Wake-up call for the FAA

last updated 8 January 2015

Public outrage forced the Federal Aviation Administration to issue new rules after seven air-traffic controllers at airports around the country were found sleeping on the job. “I don’t know when I’ve ever been madder,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who reported that all seven had been suspended and may ultimately be fired. The epidemic started in March, when a controller at Reagan National Airport, near Washington, D.C., nodded off while two jumbo jets landed without clearance. Since then, reports have emerged of six more sleeping controllers, another caught watching a DVD on the job, and one whose misjudgment forced the plane carrying First Lady Michelle Obama to abort a landing because it was too close to a military cargo plane. The official in charge of air-traffic control was forced out, and a new set of regulations—rushed into effect to calm the public—doubled coverage in 27 towers and decreed that all controllers must now take at least nine hours (up from eight hours) between shifts.

“Sounds good. Means little,” said the New York Daily News in an editorial. The problem will not be solved by mandating an extra hour of downtime—it goes deeper than that. Controllers’ work schedules are designed for long weekends, not public safety. Many work five eight-hour shifts in four days—rotating through midnight, morning, and swing shifts—with 16 hours of work on the last day. This union-negotiated practice is “reckless and disruptive,” said The Denver Post. In Canada, Japan, Germany, and elsewhere, napping is encouraged on overnight shifts, an idea that LaHood emphatically rejected.

Let them nap, said Matthew Edlund, M.D., in HuffingtonPost.com. It’ll happen anyway. Controllers work in the dark, surrounded by flickering lights, often in the wee hours, when not much happens. Rotating shifts produce a kind of “perpetual jet lag.” But enforcing nap times and rejiggering schedules are just “short-term Band-Aid fixes” anyway, said Investor’s Business Daily. The real problems are controller errors, which increased by 81 percent from 2007 to 2010; technology that’s less sophisticated than a $200 GPS; and bureaucratic inertia, which has stifled change. In 50 other countries, air-traffic control has been turned over to nonprofits, saving money while improving safety. “It’s time the U.S. woke up and got with the program.”