“There’s nobody in the tower,” two pilots attempting to land early Wednesday morning at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport were told. The lone air traffic controller assigned to the airport’s graveyard shift was incommunicado for a half-hour, possibly asleep, as the two airliners vainly sought clearance to land. “It is not acceptable to have just one controller in the tower managing air traffic in this critical airspace,” an embarrassed Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood later told Bloomberg News. He hastily ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to assign at least two people to air traffic towers at all times. But the fact is, this is the second time in two years that the tower at Reagan was left unmanned. And it certainly wasn’t the first time that FAA was made aware of the danger. On Aug. 27, 2006, Comair Flight 5191 crashed on takeoff in Lexington, Ky., killing all 47 passengers and two crew members. A subsequent investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found that the solo air traffic controller, who was “most likely fatigued,” was partially responsible for the crash because, in violation of FAA policy, he was talking on the phone performing “lower priority administrative tasks” instead of visually monitoring the takeoff.
Three days after the fatal crash, FAA announced that effective immediately, Lexington and airports in Duluth, Minn. and Savannah, Ga. would be staffed with two controllers around the clock — one to monitor air traffic on radar and the other to communicate with taxiing aircraft. But the safety directive was not uniformly enforced. “The FAA has to stop trying to save money with personnel in the tower,” former FAA inspector Rich Wyeroski tells The Examiner. “They’re playing Russian roulette with the lives of the flying public.” A member of the FAA Whistleblower Alliance, Wyeroski was fired after reporting that a Delta 737 and a small Cessna came within 50 feet of colliding at Long Island’s MacArthur Airport. He estimates that as many as half of the 250 active towers in the United States are understaffed at night to save money.
The snoozing air traffic controller at Reagan has been suspended, FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt said in a statement. But with errors last year by FAA’s air traffic controllers up 81 percent since 2009, and whistleblowers like Wyeroski still being hounded out of the agency for warning about safety violations, Babbitt is the one who needs to wake up.
