Controllers Blame Staff Shortages

The Federal Aviation Administration is looking into several errors made by air traffic controllers at the Memphis Air Route Traffic Control Center (ZME), including six incidents in one week where aircraft were allowed to get too close together.

In one day, August 14, a King Air and and ExecJet corporate plane were allowed to come within 3.6 miles of each other during final approach at Nashville International airport. Later on, an American Airlines MD-80 came within 2.5 miles of a commuter jet flying at 600 feet above it at Memphis International Airport.

FAA spokesperson Laura Brown said the errors were "not what we would call the highest-severity category errors. On an A, B, C scale, they were C-level errors."

Controllers blame all the errors to short staffing, as well as radio static interfering with communication and just plain miscommunication, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

"We have never had this many mistakes at one time in Memphis," said Ron Carpenter, head of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. "What caused a lot of this, in my opinion, is that we are working so short right now."

"We believe we are 101 controllers short of the journeyman controllers we were allotted," he added. That means a shift that is supposed to be staffed by 13 to 14 journeyman controllers now has eight or nine, according to Carpenter.

Two of the six errors made in a week's time were made by trainees while being monitored by senior controllers.

The Memphis center will add 15 more controllers this October to augment the current 63 trainees there currently. Even though they are not fully certified as controllers, they are qualified to work the positions where they have been trained, Brown said.

"They become part of staffing even though they are not fully certified. It does not mean they are not functional in some respect," she said.

The FAA says it hired 1,100 new controllers in 2006, and will hire 1,400 this year.

According to the new FAA staffing plan for the next 10 years, the range of allotted controllers at the Memphis center is 244-298. Brown said these new ratios were agreed upon by controllers during negotiations, and should help accurately reflect actual workloads and lead to more precise staffing.

NATCA responds that in the past, most areas were staffed on a daytime shift with 13-14 veteran controllers. If there were not that many controllers on duty, overtime was called in and leave for personal or vacation time was prohibited. The union says now, most shifts are beginning with 8-9 controllers who are still tasked with training duties.

At the beginning of the summer vacation period, overtime was scheduled and controllers were working six-day weeks. This overtime was used to cover training new controllers along with training veteran controllers on a new procedure. Fatigue set in, but "at least the coverage was there for the shifts," Carpenter said.

However, he added, "during the week of August 5th, scheduled overtime was cancelled. Those same controllers are now forced to work with less people and sectors combined. Combining sectors means the controller is working twice the airspace they normally would be responsible to control."

On the morning of August 18, Carpenter said, there were five people scheduled to start the day in Area 6, with a total of 8 certified controllers by the end of the day. "In the past," Carpenter said, "if there were not 11-12 controllers starting the day, overtime was called. In this case, management refused."

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