Says FAA Hasn't Complied With NTSB's 2007 Recommendations
Claiming the FAA has continued to refuse to comply with the
National Transportation Safety Board's April 2007 recommendations to
work with controllers on fatigue issues, the National Air Traffic
Controllers Association announced Monday its own plans to develop a
"fatigue management system."
NATCA President Patrick Forrey adds the union will also
participate in the FAA's "Aviation Fatigue Management Symposium,"
which kicks off Tuesday... despite it being, in his words, "nothing
more than another FAA publicity stunt, designed to show an
appearance of concern for this issue.
"Apparently, the FAA
now decides that an industry-wide symposium is needed when they
can't even address their own employee fatigue issues well after a
year from being asked by the NTSB," Forrey said. "In fact, the
agency has contributed to the fatigue problem by worsening the
controller staffing crisis and imposing work rules on controllers
in September 2006 that mandated longer work periods and fewer rest
opportunities and even prohibited controllers from calling in sick
due to fatigue."
NATCA is locked in a highly-vitriolic, two-year battle with the
FAA over a new contract.
As ANN reported last week,
the NTSB recommended the FAA develop a fatigue management system
for all classes of operators that it regulates. NATCA says it would
like the NTSB to require the FAA to develop a system for air
traffic controllers, and other FAA employees as well. To that end,
NATCA will immediately launch work on a fatigue management system
that will contain a variety of policies and countermeasures that
are all focused on decreasing the likelihood of fatigue in the
workplace.
Three NATCA facility representatives chronicled the relationship
between understaffing and fatigue last Wednesday at a House
Aviation Subcommittee hearing. One of them, Melvin Davis from
Southern California Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) -- the
busiest terminal radar facility in the country -- testified that
overtime mandated by FAA managers desperate to cover for
understaffing had risen the past four years, from $250,000 spent to
$4 million, greatly worsening the fatigue problem. "Every day I sit
next to controllers who show the signs of accumulated fatigue," he
said. "The stress and strain of the extended overtime and increased
demand manifests itself in visible physical changes. There are
constant bags under our eyes."
"The FAA holding a symposium on fatigue is like the big oil
companies holding a symposium on high gas prices," Forrey
concludes. "While not a crisis entirely of its own making, the FAA
must be held accountable for its failed management and policy
decisions and brutally stressful, understaffed and exhausting
working conditions that have caused the NTSB to add controller
fatigue to its list of most important safety concerns."