Air Controller Safety Issue Surfaces Again

Preliminary findings that an air traffic controller was at fault in the collision Friday between a SkyWest commuter plane and a USAir jetliner at Los Angeles International Airport have raised concerns once again about the quality and quantity of the nation’s controllers.

Ever since President Reagan fired 11,400 of the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic controllers during an illegal 1981 strike, air safety advocates have contended that the FAA did not move quickly enough to replenish its work force.

While the volume of air traffic continued to grow during the 1980s, America’s airports were staffed by significantly fewer controllers during most of those years.

As late as 1986 there were 14,080 controllers, compared to a pre-strike level of 16,400. By last fall the number of controllers had reached 17,226.

However, John Thornton, executive director of the 10,000-member National Air Traffic Controllers Assn., formed in 1987, said that the FAA needs to hire 3,000 more controllers to keep pace with increases in air traffic.

“We’re very far behind,” he said.

Before the strike, about 80% of the controllers nationwide were rated as “full-performance level,” meaning they were fully trained by supervisors to perform each of the controller positions in their control tower, such as ground, departure and arrival control.

By 1984, the ratio of full-performance controllers had fallen to 72%, and by last fall it had dropped to 62%. This lower proportion means that supervisors have less flexibility in making work assignments, aviation experts say.

The tower at LAX has a better ratio: 26 of the 34 controllers--76%--are full-performance level, spokesman Fred O’Donnell said. Government investigators and the controllers’ union refused Sunday to comment on the level of experience of the controller involved in Friday’s disaster.

“After the strike,” said a controller training supervisor at one Southern California FAA facility, “we lost a whole pool of (controllers) who had vast experience, people who’d been military controllers during the Vietnam War and came looking for jobs in the early ‘70s. This time we’re getting people with zero aviation ability. Maybe they’re good at video games.”

The supervisor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that some controllers hired since the strike receive substantially less training at smaller, local airports before being stationed at major airports such as LAX.

One of the SkyWest passengers who died in Friday’s accident, Scott Gilliam, was a controller at the FAA’s Palmdale facility, which directs all air traffic at high altitudes in Southern California.

Gilliam’s wife, Connie, said in an interview Saturday that her husband, who was returning from Atlantic City, where he traveled periodically to work on the design of a new FAA automated air traffic control system, had voiced concerns recently about air safety.

“He just said that there aren’t that many controllers for the job,” she said.

The FAA has defended itself against such criticism by saying there is no evidence of higher near-miss or accident rates since the strike. The FAA also has substantially cut overtime work that had been blamed as a contributing factor to high stress levels among controllers.

In 1988, however, the FAA acknowledged that it was running short of experienced controllers. The agency temporarily cut evening rush-hour landings at O’Hare Airport in Chicago from 96 an hour to 80 and began offering 20% salary premiums for controllers at O’Hare, New York’s Kennedy Airport and LAX. An experienced controller in one of these airports makes about $70,000 a year.

Some aviation safety experts say that the quality of controllers at LAX is less of a problem than the sheer volume of traffic.

“The (controllers) who work at LAX today are as good as the pre-strike people,” said Wally Roberts, who retired as a TWA pilot late last year. “It took a long time to recover from (the 1981 firings) but I think in large part they (the FAA) have done that.”

However, the high number of planes at LAX puts controllers “under tremendous pressure,” said Dick Russell, who retired as a United pilot last year and runs an airline safety consulting business.

“What you have to do is back off and not try to bunch so many airplanes into the same area,” Russell said. “We’re running out of concrete. . . . The average amount of time an airplane occupies the runway is 56 seconds. The controllers are trying to space airplanes a mile and a half from each other. Once somebody stubs their toe . . . it begins to cause problems.”

John Galipault, president of the Ohio-based Aviation Safety Institute, said it would be unfair to suggest that only an inexperienced controller could have made the error blamed in the USAir-Sky-West accident.

“Anybody can make that mistake, particularly at LAX, where one controller on the north sidehas responsibility for two runways and everything that’s going to taxi across those runways,” he said.

The role of the controller was initially regarded as crucial in the 1986 mid-air collision between an Aeromexico jet and a private plane over Cerritos, in which 82 people died.

However, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded in 1987 that the chief cause of the crash was the failure of the nation’s air traffic control system, which the board said puts too much emphasis on the “see-and-avoid” approach. The Aeromexico jet had received no warning from the FAA controller about the smaller plane.

The board blamed no individuals. It said the controller, Walter White, a six-year FAA veteran with a good work record, might not have noticed the small plane because he had to deal unexpectedly with a second private plane that strayed into restricted airspace and because the radar signal from the first small plane could have been very dim on his screen.

Times staff writer Iris Schneider contributed to this story.

SEQUENCE OF EVENTS LEADING TO CRASH AT LAX

1. SkyWest commuter plane taxis to this point before moving onto the runway

2. Approximate touchdown point for arriving USAir jetliner.

3. Point where USAir jet applies brakes and begins to skid.

4. Impact point.

5. Point where planes come to rest against a building.