Second Incident In Four Days Involving ZAU

It was another close call for aircraft operating under the control of Chicago Center. For the second time in a week, two aircraft came closer than rules allow in the skies over the Midwestern US.

The latest incident occurred Saturday morning, when a Cessna C208 Caravan flying from Chicago's Midway Airport to Soldiers' Grove, WI came within 1.3 miles laterally, and 500 feet vertically, to a Cirrus SR22 that had just departed from Lone Rock, WI, heading to Fairbault, MN.

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association -- still smarting over a November 13 incident, in which two regional jets were vectored dangerously close to one another by a controller at ZAU -- quickly came to Chicago Center's defense, saying the facility is understaffed.

"It’s clear now that even the FAA, which has ignored our staffing and workload concerns, believes there is a serious safety problem here because they have announced to our facility that training of new prospective controllers has been halted until Friday and they are putting every manager on the control room floor," said NATCA’s Chicago Center Facility Representative Jeffrey Richards. "It is our hope these managers will finally see what we already know: Controllers here are overworked, tired and understaffed. That reduces the margin of safety and leads to more mistakes."

However, Richards also conceded Saturday's incident occurred not because of understaffing, per se, but rather miscommunication between controllers at ZAU and their counterparts in Madison, WI about how much airspace needed to blocked off for the departing Cirrus. As that conversation was going on, controllers at Chicago Center switched the Caravan to the local traffic advisory frequency to land at Soldiers' Grove.

"We were not talking to either airplane," Richards told The Associated Press. "This was really a bad situation."

FAA spokesman Tony Molinaro said despite the ominous undertones to two incidents in the same week, overall errors at the Chicago facility have decreased since 2003.

"Two errors in a week at a center does not define a problem. We need to look at it from the proper perspective," he said. "At Chicago Center, they handle about three million flights each year, so one or two controller errors in a week does occur."

FMI: www.faa.gov, www.natca.org