Air Traffic Control in crisis: Federal Aviation Administration recruitment looks to high schools to fill jobs

by Jeffrey White on

Confronted with an exodus of veteran air traffic controllers who are hitting retirement age, the Federal Aviation Administration is busy recruiting — at, among other places, high schools.

The FAA is busy wooing recent high school grads to come right on board, so to speak, and begin training to be controllers. They’ll go through three months of training before becoming “controllers in training.” Not long after that, they’ll be staff.

The New York Post broke the story today.

The FAA has just completed a recruitment drive that placed ads on Craig’s List, Myspace and at high schools nationwide. The feds were offering more than $100,000 in signing bonuses to newbies to draw them to the New York area’s five understaffed radar centers, says the Post.

There’s a one-time $27,000 bonus at the start of training, with another $75,000 paid out over four years.

So far, the Post says, one recent hire is a 20-year-old man who is currently monitoring radars at a station in Westbury, LI. He happens to have majored in air traffic control, but the FAA says students who have completed the 12th grade are eligible.

This news comes after two recent near-misses above the skies of New York that are being attributed to understaffed radar stations.

On July 5, two passenger jets inbound to JFK came within 100 feet of colliding in mid air, which the FAA considers to be an extremely close call. On June 25, a Learjet was given the green light to land at Teterboro Airport on a runway on which maintenance employees were busy working.

By 2011, nearly 60 percent of all air traffic controllers nationwide will have less than five years experience on the job, the Post says.

I don’t know how to feel about this. On the one hand, the FAA has to get new people in there to bring staffing numbers up to a safe level. Then again, how safe do we feel knowing the FAA is searching out applicants for this life-or-death job on Myspace?

National Transportation Safety Board: Runway collisions the biggest danger out there

by Jeffrey White on

Forget all this talk about airplane safety inspections. What we should really be worried about, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board tells the New York Times today, are runway collisions.

“Where we are most vulnerable at this moment is on the ground,” Mark Rosenker tells the Times. “To me this is the most dangerous aspect of flying.”

The article details efforts to drastically cut down, if not eliminate, runway collisions, known rather vaguely in airline-speak as “incursions.” Basically a runway incursion is when something that shouldn’t be on a runway is, like a vehicle or an unauthorized plane. Earlier this month, for example, a tug towing an American Airlines MD-80 at Dallas-Fort Worth failed to hold in front of a runway on which another AA plane had landed. Seeing the tug-and-plane fast approaching the runway from the left, the pilot directed his plane to the right edge of the runway, avoiding a collision by some 25 feet, according to reports.

There were 15 incursions nationwide during the past six months, compared to eight for the same period last year, the Times reports.

At issue is the utter lack of technology on the ground — like surface GPS, for instance, or other electronic warning systems — that can give planes an idea of what is around them when they are on land. The FAA has stepped up efforts to improve signage and runway lighting, but it hasn’t been enough. One pilot dryly points out that if you have a navigation system in your car, you know more about where your car is on the ground than a plane does on a runway.

The technology is out there, but it’s expensive. The FAA is weighing one system that allows planes to broadcast their position automatically via GPS to both the ground and other planes.

The NTSB chides the FAA for pretty much ignoring the problem of runway incursions. Still, there is evidence that the FAA knows this is serious: The Times reports that during the big AA fiasco a few weeks ago with its MD-80 fleet, a senior FAA official was testifying before the Senate. The problem he addressed the most was not faulty wiring and plane safety inspections, but runway safety.

FAA update: Flight delays continue, airline inspections could continue through June

by Jeffrey White on

There are a few factors at work behind the widespread disruptions, cancellations and plane groundings at airlines like American, Delta and Alaska. One of them is U.S. Representative James Oberster (D – Minnesota). He is the chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, which is demanding the tougher scrutiny of airline upkeep that we see the Federal Aviation Administration now responding to.

Congress went easy on the airline industry during the immediate aftermath of 9-11, given the financial hit carriers took in the wake of decreases in passenger traffic. But now passenger numbers are up, and airlines like Southwest have acknowledged lapses in mandatory safety inspections. Congress has turned its helping hand into a fist.

“[This is all] an effort to get [airlines] back on course, to being the gold standard in the world for aviation safety oversight and maintenance oversight, and to re-establish a safety mind-set and culture with in the [FAA], instead of this coddling of the industry,” Oberster told the New York Times yesterday.

The FAA seems to be listening. Today it is breaking the bad news that a broader round of airline inspections are likely to last through June. The FAA also suggests that further groundings are likely not just in the coming few weeks, but during the next few months.

The inspections, like the ones at American, are targeting specific things (at American, it’s faulty wiring in the wheel wells and along the wings of its MD-80 fleet). But there is a broader investigation also ongoing here, as airlines are under increased pressure to prove their compliance with industry safety regulations.

Of course, passengers suffer, in the form of flight delays and cancellations. Some of the biggest hubs in the country, like O’Hare and LaGuardia, have been most affected.

I want to put this question out there: Are these travel inconveniences acceptable if it means that we have an aviation system that is taking our safety seriously, or is it more important to arrive to our destinations on schedule? Let me know what you think.

Airplane safety: Is globalization a bad thing?

by Jeffrey White on

Still catching up on the Sunday papers, I just stumbled onto a piece in the Washington Post’s business section reporting that the U.S. Dept. of Transportation is taking the Federal Aviation Administration to task for using shoddy parts in some of today’s biggest plane models.

The folks over at Transportation are taking umbrage with the fact that many of these parts used to be made exclusively in the U.S., but now happen to be made overseas, since – ah, the fact of globalization – it is often cheaper to make things in foreign countries than at home.

The government says the FAA “lacks an adequate system for checking the quality of airplane components,” the Post reports.

What are the plane models in question? Parts of Boeing’s 777 (and its planned 787) are made abroad, in places like China, Brazil and Australia.

The Post quotes from the report: “Neither manufacturers nor FAA inspectors have provided effective oversight of suppliers; this has allowed substandard parts to enter the aviation supply chain.”

Apparently the report is citing engine failures in 2003 – a total of four, including one in flight – that can be traced back to questionable, foreign-manufactured parts.

It is of course ironic when you consider the role the airplane has played in making this world a smaller (not to say, pace Thomas Friedman, flatter) place and how the free flow of goods and services from one corner of the globe to the other wouldn’t be possible without them. Globalization owes a lot to the airplane (among other things), and now the very phenomenon planes helped wrought might be undermining their safety (and ours)?

FAA spokeswoman Alison Duquette tells the Post, “There are absolutely no imminent safety issues raised by the report.”

But we’ve been warned…