Our Troubled Skies (Contd.)

By Janice Horowitz

The air-traffic controllers stared intently at the glow on their radar monitor. Suddenly, without warning, the screen went dark. In an instant, the controllers had lost their all-important ability to track dozens of jets carrying hundreds of passengers.

This potentially scary scene occurred not just once last week but twice. At 9:34 a.m. on Tuesday, a primary computer at the control center at Leesburg, Va., which handles flights in the greater Washington area, lost electrical power for 30 seconds. Another brief outage, lasting 1 minute 40 seconds, occurred at 9:08 that night in the New England control center at Nashua, N.H. Both operations quickly switched to their emergency backup systems, and officials at the Federal Aviation Administration maintain that safety was not seriously compromised. But the disruptions delayed flights along the busy East Coast corridor.

The glitches contributed to yet another bad week for the airline industry, which has recently been hit by a frightening succession of near disasters. The FAA launched investigations of the two incidents and a check of computer operations at the agency's 22 control centers in the U.S. What apparently happened at Nashua was that a technician performing routine maintenance on the electrical system accidentally cut off its power. The FAA has not yet determined what caused the electrical problem in Leesburg.

FAA officials were taking a hard look at Eastern Air Lines, where some workers have complained that they have been forced to cut corners on maintenance. Since mid-July, the agency has conducted inspections of Eastern's operation at Boston's Logan International Airport. After an FAA visit last Thursday, the airline canceled or delayed several flights to make aircraft repairs.

Controversy about Eastern's maintenance record flared up earlier in the week after the airline fired John King, 45, a Boston-based mechanic. Eastern said King was sacked because he had falsely accused the airline of violating safety procedures. As King tells it, he notified the FAA of problems with Eastern's maintenance procedures, including the fact that some repairs were not recorded in the mechanics' logbooks. In one instance last May, says King, his supervisor did not want to record a fuel leak on an Airbus A-300 jet because the plane might have to be taken out of service. King secretly made a tape of the supervisor's words: "I have no chance to move this aircraft with this stinking item in the logbook . . . We don't want any showstoppers. We want the plane to fly away." The leak was repaired, King admits, before the plane took off. Eastern denies that King has any evidence of improper maintenance.

The fuss at Eastern drew attention away from Delta's continuing bad luck. At Los Angeles International Airport, a SkyWest commuter plane collided on a taxiway with a Delta 767. Both planes were damaged, but no one was injured. The cause of the accident was not immediately clear. Meanwhile, two Delta jets had to make unscheduled landings: a 727 flying from Calgary, Alta., to Salt Lake City touched down in Great Falls, Mont., because of a pressurization problem, and an Atlanta-bound DC-8 returned to Las Vegas after it developed engine trouble.

Amid the growing public concern about airline safety, organizations of the fractionalized industry are showing a rare unanimity in demanding action. Groups representing the airlines, the pilots and corporate aircraft owners presented to Congress a plan to improve safety and service. It recommends that the Government use the current $6 billion surplus in the federal aviation trust fund to meet such goals as expanding airport capacity and hastening the development of more modern traffic-control systems. Over the years, flying has been a safe way to travel, and the airline industry is determined to keep it that way.

With reporting by Gisela Bolte/Washington and Lawrence Malkin/Boston