Scott Voigt
15th Oct 2001, 10:40
Hi Y'all;
I thought that I would post some remarks at a European event from our Executive Vice President for NATCA...
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Topic: Ruth Marlin remarks to GATCO staffing conf. (1 of 4), Read 164 times
Conf: General Messages
From: Doug Church [email protected]
Date: Friday, October 12, 2001 01:39 PM
Safe Orderly and Adequately Staffed?
Remarks of Ruth Marlin, Executive Vice President
National Air Traffic Controllers Association, AFL-CIO
Since the events of September 11th, I have had cause to modify my remarks. The industry is very different than it was a month ago. Delays that once plagued us daily are no longer charged to ATC, but are now inside the airports in security lines. Passengers are more accepting of the inconvenience. That will not last long. Soon we will be back on the front page and increasing capacity will be the priority once again. Controller staffing is will be a key ingredient to meeting that demand!
The morning of Tuesday September 11th was an ordinary air traffic morning, when we had to implement a plan that had never been tried; in fact it had never even been simulated. The airspace was shut down quickly and without incident – largely because we had a well-trained and seasoned workforce that could rely on their experience and confidence in their abilities to deal with what were essentially 5,000 simultaneous aircraft emergencies. Had this occurred five to seven years from now when, if we fail to change our current course, we will have a junior workforce that is short staffed. I wonder, would the outcome have been the same?
Ensuring adequate levels of Air Traffic Controller staffing is a continual concern for controllers around the world. Unlike a business that can use a variety of commercially acceptable techniques to redistribute demand, redistributing demand results in excessive delay in our industry. System delays are rarely attributed to excessive demand, but instead are viewed as a failure of the ATC service provider to meet the needs of the industry.
The side effects of delay, if it is viewed as poor system performance, can be significant for the service provider. Airline delays are front-page news and have sparked countless congressional hearing in the U.S. We have no shortage of attention when the systems do not meet public expectations. However, there is rarely any analysis to determine whether the expectations were realistic. As those of us inside the industry know, we are governed by physics; consumer and media expectations are not.
Determining appropriate levels of controller staffing is not an easy task. We must first recognize that ATC is not just like any other enterprise. Unlike traditional service based industries, our “customers” are often airborne. They cannot simply wait in line or come back later. Additionally, as a monopoly our customers do not have the ability to go elsewhere if they are dissatisfied with the service.
Dissatisfaction in ATC is directly related to airline delays. Improving system performance is not an esoteric discussion for controllers, we know the limits and we know what it takes to work more airplanes. Staffing is key to meeting expectations. When we have insufficient staffing to meet the demand, we have two choices. Compromise safety or increase delay. Of course controllers will opt for the latter over the former every time. Compromising safety is never an acceptable alternative, however, not withstanding criminal acts, we have achieved such a high standard of safety that the users take it for granted. In fact, prior to September 11th, there have even been officials and editorials in the U.S. wondering if we are too cautious, basically asking the question “is the system is too safe?” I doubt if any of the pilots or controllers in the audience today have lost sleep wondering if the system is too safe.
Earlier this year, Secretary Mineta proposed that we allow pilots to fly closer to thunderstorms as a means to reduce delay. I would like to ask the pilots in the room, how close to the thunderstorms would you like to fly? However, this proposal illustrates the level of frustration surrounding ATC delays. We should be very concerned when people consider advocating reducing the standard of safety in order to reduce delays.
While it is intuitive for most controllers, there have been many others to make the nexus between air traffic controller staffing and delays. The Transportation Research Board published the findings of a congressionally mandated committee to study controller staffing in 1997. The committee found:
The primary factor affecting controller work is the demand created by air traffic, that is, the volume of air traffic in a sector and the resulting density (i.e. number of aircraft handled at one time). From a staffing perspective, the peaks in demand are as important or more important than the total volume. Adequate numbers of controllers must be available to cover the peaks in traffic caused by weather and daily, weekly, or seasonal variations.
It is clear that a well-staffed system can lead to optimal efficiency, but it is also necessary for maintaining safety. The report goes on to say:
Peak traffic periods increase the potential for conflicts among aircraft in a sector that must be resolved by the controller. The availability of additional personnel during these periods is important so that additional positions (i.e. handoff and coordinating controllers) can be staffed, allowing the radar controller more time to issue and observe control instructions and resolve potential conflicts. Additional personnel can also enable the opening of adjacent sectors to help handle the workload. If the additional personnel are not available, traffic flow is restricted or aircraft are held outside the affected area to ease the workload. Thus system efficiency is reduced to avert any adverse effects on safety.
The issue has been studied. The industry is concerned about the implications of staffing shortfalls. While it was once assumed that new technology would reduce the staffing requirements, we have since found that taking advantage of decision support tools and advanced equipment like CPDLC, requires more staffing not less. It seems that we are all in agreement that controller staffing must be a high priority, but somehow we have also ended up in a situation where we may realistically be facing a worldwide controller shortage. How can this be?
In the U.S., our staffing shortage can be tied to the 1981 PATCO strike. Twenty years later those controllers hired to rebuild the workforce are becoming eligible to retire. Simply put, when you replace 2/3rds of your workforce in a short period of time it is reasonable to assume that they will retire in a similarly short period of time. One can argue that the strike explains the problem and that the current U.S. condition was unavoidable. However, there is no excuse for being caught unaware. We all knew about the strike and its effect on the demographics of the workforce. Simple planning and continued hiring could have smoothed out the workforce demographics. Unfortunately, that did not occur.
I am regularly asked why this issue has gone un-addressed. Often the assumption is a shortage of applicants. In most industries, when we hear about a shortage it is because the labor pool is inadequate. The assumption is that the employer wants to meet the staffing need, but is unable to do so. In the U.S. the pool of applicants has always far exceeded the number of positions. Military controllers have difficulty getting hired, there are still nearly 4,000 former PATCO controllers trying to get rehired and there are 14 schools in the Collegiate Training Initiative program producing graduates eligible to be hired by the FAA every semester. In the decade following the strike, when the FAA was hiring at a frenzied pace, we had long waiting lists frequently taking a year for a new hire to get an academy assignment.
I understand many countries have problems recruiting. It may be useful to know tat while controllers have stressful work, work rotating shifts regardless of seniority, work holidays, nights and weekends, but in the States, they are also among the top 20% of wage earners in the country, are eligible for full retirement at 20 years of service and age 50 or 25 years and any age, and have the job security of being federal employees. At a time when the airline industry has announced 100,000 layoffs, that security is very comforting indeed. These factors may explain why we do not have a recruiting problem.
In the U.S., controller shortages are the result of an unwillingness or inability to hire. That unwillingness is solely budget driven. ATC is a service business. Personnel costs are the biggest part of our budgets, as it should be. The down side is that when budgets are constrained, it is difficult to reduce spending without reducing staff. As more service providers move toward commercialization, we exacerbate the risk of a staffing crisis. Too often we have seen management teams from private sector, lacking an understanding of the nature of the service, try and cut costs through personnel changes that simply did not work. With funding shortfalls, ATC cuts become inevitable.
The U.S. system remains fully within government. As such we can run surpluses during periods of strong economic growth and deficits to carry us through the slow periods. We are also funded by a ticket tax rather than a user fee. The tax declines with airfare, which allows the airlines to attract customers back through fare cuts. A fixed weight distance fee forces the airline to spread the across a smaller passenger base, increasing the per passenger cost and limiting the airlines’ ability to use fare cuts as a means of recovery. In order to reduce ATC costs in a fee-based system the airlines must cut flights. How you are funded directly relates to your ability to staff. A government system has access to trust fund surpluses and the general fund to make up for revenue shortfalls while the industry recovers.
Too often, the assumption is that ATC is comparable to an airline. An airline is a consumer service – providing transportation to its customers. This is not to say that safety is not a paramount concern, but the function, their business, is providing transportation. Unlike ATC, the pilots who deliver the service do not make up the bulk of an airline’s personnel needs. There is marketing, reservations, gate agents, mechanics, and a plethora of other support functions. For ATC the business is the safety function. We provide for the safe, orderly and expeditious flow of aircraft. The bulk of the personnel needs are air traffic controllers. So while an airline manger may be able to find significant savings in personnel costs by streamlining departments, adjusting schedules, and reorganization, it can be done without cutting pilot positions.
It is easy to see that fewer pilots limit the number of planes that can be flown. It is equally important to recognize that fewer controllers limit the number of sectors that can be staffed and consequently the number of aircraft that can transition a given area.
Alleviating controller staffing shortages is no simple task. Controller training is an on-the-job function. We can provide classroom instruction and laboratory simulation, but proficiency can only be achieved through operational training. Training is a staffing intensive activity, as it requires two controllers, the trainer and the trainee to work a single position. If a facility lacks adequate staffing to conduct training, the training process itself is slowed. Therefore, failure to address the problem in a proactive manner, make the problem itself, worse.
When we consider the resources needed for training, hiring for today’s need still leaves the system inadequately staffed and ill prepared for the future. A developmental controller, or trainee is not equivalent to a fully certified controller in terms of system performance. In order to learn a trainer must allow the trainee to run the sector. To put it bluntly, a trainee is slow. As a result, the sector will run more slowly and capacity is diminished. In order to mitigate the system effects of training, we should spread the training across the system.
Rather than wring our collective hands about the “crisis” in the industry – we should look at this temporary lull as an opportunity. While traffic in the U.S. is at near pre-Sept 11 levels, the outside pressure on ATC to increase capacity has lifted. We can, and should, use this time to ramp up and prepare for the pressure on the system that will inevitably return. If we fail to staff now for future demands we cannot spread training across the system and when we eventually hire to meet the demand we may well end up with a system headed for gridlock, staffed with trainees. In short, it is a recipe for disaster.
That fate is not yet etched in stone. But there is only one way to avoid fulfilling that prophecy. That is, quite simply and obviously, to hire more controllers. We already have the evidence to show that you must staff for traffic peaks rather than averages, that excessive training reduces system performance, and that increasing delay is not a palatable alternative. The solution is more controllers, sooner rather than later. To answer the question “how do we meet the controller staffing needs of the future?” I say simply, hire controllers today.
I thought that I would post some remarks at a European event from our Executive Vice President for NATCA...
TOP | Post | Reply | Reply/Quote | Email Reply | Delete | Edit
Previous | Next | Previous Topic | Next Topic | Entire Topic
Topic: Ruth Marlin remarks to GATCO staffing conf. (1 of 4), Read 164 times
Conf: General Messages
From: Doug Church [email protected]
Date: Friday, October 12, 2001 01:39 PM
Safe Orderly and Adequately Staffed?
Remarks of Ruth Marlin, Executive Vice President
National Air Traffic Controllers Association, AFL-CIO
Since the events of September 11th, I have had cause to modify my remarks. The industry is very different than it was a month ago. Delays that once plagued us daily are no longer charged to ATC, but are now inside the airports in security lines. Passengers are more accepting of the inconvenience. That will not last long. Soon we will be back on the front page and increasing capacity will be the priority once again. Controller staffing is will be a key ingredient to meeting that demand!
The morning of Tuesday September 11th was an ordinary air traffic morning, when we had to implement a plan that had never been tried; in fact it had never even been simulated. The airspace was shut down quickly and without incident – largely because we had a well-trained and seasoned workforce that could rely on their experience and confidence in their abilities to deal with what were essentially 5,000 simultaneous aircraft emergencies. Had this occurred five to seven years from now when, if we fail to change our current course, we will have a junior workforce that is short staffed. I wonder, would the outcome have been the same?
Ensuring adequate levels of Air Traffic Controller staffing is a continual concern for controllers around the world. Unlike a business that can use a variety of commercially acceptable techniques to redistribute demand, redistributing demand results in excessive delay in our industry. System delays are rarely attributed to excessive demand, but instead are viewed as a failure of the ATC service provider to meet the needs of the industry.
The side effects of delay, if it is viewed as poor system performance, can be significant for the service provider. Airline delays are front-page news and have sparked countless congressional hearing in the U.S. We have no shortage of attention when the systems do not meet public expectations. However, there is rarely any analysis to determine whether the expectations were realistic. As those of us inside the industry know, we are governed by physics; consumer and media expectations are not.
Determining appropriate levels of controller staffing is not an easy task. We must first recognize that ATC is not just like any other enterprise. Unlike traditional service based industries, our “customers” are often airborne. They cannot simply wait in line or come back later. Additionally, as a monopoly our customers do not have the ability to go elsewhere if they are dissatisfied with the service.
Dissatisfaction in ATC is directly related to airline delays. Improving system performance is not an esoteric discussion for controllers, we know the limits and we know what it takes to work more airplanes. Staffing is key to meeting expectations. When we have insufficient staffing to meet the demand, we have two choices. Compromise safety or increase delay. Of course controllers will opt for the latter over the former every time. Compromising safety is never an acceptable alternative, however, not withstanding criminal acts, we have achieved such a high standard of safety that the users take it for granted. In fact, prior to September 11th, there have even been officials and editorials in the U.S. wondering if we are too cautious, basically asking the question “is the system is too safe?” I doubt if any of the pilots or controllers in the audience today have lost sleep wondering if the system is too safe.
Earlier this year, Secretary Mineta proposed that we allow pilots to fly closer to thunderstorms as a means to reduce delay. I would like to ask the pilots in the room, how close to the thunderstorms would you like to fly? However, this proposal illustrates the level of frustration surrounding ATC delays. We should be very concerned when people consider advocating reducing the standard of safety in order to reduce delays.
While it is intuitive for most controllers, there have been many others to make the nexus between air traffic controller staffing and delays. The Transportation Research Board published the findings of a congressionally mandated committee to study controller staffing in 1997. The committee found:
The primary factor affecting controller work is the demand created by air traffic, that is, the volume of air traffic in a sector and the resulting density (i.e. number of aircraft handled at one time). From a staffing perspective, the peaks in demand are as important or more important than the total volume. Adequate numbers of controllers must be available to cover the peaks in traffic caused by weather and daily, weekly, or seasonal variations.
It is clear that a well-staffed system can lead to optimal efficiency, but it is also necessary for maintaining safety. The report goes on to say:
Peak traffic periods increase the potential for conflicts among aircraft in a sector that must be resolved by the controller. The availability of additional personnel during these periods is important so that additional positions (i.e. handoff and coordinating controllers) can be staffed, allowing the radar controller more time to issue and observe control instructions and resolve potential conflicts. Additional personnel can also enable the opening of adjacent sectors to help handle the workload. If the additional personnel are not available, traffic flow is restricted or aircraft are held outside the affected area to ease the workload. Thus system efficiency is reduced to avert any adverse effects on safety.
The issue has been studied. The industry is concerned about the implications of staffing shortfalls. While it was once assumed that new technology would reduce the staffing requirements, we have since found that taking advantage of decision support tools and advanced equipment like CPDLC, requires more staffing not less. It seems that we are all in agreement that controller staffing must be a high priority, but somehow we have also ended up in a situation where we may realistically be facing a worldwide controller shortage. How can this be?
In the U.S., our staffing shortage can be tied to the 1981 PATCO strike. Twenty years later those controllers hired to rebuild the workforce are becoming eligible to retire. Simply put, when you replace 2/3rds of your workforce in a short period of time it is reasonable to assume that they will retire in a similarly short period of time. One can argue that the strike explains the problem and that the current U.S. condition was unavoidable. However, there is no excuse for being caught unaware. We all knew about the strike and its effect on the demographics of the workforce. Simple planning and continued hiring could have smoothed out the workforce demographics. Unfortunately, that did not occur.
I am regularly asked why this issue has gone un-addressed. Often the assumption is a shortage of applicants. In most industries, when we hear about a shortage it is because the labor pool is inadequate. The assumption is that the employer wants to meet the staffing need, but is unable to do so. In the U.S. the pool of applicants has always far exceeded the number of positions. Military controllers have difficulty getting hired, there are still nearly 4,000 former PATCO controllers trying to get rehired and there are 14 schools in the Collegiate Training Initiative program producing graduates eligible to be hired by the FAA every semester. In the decade following the strike, when the FAA was hiring at a frenzied pace, we had long waiting lists frequently taking a year for a new hire to get an academy assignment.
I understand many countries have problems recruiting. It may be useful to know tat while controllers have stressful work, work rotating shifts regardless of seniority, work holidays, nights and weekends, but in the States, they are also among the top 20% of wage earners in the country, are eligible for full retirement at 20 years of service and age 50 or 25 years and any age, and have the job security of being federal employees. At a time when the airline industry has announced 100,000 layoffs, that security is very comforting indeed. These factors may explain why we do not have a recruiting problem.
In the U.S., controller shortages are the result of an unwillingness or inability to hire. That unwillingness is solely budget driven. ATC is a service business. Personnel costs are the biggest part of our budgets, as it should be. The down side is that when budgets are constrained, it is difficult to reduce spending without reducing staff. As more service providers move toward commercialization, we exacerbate the risk of a staffing crisis. Too often we have seen management teams from private sector, lacking an understanding of the nature of the service, try and cut costs through personnel changes that simply did not work. With funding shortfalls, ATC cuts become inevitable.
The U.S. system remains fully within government. As such we can run surpluses during periods of strong economic growth and deficits to carry us through the slow periods. We are also funded by a ticket tax rather than a user fee. The tax declines with airfare, which allows the airlines to attract customers back through fare cuts. A fixed weight distance fee forces the airline to spread the across a smaller passenger base, increasing the per passenger cost and limiting the airlines’ ability to use fare cuts as a means of recovery. In order to reduce ATC costs in a fee-based system the airlines must cut flights. How you are funded directly relates to your ability to staff. A government system has access to trust fund surpluses and the general fund to make up for revenue shortfalls while the industry recovers.
Too often, the assumption is that ATC is comparable to an airline. An airline is a consumer service – providing transportation to its customers. This is not to say that safety is not a paramount concern, but the function, their business, is providing transportation. Unlike ATC, the pilots who deliver the service do not make up the bulk of an airline’s personnel needs. There is marketing, reservations, gate agents, mechanics, and a plethora of other support functions. For ATC the business is the safety function. We provide for the safe, orderly and expeditious flow of aircraft. The bulk of the personnel needs are air traffic controllers. So while an airline manger may be able to find significant savings in personnel costs by streamlining departments, adjusting schedules, and reorganization, it can be done without cutting pilot positions.
It is easy to see that fewer pilots limit the number of planes that can be flown. It is equally important to recognize that fewer controllers limit the number of sectors that can be staffed and consequently the number of aircraft that can transition a given area.
Alleviating controller staffing shortages is no simple task. Controller training is an on-the-job function. We can provide classroom instruction and laboratory simulation, but proficiency can only be achieved through operational training. Training is a staffing intensive activity, as it requires two controllers, the trainer and the trainee to work a single position. If a facility lacks adequate staffing to conduct training, the training process itself is slowed. Therefore, failure to address the problem in a proactive manner, make the problem itself, worse.
When we consider the resources needed for training, hiring for today’s need still leaves the system inadequately staffed and ill prepared for the future. A developmental controller, or trainee is not equivalent to a fully certified controller in terms of system performance. In order to learn a trainer must allow the trainee to run the sector. To put it bluntly, a trainee is slow. As a result, the sector will run more slowly and capacity is diminished. In order to mitigate the system effects of training, we should spread the training across the system.
Rather than wring our collective hands about the “crisis” in the industry – we should look at this temporary lull as an opportunity. While traffic in the U.S. is at near pre-Sept 11 levels, the outside pressure on ATC to increase capacity has lifted. We can, and should, use this time to ramp up and prepare for the pressure on the system that will inevitably return. If we fail to staff now for future demands we cannot spread training across the system and when we eventually hire to meet the demand we may well end up with a system headed for gridlock, staffed with trainees. In short, it is a recipe for disaster.
That fate is not yet etched in stone. But there is only one way to avoid fulfilling that prophecy. That is, quite simply and obviously, to hire more controllers. We already have the evidence to show that you must staff for traffic peaks rather than averages, that excessive training reduces system performance, and that increasing delay is not a palatable alternative. The solution is more controllers, sooner rather than later. To answer the question “how do we meet the controller staffing needs of the future?” I say simply, hire controllers today.