Well, this is embarrassing. It’s happened again. Another controller fell asleep while on duty. But in this case it appears this controller will soon be out on the street looking for work. And this is one case I’m not even going to begin to try to defend.
Regular readers of this blog will recall that we’ve already discussed this in a previous case that occurred in the Control Tower at Reagan Washington International Airport back on March 23.
Well, now Don Brown has stepped into the fray with his own take on this matter. I’ve known Don for many years. Like me, Don is also a retired controller, but whereas I worked in the terminal tower and radar options, he worked in the en route option. Don is also a safety perfectionist. Don authors one of the most respected Aviation Safety blogs out there, and for many years he wrote a monthly column entitled Say Again? for AvWeb.
Don must know what he’s talking about because he agrees with me (that’s a joke, people). People die because of poor staffing, and Air Traffic Control in this country is both woefully and critically understaffed thanks to you-know-who. So, what does Don have to say about this latest rash of controllers falling asleep on the midnight shift? Let’s take a look and find out.
Decisions — Murder in Paradise
The Globe — Murder in Luxury
R. Doug Wicker — Author 
How is it possible that a controller could be asleep (or dead) for several hours before anyone goes to check on him?
That is just one problem with a one-man operation. On a midshift, you can go hours between aircraft operations. If something were to happen to a lone controller causing incapacitation during that time, there is no second person around to act as a safety backup. In a safety-critical field, that is the equivalent of putting a lone police officer out on patrol and not checking on him for eight hours to see if he’s all right until he’s relieved. As Don Brown points out, from a safety perspective alone there should never be less than three people on any one shift—two working positions and a third to rotate through those positions in order to provide physiological breaks and rest periods.
At the outset, I will say that I have no unassailable knowledge about the particulars of either of the recent sleeping incidents. Maybe one of the events is more egregious than the other, maybe not. But this most recent incident seems to have been analyzed in more than one report as a slam-dunk for the (non-management) controller to be fired. I’m dying for an authoritative response to why that’s fair, while the DCA (management) “controller” seems not to have such an ax dangling above his neck.
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