Against the Wind - National Air Traffic Controllers Association

Emerging from the Dark Ages
Leyden and Poli held diametrically opposing
views on the union’s path to success, but they were
driven by identical goals. Those same strong sentiments
had stirred controllers for decades and created
a cohesive sense of purpose that prompted Leyden,
Poli, and their colleagues to seek the protection of a
union. The motivation was so powerful that it survived
PATCO’s subsequent dismemberment and fueled
a second organizing effort a mere two years later
among a predominantly different work force.
Leyden had served in the military before entering
the private sector, a typical career path for many
controllers in his day. After the Federal Aviation
Agency hired him in early 1959, he received basic
training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City and
then settled in at New York Center, located in Hangar
11 at Idlewild Airport (now Kennedy).
Federal-sector unions did not exist yet. Leyden
and his Hangar 11 crew even worked some sectors
without the benefit of flattop radarscopes, let alone
computerized flight information.
Instead, they used small plastic “shrimp
boats”—so named because of their resemblance
to fishing vessels—which contained slips of paper
about each flight. Controllers pushed the shrimp
boats on the scopes as the targets for their planes
inched across the glass. Coordination with approach
1980
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Aug.
controllers was handled by telephone.
They separated traffic by 1,000 feet vertically
and relied on pilot time estimates for arriving at
navigational fixes to maintain lateral distances of
10 minutes, an inefficiency that translated into
more than ten times the horizontal spacing used
today. The reliance on estimates also led to frequent
separation errors.
Chapter 1: ATC Comes of Age
National Archives
Pushing plastic: Washington Center controllers in 1955 monitored aircraft with surplus radarscopes built for Navy
battleships in World War II. They identified each target using a plastic “shrimp boat” that contained flight information.
PATCO controllers stage a one-day slowdown at O’Hare International
Airport that causes 616 delays of thirty minutes or more and costs the airlines
more than $1 million in wasted fuel. The slowdown follows the FAA’s
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refusal to pay O’Hare controllers an annual tax-free bonus of $7,500 and
upgrade the tower to Level V. All other control towers are classified as
Level IV. The agency calls the O’Hare demand “non-negotiable.”