Against the Wind - National Air Traffic Controllers Association

34
Against the Wind
Fred Gilbert: The Chicago Center veteran
organized a conference for controllers
from all of the FAA’s en route centers
some eighteen months after the strike.
However, agency managers pressured him
to cancel the event. / Courtesy of Howie Barte
1981
30
Sep.
compliments from managers flowed freely.
Traffic gradually resumed as summer faded
into fall. Meanwhile, the strikers’ hopes of getting
rehired waned and their resentment mounted toward
those still wearing headsets. Picketers grew more vocal
and telephoned threats to controllers’ homes. Cars
were splattered with paint and tires were slashed.
Onetime friends wordlessly walked away when they
saw each other at supermarkets and shopping malls,
a bitterness that lingered for years.
“The division of loyalty was huge,” recalls
Barte, who burned his PATCO membership card in
an ashtray in the TRACON a week after the strike. “If
you were in, you hated PATCO. If you were out, you
hated the people who were in.”
Controllers embraced the challenge of the
job itself, however, and relished their honeymoon
with management. Joe O’Brien, a lanky
former Navy controller who started at New
York TRACON in February 1982, has fond
memories of the period and his decision to
enter the profession. “It was the best thing I
ever did in my life,” he says.
Energetic and all of 22, O’Brien joined about
fifty other controllers in a facility built for 200. They
had to keep planes separated by the legal minimums,
of course, but exercised some latitude in doing so.
Gulping coffee and smoking cigarettes, screaming
and cursing at each other to coordinate traffic, they
During the preceding year, the FAA has added two key capabilities to
equipment at the nation’s twenty-one en route centers: minimum safe
altitude warning, already in use at TRACONs; and arrival metering, which
somehow got it done. “It was like the Wild West,”
he says.
Farther east on Long Island from O’Brien, Michael
McNally enjoyed the same sense of exhilaration
on the scopes at New York Center. “I was young. I was
cocky. I was on the top of my game,” he says. “They
wanted us to become tin junkies and that’s what we
became. We kept running, running, running.”
It would take awhile for O’Brien, McNally, and
others to recognize the negative long-term effects of
their frenetic pace. Much sooner, their post-strike rapport
with management would turn sour, like blissful
newlyweds lapsing into an abusive
marriage.
One morning about
six months after the
walkout, Fred Gilbert
strolled into Chicago
Center and passed the
cafeteria on his way
to the control room.
Darkness shrouded
the food line, as it had
since August 3 rd . Diners
used to fight for seats; these days,
they occupied a mere handful of tables at lunchtime.
Gilbert’s foot steps echoed along the largely deserted
halls. Inside the control room, the formerly vibrant,
noisy atmosphere had softened to a hush, much like
provides controllers with computerized advisories to help manage traffic
flows into major airports.