-crew members, Dr. Martin Moore-Ede, a professor at the Harvard Medical School, discovered that on long high-altitude flights, the cockpit crew is sometimes asleep. The pilots, copilots and navigators he interviewed admitted that they have either nodded off on the job or had to struggle not to do so an average of 16 times a month. This usually happens sometime between 4 and 5 in the morning. In other research, Moore-Ede discovered an incident in which a transcontinental flight missed its Los Angeles destination and flew 100 miles over the Pacific because everyone up front had fallen asleep. Controllers awakened them by sounding chimes in the cockpit. NTSB's Lauber confirms that napping occurs and suggests that the problem could be eased if regulations banning all sleeping could be relaxed to permit snoozing by one officer at a time during a high-altitude flight.