Against the Wind - National Air Traffic Controllers Association

corporate volume, complexities, knowledge, skills,
and ability to do the job,” says committee member Pat
Forrey, who was the facility rep at Cleveland Center.
For the next eighteen months, the group traveled
every three to four weeks to more than 200
sites to observe air traffic
operations and collect
mountains of information.
They interviewed
more than a thousand
controllers about runway
configurations, the types
of planes they handled,
and facility-specific issues.
They gathered traffic
counts, studied aeronautical
charts, and reviewed
Letters of Agreement that
outlined procedures with
other facilities.
Notebooks containing
all the data filled
several long shelves at the national office. Heeding
a suggestion from Kilgallon and Swauger, the group
purposefully waited to review PATCO’s reclassification
project to avoid being swayed by its conclusions.
“It was some of the best advice we got,” says
committee member Mike Coulter, the facility rep at
Denver Tower. “We didn’t fall into the trap of just
31
Dec.
“
We wanted to make it more
realistic and incorporate
volume, complexities,
knowledge, skills, and ability
to do the job.
taking over where PATCO left off, although our findings
were very similar. The issues hadn’t changed.”
The wearisome process of acquiring information
was relatively easy compared with the challenge
of devising a standard that included myriad complex
factors. After producing a
document that ran more
than 100 pages, the committee
then had to decide
— Reclassification Committee
member Pat Forrey
All airliners with more than thirty passenger seats flying in U.S. airspace
must now be equipped with the Traffic Alert/Collision Avoidance System.
Early on, TCAS suffers from many false alerts that cause numerous near
how to weight the factors
to rank the facilities fairly.
While Coulter taught himself
how to use a spreadsheet
program and plugged in the
numbers, Haines, Forrey,
and Cam Maltby from Nantucket
Tower wrangled for
hours over the formula.
“We were operating in
a pure environment,” Maltby
says. “We didn’t really know
what putting a facility into a
particular grouping would do to their pay. We were
working on the concept that we had the ‘right’ facilities
together.”
At the 1994 convention in Tampa, Florida, the
committee unveiled a proposal that assigned facilities
to one of seven categories and expanded the FAA’s
five-tier scale to fourteen levels. The first three grades
Chapter 5: The Art of the Deal
misses due to pilot unfamiliarity and lack of controller involvement during
product development. The incidents subside as pilots become familiar with
TCAS and controllers help programmers working on software updates.
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