Congressional Testimony 

Testimony of National Air Traffic Controllers Association President Patrick Forrey

Before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation’s Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security

March 8, 2007

Executive Summary

Contract

There are tens of thousands of Federal Aviation Administration employees working without a contract.  Employees represented by NATCA, PASS, and AFSCME are all working without contracts for their respective bargaining units.  Although the FAA continually refers to a contract, the truth is that NATCA, including Air Traffic Controllers, engineers, test pilots, nurses, lawyers and others are working under imposed work and pay rules.  This is no contract.

From the beginning of the collective bargaining process in July of 2005 until the Agency’s unilateral declaration of impasse in April of 2006, the FAA engaged in what can only be referred to as surface bargaining until it found an opportunity to end negotiations, submit its proposal to Congress, and unilaterally implement its non-negotiated work rules.

It is my belief that the FAA’s goal was not to reach agreement.  Instead, the Agency intended to reach impasse and unilaterally implement its will with no duty to bargain. FAA’s proposal to grant itself discretion over wages, facility classification, and other matters, constitutes a waiver of NATCA’s right to bargain over working conditions.

Let us be clear: no labor law considers imposed work rules to be a contract.  In fact, unilateral implementation is a form of economic warfare not unlike a strike or lockout in the private sector.  The Agency’s actions are antithetical to the definition of collective bargaining.

Morale among FAA employees is extremely low.  Retirements are far exceeding FAA’s planning.  Fatigue among those employees remaining is a major concern.  And these are all effects of the unilaterally imposed work rules.

Effect of the Imposed Work Rules

As a result of the implementation of the unilaterally imposed work rules, we have seen a reduction in air traffic controllers nationwide and an unnecessary compromise of safety to the flying public.

While the FAA continues to repeat the mantra that there is no correlation between staffing and safety, the evidence seems to prove otherwise. 

According to the FAA “Administrator’s Fact Book,” there were 14,206 air traffic controllers working in the United States at the end of FY 2006.  In 2003, there were 15,691.  Of the 14,000 working today, almost 2,000 of them are trainees and not fully-certified.  That was not the case in 2003 when where were almost 16,000 CPCs.

At the same time, and by no means by coincidence, operational errors are on the rise at the FAA’s busiest facilities, including Atlanta-Hartsfield and the Southern California TRACON.

As an air traffic controller with 23 years of service within the FAA, I can assure you that those 1,485 controllers would make a significant difference in the level of safety in the sky.  It would eliminate the need for mandatory 6-day work weeks, forced overtime, the fatigue and the burnout felt by the overstretched controller workforce throughout the country.  Without a concerted effort to attract experienced controllers and retain our current workforce, the ATC system will continue to lose controllers and that will mean flight delays, runways incursions and increased chance of aviation disasters.

FAA has acknowledged understaffing as a problem at a number of FAA facilities, including Fort Myers Tower, the New York TRACON, and Atlanta-Hartsfield.

In California, the 38 FAA air traffic control facilities are authorized 1,624 controllers, but they are currently operating with only 1,107 fully-certified controllers.  In addition, 92 controllers retired in FY06, 37 have retired thus far in FY07, and additional 303, or 27 percent, will be eligible to retire this year.  At Oakland Air Route Traffic Control Center, 50 percent of their workforce are trainees.

In Illinois, the 13 FAA facilities are working with a combined 657 of the 813 authorized controllers.  164 controllers will retire this year, offsetting gains of a possible 101 controllers that are currently in training.

In Mississippi’s three FAA facilities, they are working with 42 fully-certified controllers of the 52 they are authorized.  Twenty-three of the 42 are eligible to retire this year and next.

Controllers are leaving the workforce at a rate of exactly three per day since the start of the current fiscal year.  At the current pace, the number of controller losses would be 1,095 – nearly 150 more than the FAA’s projection.  This would not represent an unusual occurrence, as the Agency has missed its retirement projections for three straight years, by an increasing margin each year.  But it does represent a paradigm shift away from “safety first,” as the FAA has always previously maintained. 

It is likely that those controllers that are retirement-eligible will choose to leave the system unless something can be done to keep them, like returning to the negotiating table under fair conditions with the intentions of reaching a mutually-agreeable contract.

Trainees, Not Controllers

It is important to note that the FAA is not currently hiring air traffic controllers, it is hiring trainees.  It takes an average of 3 years for a trainee to become fully-certified.  So with the Agency’s current course of action – by which they hire a new controller for every controller they lose – they are actually putting themselves 3 years behind the power curve.

Exacerbating the training process is the fact that when we lose veteran controllers, we are removing the on-the-job instructors that assist with the development of new hires.  Trainees become controllers by plugging-in and working the traffic alongside veteran certified controllers.  With the pool of instructors continually shrinking, the length of time it takes trainees to become fully-certified and able to work traffic will continue to increase. 

That gap, from the day a veteran controller retires to the day their replacement reaches full certification level, is where we have the most reason to worry about the agency’s continued ability to maintain the margin of safety in the system by ensuring there is redundancy.  Our greatest challenge today is maintaining the margin of safety knowing the level of redundancy has been whittled away to its bare minimum.  We need more eyes watching the skies.

The FAA’s Air Traffic Organization has stated that they are considering structural staffing to deal with shortages to train new hires.  Unfortunately, this will mean our air traffic facilities will be staffed with less-experienced controllers.  Current FAA projections are that by 2010, 40 percent of the air traffic control workforce will have 4 years or less experience on the job.  And that’s without figuring in the 50 percent failure rate at facilities such as the New York TRACON, as the FAA’s Eastern Regional Administrator Doug Murphy has claimed.

I have often heard airline passengers remark that they like grey-haired pilots.  Well, I think pilots and passengers also like grey-haired air traffic controllers.

Can’t Staff to Traffic (CIP)

The FAA’s imposed work rules are not only removing incentives for veteran controllers to stay on the job, but they have also removed incentives for controllers to want to seek a transfer to a larger, busier air traffic facility.  Controller Incentive Pay was designed to help put controllers in these hard-to-staff facilities.  The imposed work rules eliminate controller incentive pay for controllers, but, in an ironic twist, the Agency has chosen to maintain controller incentive pay for supervisory positions.

Financial Costs of Inefficiency

Air traffic across the country is back to pre-9/11 levels, and surpassing those record levels in many of our busiest facilities, including JFK in New York and Atlanta Hartsfield.  As traffic continues to rise while the number of controllers continues to decrease, inefficiencies will become more rampant and delays will become the norm rather than the exception.

When congestion overwhelms the system, the costs are shared across the system.  With aviation contributing $640 billion dollars a year to the American economy, representing 5.4 percent of U.S. GDP and accounting for over 9 million jobs, it is increasingly important that inefficiencies be eliminated.  As Transportation Secretary Mary Peters recently said, “If we continue along the current path, estimates are that, by 2022, congestion across our skies will cost this nation $22 billion each year in lost economic activity.”

Yet the FAA has failed to plan for the retirement swoon 26 years in the making.  In fact, the Agency has recently admitted that the work rules imposed on its workforce is actually exacerbating the retirement wave and the understaffing epidemic.  The rampant understaffing of facilities across the country will mean increased delays and unnecessary increased risk.
 

Conclusion

The failure of the FAA to reach agreement with the unions that represent its employees has caused urgent safety concerns.  NATCA believes that the quickest solution to this safety concern is for Congress to act now to alleviate these problems by requiring the FAA to return to the bargaining table with NATCA, provide a clear impasse procedure, similar to the process that has been consistently successful for the US Postal Service for over 30 years, preserve the rights to ratification and agency head review, and provide jurisdiction for the federal courts to hear disputes and enforce the law.

NATCA maintains the right to ratify the contract once a complete agreement has been reached.  I have a Constitutional requirement to ratify as a precondition to a binding final agreement between the Parties.

We are faced with a similar staffing crisis in the nursing profession, as hospitals around the nation are struggling to get enough nurses trained and plugged into the system.  A quick Google search pulls up federal and state efforts to provide incentives to recruit nurses into the profession.  Yet we’re dismayed that the FAA is actually doing everything it can to dis-incentivize recruits from joining the ranks as controllers while at the same time pushing the veteran controllers out the door towards retirement.

This approach is bad for the safety of the flying public, bad for our economy, and bad for the nation.

We would like to return to the contract negotiating table with the FAA and fix this critical problem immediately before the margin of safety in our beloved National Airspace System is further compromised.  I believe this will decelerate the attrition levels we are currently seeing.