OUT-OF-CONTROL TOWER

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FOR SIX TERRIFYING MINUTES LAST month, 35 pilots were forced to navigate the airspace around Pittsburgh International Airport on a wing and a prayer. As two planes readied to take off from parallel runways and 33 planes cruised the surrounding air corridors, one of the airport's power systems shorted out. That tiny malfunction shut down all radarscopes, telephone lines, landing-instrument systems, radio connections and lights inside the air-control tower. "You have to visualize a radarscope showing two planes aimed at each other from 50 miles away," says Barry Krasner, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. "Your equipment goes down for [six] minutes. When your equipment comes back up, where are those two airplanes? The answer is that they're two miles apart, nose to nose, with a closure rate of 800 m.p.h. and less than five seconds to make a course correction."

Needlessly alarmist? As it happened, no planes came hurtling down, none collided in midair, no one was hurt. So Pittsburgh's mishap barely stirred notice. But such technological glitches are fast becoming routine in the nation's air-traffic-control system. By the National Transportation Safety Board's reckoning, anti- quated tracking equipment freezes up, shuts down or fizzles out all too often. "There is not one day that goes by without our losing radar or radio communication with an aircraft," says Joseph Fruscella, president of NATCA's eastern region. "It compromises safety on a regular basis."

Yet most people connected with air-traffic control are loath to admit to any safety problems. The U.S., after all, boasts the best air-safety record in the world. Despite some 82 million takeoffs and landings each year, aviation deaths average about 200 annually. (By contrast, roughly 120 people die each day on America's roads.) Instead, the folks in the cockpits, watchtowers and administration offices moan about the weather disruptions and equipment breakdowns that cause 250,000 delays annually and cost billions of dollars. "We're on the FAA all the time to modernize," says Tim Neale of the Air Transport Association, which represents the industry in Washington. "But it's definitely not a safety problem; it's a cost problem."

As near misses accrue, however, fewer and fewer air controllers buy this party line. They warn that safe air travel is being compromised by obsolescent equipment, reckless penny pinching and severe staffing cuts that have eliminated 2,000 controller positions since 1982, even as air traffic has soared 35%. Says Gus Guerra, a California controller: "It's almost as though they're waiting for a midair collision where we lose hundreds of lives before they finally see the big light bulb."