A flurry, then fatigue: Air-traffic controllers cope with wild swings

CHICAGO — Sitting in an airport tower peering into the darkness or working inside a quiet, dimly lit radar room can be disastrous for air-traffic controllers who work long, grueling hours and must stay awake all night.

An adrenaline rush is often followed by an energy crash, echoing the pattern of staring at radar scopes while multitasking during rush periods and then having nothing to do during lulls in flight activity. And that's just one shift, which may end in the morning and be followed by an afternoon shift.

The only constant is that controllers must be alert, with eyes wide open, all the time.

Coinciding with the busy summer travel season, the Federal Aviation Administration this month issued new rules that allow controllers to request leaves if they are too tired to work. It comes after repeated warnings from safety watchdogs over the years that alternating shift work intensifies fatigue problems and may be linked to increases in controller errors.

But the action, coming in the wake of highly publicized incidents in which controllers fell asleep on the job, may not go far enough, according to some sleep science researchers. They advised the FAA to allow controllers to nap during breaks.

During visits by a Chicago Tribune reporter and photographer to the main air-traffic tower at O'Hare International Airport and the air traffic control center for the Chicago region — access that is unprecedented since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — the overall picture that emerged supports the hard data showing that U.S. commercial air travel is the safest it has ever been.

But amid that exemplary record and professionalism, interviews with controllers also highlighted the job's physical and mental tolls.

Chicago-area controllers say there is no excuse for the lapses that have occurred at other FAA facilities, including one case in which a controller laid out a bed for himself. The fear of making a mistake that would place planes packed with passengers in danger is always in the back of a controller's mind, and the nationwide scorn that resulted from the sleeping-controllers scandal really stings, they said.

"We were the butt of jokes to every stand-up comedian around. That doesn't feel good," said Jeff Richards, the controllers union chief at the FAA's Chicago Center in Aurora, which handles high-altitude traffic in the Midwest. "We are doing our jobs just fine."

Each controller copes with the weird hours and the stress of the job differently.

Using the exercise rooms at FAA centers or just taking a walk under the bright lights of airport terminal buildings are among the important rituals that controllers follow to recuperate after working airplanes nonstop for an hour to 90 minutes. The controllers get 45-minute breaks. Plenty of coffee helps too. For smokers, FAA facilities are perhaps the only federal buildings that still have smoking rooms.

"I will stand up while working traffic," said David Stock, a controller at the Chicago TRACON radar center in Elgin, Ill., where controllers handle aircraft approaching and departing Chicago-area airports. "People accuse me of doing tai chi. But some of the jobs are monotonous, until all of a sudden you have a problem and must make a split-second decision."

Kurt Granger controlled planes for 25 years at the TRACON (an acronym for Terminal Radar Approach Control). For most of his career, there was little he and his colleagues could do about the lousy hours.

"Years ago, I used to love (midnight) shifts, but as I got up in age, I said, 'I'm too old for this crap,' " said Granger, a controller at Chicago TRACON from 1984 to 2009. After reaching mandatory retirement at age 56 two years ago, Granger switched jobs to become a training support specialist at the facility.

He said he doesn't miss the countless times over the years in which bad weather forced controllers working the day shift to stay well into the night.

"You'd have all that traffic in the area way past the time it should have dropped off," he said. "You get off work at 10 p.m. and come in the next morning at 6:30 and you are just dragging, feeling like you're hung over. I have to confess that I sometimes used my sick leave, too, especially on a quick turn (in shifts) when it was killing you.

"The whole chasing-yourself stuff is just no good."

Until now, taking sick leave to fight fatigue was prohibited. Some veteran controllers said in the past they worried about taking time off when they were overly tired for fear of receiving a sick-leave letter or being let go.

Under the new changes aimed at fighting controller fatigue, the FAA will permit controllers to use sick time if they are too tired to work. The new policy, which the FAA said will be implemented by September 2012, is part of an agreement with the controllers union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, in response to the incidents this year in which controllers fell asleep.

The FAA will also allow controllers to listen to the radio and read during overnight shifts at airport towers and radar facilities where traffic is light during those hours. Most FAA controller facilities allowed the playing of radios in the past, but eliminated the option in about 2006.

In April, the FAA gave controllers an extra hour off between shifts, for a minimum of nine hours' rest, so they don't doze off at work.

But U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has refused to compromise on a longstanding FAA rule that prohibits controllers from taking naps — or even closing their eyes — while on break or to schedule naps when multiple controllers are working overnight shifts. LaHood's hard-line stance against paying workers to sleep runs counter to recent sleep science research that shows short naps are effective in re-energizing tired workers, experts said.

"It's ridiculous that air-traffic controllers are not allowed to close their eyes when they are on break. There isn't another profession where this is prohibited," said Joseph Bellino, a retired controller who worked for 42 years at O'Hare. "Is there a pilot or a passenger who wants a tired controller working their airplane?"

The FAA has reported seven cases this year of controllers found sleeping on the job and two instances of controllers failing to respond when contacted by pilots. In one case, a medical flight carrying a patient was forced to delay its landing at an airport in Reno, Nevada, because the lone controller in the tower had fallen asleep.

The problem is not new, nor is it a moral failure on the part of a handful of the nation's approximately 15,000 air-traffic controllers, Dr. Gregory Belenky, director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University, told a Senate hearing on May 24. He said sleepiness and degraded performance associated with alternating shift work is a widespread problem.

"Given the structural realities of scheduling, the solution to this problem may lie in sanctioned, scheduled on-shift napping when working the night shift," Belenky testified.

The FAA's own group studying the fatigue issue recommended introducing scheduled naps on overnight shifts, in part after seeing that several countries, including Germany and Japan, permit controllers to take sleeping breaks.

 

A review conducted at FAA facilities in the Chicago area in 2009 found that the agency has not fully implemented recommendations to identify and reduce the risks of fatigue. Investigators found that minimal hours between shifts, counter-rotational shifts with progressively earlier start times, on-the-job training and scheduled overtime could seriously fatigue controllers at O'Hare, Chicago TRACON and Chicago Center, according to Calvin Scovel III, inspector general in the U.S. Department of Transportation.

"We also found that FAA does not consistently include fatigue issues as part of its normal operational error investigatory process, even though NTSB has identified fatigue as a potential contributing factor in several operational errors," Scovel said in a statement in May.

The fatigue issue, which the National Transportation Safety Board has labeled a top threat to transportation safety, is not likely to fade so long as controllers continue to rotate between early morning, afternoon and midnight start times.

It has been a tough issue to resolve because controllers and the FAA support the continuous rotation, as opposed to working a week of days, a week of nights and back to a week of days. For controllers, it means schedules can be structured to create longer strings of days off. It also minimizes burn-out by avoiding working the same heavy traffic periods for many days in a row. The rotating shifts stretch manpower, which helps FAA managers to staff their facilities without mandating six-day workweeks, especially in the summer or over holidays when there are more requests for time off, officials said.

"We take care of each other here," said Stock, the TRACON controller. "If somebody comes back to work after just having a baby and they look tired, we move them around the radar room in positions where they are not going to hurt anybody. But for the most part, we don't have any problems."

Erin Hart — a 26-year-old controller at O'Hare who represents the new face of air-traffic control as a huge wave of controller retirements is cresting — said she is not distracted by the sleeping-controllers scandal or daunted by the challenges ahead. Hart, a Purdue University graduate, started working at O'Hare in September 2008,

One of the youngest controllers wearing a head-set in O'Hare tower, her temperament came across as assured and her air-traffic-ese spot-on as a reporter was plugged in to her frequency while she walked around the tower cab scanning the airfield and radioing pilots to runways during a severe weather operation on June 30.

Hart, whose husband is an O'Hare-based pilot at a major airline, recalls feeling like she was constantly swimming when she started working at O'Hare, her first air-traffic job.

Hart said rotating shifts — she starts out on evenings in the beginning of the week and ends up on morning or midnight shifts — are harder on her than the actual work itself.

"Some shifts wear down on you a little. You just have to fit life in the middle and go and pick up dry cleaning and go to the grocery store," she said. "But I like the pressure. When you get to be engaged with the airplanes and you are clearing off the airport, it is serious and fun."

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