Walk through an air traffic control facility these days, and you will notice that the single-most common tool for the people who work there is bifocals. You will also notice that almost everyone is 50-plus years old. While almost any other workplace has a mix of rookies, mid-career people, and veterans, air traffic controllers look like a class reunion from the mid-1970s. The fact that most air traffic controllers are approaching the FAA’s mandatory retirement age of 56 would be little more than curiosity except that it raises two big questions about the next few years: Who will the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recruit to mind the store—or towers and radar rooms in this case—and how will the system pay to train replacements?

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Cleared For...Retirement?

The agency is also rearranging the scheduling at its radar centers. In many cases the number of workers scheduled for Saturday and Sunday was far lower than required, which ensured that for adequate staffing someone would have to be called in on overtime. In addition the FAA and the air traffic controllers’ union formerly had a memorandum of understanding about minimum staffing requirements, but the agency has dropped it and plans to run many radar centers with fewer people.

Rather than agreed-upon staffing the FAA reports that it now “staffs to traffic,” but that practice may have safety implications. Just this past August a Comair regional jet cleared for takeoff from Lexington, Kentucky, mistakenly took the wrong runway, which was too short, and crashed into trees before it could lift off, killing 49 of the 50 people on board. Air traffic controllers sometimes catch errors like that before they become tragedies, but at the time of this deadly and unavoidable accident—6 a.m. on a Sunday—only one controller was manning the tower at Lexington’s Blue Grass Airport, and he was responsible both for traffic on the field and traffic that had recently departed. He gave a clearance while the plane was on the taxiway, turned his back to attend to other responsibilities, and then heard the explosion.

None of this pleases the air traffic controllers, and Carr has referred to the FAA as “FEMA with wings,” a reference to the agency derided for its performance after Hurricane Katrina. But the FAA believes it can solve part of its budget problem by doing more with less.

The agency’s long-term plan involves using technology to reduce the need for air traffic controllers. Year by year it adds a variety of productivity tools, although lately it has scrapped some for lack of money. The FAA’s grand scheme is something called the Next Generation Air Traffic Service, or NGATS. In cooperation with the US Department of Defense, NASA and the Department of Commerce, it is planning a fundamentally different system for keeping planes apart in flight. The current system is a little like a street cop with a whistle and white gloves standing in an intersection—NGATS is more like a four-way stop in which drivers count on a combination of rules, courtesy, and sometimes eye contact to establish who will go first. In NGATS however eye contact is unlikely, and in many cases visual contact of any kind is impossible.

The concept is that each plane will ascertain its location by GPS, as many planes already do, and then broadcast that information, just as planes now broadcast their identity through a transponder. But under the current system a ground-based radar system listens for the transponder and ascertains the location by calculating what time the signal was received and which way the radar was facing when it received it, and then the information appears on a controller’s screen. Under NGATS each plane would listen for signals from the others, and the transmission would include information about whether the plane was flying straight and level or turning and changing altitude. Computers on the ground and on the planes—not a person at a radarscope—would look for conflicts in the minutes ahead and advise the pilots to make small changes that would keep planes safely separated. GPS is more accurate than radar so the system could safely let planes come a little closer together without risk of collision. It also works on the ground, giving each plane a map of the airfield and a “you-are-here” dot, which should make it harder to pick the wrong runway.

The FAA is taking some intermediate steps. In June several agencies set up shop in a conference room in a US Senate office building and tried hard to persuade Congressional staff members to fund some of them. At one demonstration NASA scientist David McNally sat at a sleek flat-panel display and clicked a mouse on icons representing planes in flight to provide a quick test of whether or not they could take shortcuts to fly more directly from takeoff to landing rather than flying over waypoints listed in their flight plans, a route that often makes the plane’s path resemble a piece in a game of Chinese checkers. On a map of simulated traffic over Florida, McNally clicked once to determine that an airliner could be routed directly. “Now that takes a controller 25 head-down keystrokes,” he reported, which means turning away from the radar screen for several seconds, something air traffic controllers often do not have time to do. “This will let the controller handle a lot more airplanes,” he emphasized—but the system is not yet in place.

The United States is probably further from a self-regulating air traffic system than boosters would like to admit. NASA has cut its funding for aviation, largely because of President Bush’s plan to send astronauts to the moon and Mars, and the US Department of Defense has said that its contributions will mostly be “in-kind” of expertise and existing technology.

The FAA has to do something different however because the traffic is getting heavier. Not only is the number of people flying is climbing, but they are flying in smaller planes, which drives up the FAA’s cost. This past February the agency predicted that by 2010 the business jet fleet would be 65 percent larger than it was in 2000, and the regional jet fleet is expected to be four times larger. If two 50-seat regional jets replace one Boeing 737, the FAA’s costs double but its revenues stay the same—or decline if ticket prices do.

Norman Y. Mineta, who resigned in June after six years as Transportation Secretary, insisted that the capacity of the air traffic control system would have to triple by 2025 to keep up with demand, but his department, which includes the FAA, requested about $2.5 billion for air traffic equipment for the next fiscal year, down from $3 billion in 2004. Facing the contradiction in July, the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate aviation subcommittees and the ranking Democratic members of both committees joined in asking the acting inspector general of the US Department Transportation to investigate what would work. As the lawmakers put it, “It is clear that much work remains to establish costs, milestones, and expected benefits” from NGATS

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