Against the Wind - National Air Traffic Controllers Association

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Against the Wind
The bottom line: NATCA argues that
the drive for profits in a privatized ATC
system competes against safety in terms of
adequate staffing and training.
* Despite fifty-seven co-sponsors, Ford’s bill
never came up for a vote in the Senate.
** The Transportation Trades Department is an
umbrella organization composed of thirtyfour
AFL-CIO unions representing aviation,
rail, transit, trucking, highway, and longshore
workers.
2001
badly needed equipment upgrades. The union supported
Sen. Wendell Ford’s bill for an independent
FAA in 1988 and worked with the Clinton administration
to create its USATS plan in the mid-1990s. *
However, NATCA opposed privatization and
further contracting out. It
also kept a watchful eye
on other proposals. When
the Clinton administration
drafted an executive
order in late 2000 to create
a performance-based
organization, the union’s top two officers and the
Transportation Trades Department’s executive director
attended a White House meeting to help ensure
that the mandate described air traffic control as an
inherently governmental function. **
Saving jobs was not NATCA’s sole concern.
Many members worried about the inevitable tradeoff
between safety and the bottom line. Bill “Blackie”
Blackmer, a former director of safety and technology
for the union, says ever-increasing traffic puts pressure
on controllers, whose adherence to safety margins
can result in delays. “What scares our people
most is the pressure we’d feel in the private world.”
One measure of that influence and the effect of
mounting traffic is the number of near misses on the
ground, referred to as runway incursions. A record
431 incidents were reported in the United States
Jan. Feb.
30
NATCA signs two collective bargaining agreements with the
FAA representing engineers/architects and traffic management
specialists.
28
during 2000—or more than one a day. The National
Transportation Safety Board considered the problem
so acute that it listed prevention of runway incursions
as one of its most-wanted safety improvements.
While many incidents are relatively minor,
the potential for disaster is
always present. Aviation’s
worst accident in history
occurred when two Boeing
747s collided on a
fog-shrouded runway on
Tenerife in the Canary Islands
in 1977, killing 582 people.
NATCA feared, with some justification, that
a privatized system would create an acute staffing
shortage and compromise safety. Its neighbor to the
north provides an example of a privatized model.
Nav Canada, a nonprofit corporation, paid the
Canadian government C$1.5 billion to take over air
traffic control operations in 1996. Airlines and other
users pay Nav Canada fees for its services. The firm
estimated that airlines saved more than C$225 million
in fiscal year 2000 compared with their previous
costs under Canada’s air transportation tax. 2
Although Nav Canada has spent C$500 million
on modernization, the Canadian Air Traffic
Control Association maintains that some of the savings
should have been allocated for further improvements.
Other savings have come from Nav Canada’s
A 6.1-magnitude temblor severely damages the Seattle-Tacoma
International Airport control tower. Ignoring orders to evacuate,
Brian Schimpf clears twelve remaining arrivals to land.