Unfriendly Skies

Wrestling with delays

On his way to Los Angeles last week, Anthony Skirlick, 36, was one of hundreds of angry passengers delayed for two hours on the runway at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, awaiting takeoff clearance from air-traffic controllers. Most travelers do not know precisely who is to blame for such holdups. But Skirlick, who is an air-traffic controller at the busy Palmdale, Calif, traffic center, lays the responsibility squarely on the doorstep of his employer, the Federal Aviation Administration. Says he: "They are simply trying to do more work with fewer people, and the technology is not keeping up."

According to the FAA, delays increased by 75% during the first six months of 1984. In June alone, 40,852 flights were at least 15 minutes late, an increase of 106% over June 1983. Accounting for 60% of the delays are a handful of airports in the New York metropolitan area, Chicago, Denver, Atlanta and St. Louis. Eastern Air Lines Chairman Frank Borman reckons that this year the slow-ups have cost his line more than $30 million. The air-traffic-control system, he says, "is clearly overtaxed at this time."

In a three-day closed-door meeting held at FAA headquarters in Washington last week, a 40-member panel of Government experts and airline officials groped for a plan that would ease congestion at peak periods. Observes TWA Vice President Jerry Cosley: "Our scheduling is realistic in economic terms, but unrealistic in terms of the available infrastructure." Airline executives warned that carriers will not voluntarily risk losing passengers by scheduling more flights at unpopular times. Still, in response to FAA requests, the panel recommended that the airlines seek to spread out their peak-hour schedules. Also proposed were changes in airborne routings that could permit more traffic, and an increase in the number of controllers.

Skirlick and other controllers met in Washington last week to organize the American Air Traffic Controllers Council, a replacement for the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, whose 11,400 striking members were fired in 1981. As with PATCO, overwork and understaffing are among the new group's chief complaints. Today there are 13,300 controllers; in 1981 there were 16,375. More significant, only 9,841 currently have "full performance" ratings, compared with 13,133 before the PATCO strike. About two years are required for neophyte controllers to be fully certified, so many council organizers favor rehiring some of the fired controllers. That would embarrass the Reagan Administration, which made much of its toughness when It fired the controllers. But if air traffic continues to increase, the nation's pool of qualified controllers may be the resource most readily available for ending the delays without compromising air safety. -