Against the Wind - National Air Traffic Controllers Association

222
Against the Wind
National Archives
Privatized ATC: Four airlines operated this first Airway Traffic Control Unit at Newark Airport—plus others in Chicago,
Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Oakland—for seven months before the Bureau of Air Commerce took over in July 1936.
2000
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not afford to carry out its mission. Accordingly, the
Commerce Department asked the airlines to run the
system until it could take over. American, Eastern,
TWA, and United opened the first Airway Traffic Control
Unit at Newark Airport on December 1, 1935.
The FLRA certifies NATCA as the exclusive bargaining representative for
22 controllers in the Hawaii Air Guard and Defense Department on the
islands. This is the eleventh and last new bargaining unit organized by the
Soon after, the four airlines launched facilities
in Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Oakland,
California. Dressed in white shirts and ties, controllers
received position reports from airline dispatchers
and pushed brass shrimp boats tagged with information
about each flight across aeronautical charts to
monitor their progress. They issued clearances by
telephone to the dispatchers, who relayed them to
pilots via primitive radios.
By mid-1936, the Commerce Department was
flush enough to acquire the operations and staff them
with federally certified controllers. Many of the airline
employees joined the Bureau of Air Commerce so
they could continue working at the renamed Airway
Traffic Control Stations.
Except for some very small, municipally
owned towers run by private firms, air traffic control
remained within the province of the federal government
for nearly half a century.
In the wake of the 1981 strike, a hamstrung
FAA turned to the private sector once more. Scrambling
to keep the system running with just one-quarter
of its controller work force, the agency closed
eighty small facilities known as Level I VFR towers.
Two-thirds of the towers were reopened by the fall of
1984, including nine operated by private companies
under contract with the FAA. The towers ranged
from North Myrtle Beach in South Carolina to Laredo,
Texas, to Pendleton, Oregon.
union during the calendar year. NATCA now represents 15,000 controllers,
80 percent of whom are union members, and nearly 4,000 other FAA
employees, whose membership percentage varies.