Against the Wind - National Air Traffic Controllers Association

Picketers congregated on the driveway of the
fire station across the street from Chicago Center in
suburban Aurora, Illinois, shouting at co-workers
and running out to kick the tires of their cars. At
Houston Center, some 140 strikers yelled and waved
signs while clustered along the grassy median of busy
JFK Boulevard in front of the facility. At Salt Lake
Center, managers stood on the roof, peered through
binoculars, and wrote down picketers’ names.
The tension outside yielded to different, yet
equally charged, emotions inside. Some strikebreakers
fretted about dealing with their colleagues
when they came back. Others were glad to be rid of
them—even if only temporarily. The stress during
the preceding months, fueled by peer pressure and
uncertainty, had swelled like a volcano on the verge
of eruption.
Yet, the strike resulted in one very pleasant
consequence for those on the job. As never before,
controllers, managers, staff specialists, and Airways
Facilities technicians set aside antagonism, pettiness,
and class distinctions. Instead, they banded together
with a sorely needed esprit de corps to keep the traffic
moving.
“For the first week, people were just operating
on guts,” says Howie Barte, a controller at Quonset
TRACON, south of Providence, Rhode Island. “It was
the Alamo and we were loving it.”
Initially, traffic was relatively light, leading one
4
Sep.
The FAA announces it will hire about 1,500 temporary workers, including
furloughed airline pilots, to serve as flight data assistants and perform
other controller support functions.
wag to declare: “We’re going to have one-state separation
between airplanes.”
To handle the gradual resumption of flights,
bosses turned pragmatic and abandoned cumbersome
operating procedures. Rather than haranguing
controllers about phraseology errors, managers did
whatever they could to help, even ordering in food.
Indeed, coffee and snacks were verboten in control
rooms before the strike. Now they were a necessity.
The only breaks the skeletal work force enjoyed were
dashes to the restroom. Other rules were relaxed and
Chapter 2: Opportunity Lost
Japphire
Houston Center: Nearly all of the FAA’s en route centers were built from the same cookie-cutter blueprint. The agency
opted for a different design at its Houston facility, however, due to the influence of Lady Bird Johnson.
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