"Controller Dispute Threatens F.A.A. Budget for Coming Year"

Sunday, August 3, 2003

Controller Dispute Threatens F.A.A. Budget for Coming Year
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York (NY) Times

 
WASHINGTON, - A dispute over whether the jobs of about 3,000 air traffic
controllers should be contracted out to a private company is threatening the
bill that would finance the Federal Aviation Administration for the budget
year that begins in eight weeks.

The Bush administration has identified control towers at airports not
equipped with radar, and controllers who provide weather information but do
not direct traffic, as being candidates for "privatization." But after
lobbying from the unions that represent the controllers, the House and
Senate, in separate bills, voted to block the move.

In response, the administration said the president might veto a bill with
such a provision. Just before the House left for its August recess, a
conference committee established to reconcile other differences between the
House and Senate versions produced a bill that gave the White House its way.


Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey, the author of the amendment in
the Senate version that would have blocked the privatization, said on Friday
that the conference report was produced in the "dark of night" and that he
would fight to defeat the joint version when Congress returned in September.
Mr. Lautenberg noted that the conference bill would allow privatization at
69 airport control towers but prohibit it in two in Alaska, the home state
of the conference chairman, Representative Don Young, a Republican.

"The chairman there is a pretty smart guy, knows transportation very well,"
Mr. Lautenberg said. "He didn't want his airports going into public `Acme
Air Service.' "

Senator Lautenberg likened the air traffic controllers to "a fifth branch of
the military" and said their performance on Sept. 11, 2001, when they guided
thousands of planes to safe landings, demonstrated that the job was
inherently governmental.

The F.A.A. argues that it has no plans to contract out the controllers who
use radar to separate planes. A clause prohibiting such privatization is "a
cure in search of a disease," Marion Blakey, the agency's administrator,
said. Studies show that the controllers who provide weather information do
so at a cost of about $15 per briefing, far more than it would cost a
private company, she said. About 2,000 such controllers work in flight
service stations, aiding private pilots and corporate planes.

The F.A.A. also has no immediate plans to privatize the 69 towers, officials
say. They add that hundreds of towers already operated under private-sector
contracts have an excellent safety record, and cost about half as much to
operate as F.A.A. towers and save $54 million annually. There are 219 such
towers.

John Carr, the president of the National Air Traffic Controllers
Association, the union that represents F.A.A. controllers as well as some
controllers whose jobs have been privatized, cited figures from a group
representing the "contract towers" that shows the annual cost per tower was
$413,000 this year, up from $273,000 in 1998. The F.A.A. puts the figure at
$367,000. 

Mr. Carr said it was wrong to think of the 69 towers as small. One, in Van
Nuys, Calif., is the 8th busiest in the United States; Centennial Airport,
near Denver, is the 18th busiest, he said. The towers singled out to be kept
in F.A.A. hands are in Juneau and Anchorage.

While controllers in those towers do not use radar, he said, many of the
planes are guided to their approaches by radar controllers, and go on to use
instrument landing systems. 

The F.A.A. would like the ability to turn the towers over to contractors,
said Ms. Blakey, so it can use the tower controllers elsewhere, to fill in
for controllers who are retiring. The agency anticipates a wave of
retirements of the thousands of controllers hired after the Air Traffic
Controllers strike 20 years ago. But Mr. Carr said that most of the
controllers in towers worked there because they could not qualify to handle
traffic in busier places, or were choosing to work somewhere quieter in
their last few years before retirement. 

During the Clinton administration, the air traffic controllers were
classified as "inherently governmental" and thus not subject to contracting
out. Last year the Bush administration removed that designation.


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