R. Doug Wicker — Author

Today begins my first true blog entry and you’re in luck.  It’s a twofer (real word, believe it or not).  Why a twofer?  Because the second part will address a recent Washington Post story dealing with my former career.

Part One: The Setting for Decisions

Decisions is set on the entirely fictional, privately owned island of Vai Kai in the Fijian island group.  I visited Fiji just over a decade ago, a couple of years before I began writing Decisions.  The Republic of the Fiji Islands consists of 110 permanently inhabited islands (some of which are indeed privately owned), 222 mostly uninhabited islands, and well over 500 islets (many of which disappear beneath the waves during periods of high tides or stormy weather). The name I chose, Vai Kai, is Polynesian for food and water.  I got the idea for the name from a friend of mine, Mark Vaikai, an air traffic controller whom I met in the control tower at Raratonga International Airport in the Cook Islands back in the early 1990s, and with whom I remain in contact to this day.  In all my world travels Fiji remains one of my favorite destinations.  I very much look forward to returning some day in the future.

Part Two: Don’t Read If You Fear Flying

The Washington Post reported on October 9 and again December 31 that U.S. air traffic controllers are setting all-time records in the number of operational errors (OE) reported nationwide.  An OE is when two aircraft come closer together than FAA separation rules allow.  Think of it as running a stop light at a busy intersection, or perhaps entering an Interstate Highway going the wrong direction.  Not good.  Sometimes you get away with that kind of error, but eventually it catches up with you.  FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt would have you believe that the increase in error rates is because of increased reporting following the implementation of a new self-reporting system that grants immunity in exchange for the gathering of data to be used to improve overall system safety.  Worse, he touts the myth that the system has statistically never been safer.

Balderdash (because this is a family-friendly blog).

To paraphrase a line in a book I wrote on the subject (and which New York publishing houses found, “too terrifying,” to publish—the exact words on at least one rejection), “An absence of death is not an indicator of safety.”  Never has been.  Hopefully never will be.  Just because Joe Davidson has ridden his Harley without a helmet for ten accident-free years does not mean that Joe is doing something safe.

OE rates were climbing well before Administrator Babbitt’s system was implemented, and well after previous Administrator Marion C. Blakey signed off on a plan that reclassified the least serious OEs as “Proximity Events.”  Yes.  You heard that right.  Even after the FAA magically wiped off the books the most frequent errors committed by controllers by magically renaming them something else entirely, the total number of errors actually increased even with those previous errors no longer counting toward the total.  And because the least serious errors are no longer classified as errors, that means that the errors currently being reported are much more dangerous and substantially more in number.

And why did Administrator Blakey resort to such creative accounting to show a decrease in operational errors?

Because of inept mismanagement bordering on the criminal.  Many in Administrator Blakey’s controller workforce were hired in the immediate aftermath of the PATCO controller strike in 1981, which at the time resulted in 11,000 of the nation’s controllers being fired.  Because of the incredible stress of the job, most controllers are eligible for retirement after serving 25 years.  Here’s some math that apparently escaped Administrator Blakey’s attention: 1981 + 25 = 2006.  In 2006 Administrator Blakey ordered controller base pay be frozen for five years.  In other words, she told an experienced, seasoned, and already dangerously understaffed workforce coming up on retirement eligibility that they could either have their wages eroded by inflation over the next five years, or they could retire and get annual cost-of-living adjustments to their retirement checks.

Today you have the inevitable result from that incredibly short-sighted decision.  The number of fully-qualified controllers in the U.S. last year fell to levels not seen since 1992, even as the nation’s air traffic numbers continue to climb in the wake of the recent Great Recession and subsequent but gradual recovery.  Many of the controllers who are fully qualified today have less than four years of experience and were trained under a system that lowered training standards to levels never before considered acceptable for that career field.  It is, quite frankly, an accident waiting to happen, and over the next decade hundreds, perhaps thousands, will die as a direct result.