OUT-OF-CONTROL TOWER

By Jill Smolowe

FOR SIX TERRIFYING MINUTES LAST month, 35 pilots were forced to navigate the airspace around Pittsburgh International Airport on a wing and a prayer. As two planes readied to take off from parallel runways and 33 planes cruised the surrounding air corridors, one of the airport's power systems shorted out. That tiny malfunction shut down all radarscopes, telephone lines, landing-instrument systems, radio connections and lights inside the air-control tower. "You have to visualize a radarscope showing two planes aimed at each other from 50 miles away," says Barry Krasner, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. "Your equipment goes down for [six] minutes. When your equipment comes back up, where are those two airplanes? The answer is that they're two miles apart, nose to nose, with a closure rate of 800 m.p.h. and less than five seconds to make a course correction."

Needlessly alarmist? As it happened, no planes came hurtling down, none collided in midair, no one was hurt. So Pittsburgh's mishap barely stirred notice. But such technological glitches are fast becoming routine in the nation's air-traffic-control system. By the National Transportation Safety Board's reckoning, anti- quated tracking equipment freezes up, shuts down or fizzles out all too often. "There is not one day that goes by without our losing radar or radio communication with an aircraft," says Joseph Fruscella, president of NATCA's eastern region. "It compromises safety on a regular basis."

Yet most people connected with air-traffic control are loath to admit to any safety problems. The U.S., after all, boasts the best air-safety record in the world. Despite some 82 million takeoffs and landings each year, aviation deaths average about 200 annually. (By contrast, roughly 120 people die each day on America's roads.) Instead, the folks in the cockpits, watchtowers and administration offices moan about the weather disruptions and equipment breakdowns that cause 250,000 delays annually and cost billions of dollars. "We're on the FAA all the time to modernize," says Tim Neale of the Air Transport Association, which represents the industry in Washington. "But it's definitely not a safety problem; it's a cost problem."

As near misses accrue, however, fewer and fewer air controllers buy this party line. They warn that safe air travel is being compromised by obsolescent equipment, reckless penny pinching and severe staffing cuts that have eliminated 2,000 controller positions since 1982, even as air traffic has soared 35%. Says Gus Guerra, a California controller: "It's almost as though they're waiting for a midair collision where we lose hundreds of lives before they finally see the big light bulb."

Controllers trace the troubles back to 1981, the year Ronald Reagan decided to break their union rather than meet its demands for better pay, benefits and safety measures. The FAA fired all 11,000 striking controllers, then contracted with IBM to deliver a system of high-tech computers that would rule the skies. "Rather than incremental changes, they tried to reinvent the system," says Mike Connor, NATCA's director of safety and technology. "They were trying to computerize everything, but you can't computerize human reasoning or decision making." After investing $2 billion and watching the projected costs balloon from $8 billion to $37 billion, still with no functioning system in sight, the FAA pulled the plug in 1994.

Meanwhile, the aging systems continue to deteriorate. "We are holding some of this equipment together with bubble gum and baling wire," says Pete Acadeno, a technician at New York's terminal radar approach control. Such heavily trafficked air centers as New York and Chicago rely on the IBM 9020E, a mainframe computer of 1960s vintage. Unlike modern computers, with their tidy array of microchips, this dinosaur is stuffed with thousands and thousands of feet of wire. "The technicians tell us the wires are so brittle they sometimes break when you just touch them," says Mark Scholl, president of the Chicago Center controllers' union. Wanda Geist, who heads the technicians' union at Chicago Center, says, "This computer has been running 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 25 years. Things just wear out."

When that happens, there are ever fewer people to do the repairs. Many of the technicians acquainted with the 9020E's innards have long since retired. "We are down to two trained technicians specialized in the IBM 9020E in New York Center," says Henry Brown, a power-systems technician. The FAA has tried to hire contract workers. But, says Acadeno, "a contract technician is not going to come to work in a snowstorm." And those who finally do show up are trained to work with microprocessors, not primitive circuit boards.

Experienced controllers are also in short supply. Staffing has become such a problem that major hubs have instituted mandatory six-day weeks. After the FAA decided in 1994 to discontinue incentive bonuses for work in high-stress, high-volume, high-cost areas, many veterans migrated to jobs in low-stress, low-cost areas. Now, as job openings go unfilled for months at a time at major hubs like New York, Chicago and San Francisco, each controller not only carries the work load of three but works mandatory six-day weeks as well. Union officials dryly note that even with the $3.7 million a year shelled out for overtime in the New York area, the FAA comes out ahead. Says NATCA's Connor: "You aren't paying medical insurance or retirement costs."

The FAA insists that current staffing levels are sufficient. "It is much more efficient today than it was several years ago," says Monte Belger of the FAA's Air Traffic Services. NATCA's Krasner counters, "If you have a vision of an air-traffic-control system that 15 or 20 years from now will have fewer controllers, it doesn't really matter if you make these people work longer hours and burn them out. From an economic standpoint, it makes sense. From a human standpoint, it's crazy."

It may be nuts from a practical standpoint as well. FAA administrator David Hinson predicts that the congressional cuts aimed at eradicating the national debt could pare air-control funds 14% by 2008, even as U.S. air travel is expected to climb another 35%. To make up the shortfall, the FAA is gambling on a technology called Free Flight. More sophisticated even than the scheme abandoned in 1994, it is designed to let aircraft chart their own courses, relying on collision-avoidance technology and satellite communications. It is also years from large-scale operation.

With the FAA planning to roll out the concept within the next few weeks, air controllers are already sounding the alarm. The costly system, they insist, offers no means to merge free-flying craft with other airport traffic; it lacks the "conflict probe" essential for preventing midair collisions; and it promises pandemonium in heavily trafficked regions like the Northeast. "It could never work in the Northeast," says NATCA's Fruscella. "We have high-volume airports that are within 10 miles of each other. It would cause havoc." Not missing a beat, he adds, "That is not to say they won't do it. They have no problem causing havoc right now."

--Reported by Michele Donley/Chicago, William Dowell/New York and Jerry Hannifin/Washington

With reporting by MICHELE DONLEY/CHICAGO, WILLIAM DOWELL/NEW YORK AND JERRY HANNIFIN/WASHINGTON