Mistakes are increasing among air traffic controllers at O’Hare International Airport, prompting a visit Wednesday by federal investigators to examine staffing levels and other issues that affect safety.
New data from the Federal Aviation Administration reveal an increase in errors occurring while veteran controllers are training newly hired controllers directing planes that are landing, taking off or taxiing at O’Hare. Training has been accelerated to keep pace with future increases in flights expected at O’Hare after new runways are built.
There were 17 errors in the most recent one-year period, up from six errors the year before, the data showed.
The controller errors mainly involve failing to keep proper distance between airplanes, both horizontally for planes traveling in line and vertically for aircraft stacked on top of each other. Two of the 12 reported controller errors at O’Hare were categorized as serious, but five additional errors took place during on-the-job training of new controllers, FAA records show.
The most serious incident, which did not take place during training, occurred when the wake from an airplane caused strong turbulence for another plane, violating a rule for that specific situation to keep the planes at least 1,000 feet apart vertically from each other, officials said. No injuries to passengers or crews resulted, the officials added.
Investigators from the inspector general’s office at the U.S. Department of Transportation are scheduled to arrive at O’Hare on Wednesday
Many of O’Hare’s longtime controllers spend all their time in the tower training new controllers, FAA and union officials said. The controllers who are instructing are still 100 percent responsible for anything that goes wrong. But because they are not directly working the airplanes themselves, there is concern that the controllers’ proficiency is declining.
“O’Hare tower is adding employees and doing a lot more training as part of the ramp-up to open the next air traffic tower,” FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said. “Training is necessary, but the tower is implementing programs to try and reduce training fatigue.”
Controllers said being accountable for trainees’ actions adds to the stress of an already high-pressure job.
“When you are plugged in with trainees, you are trying to give the guys the latitude to make their mistakes and then to correct the mistakes themselves,” said a veteran O’Hare controller, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk by the FAA or his union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.
“But this can lead to issues in which the instructor lets the trainees go too far. Then the (instructors) themselves sometimes cannot recover because their skills are diminishing due to the vast amount of training they are conducting,” he said.
Another fear among controllers-turned-full-time instructors is that they might commit errors when they shift back from teaching to working heavy traffic loads during busy periods at O’Hare.
The FAA is intensifying efforts to train and certify new controllers to replace veteran controllers who are retiring, as well as to prepare for flight increases from Chicago’s project to boost O’Hare’s capacity. Additional controllers are already needed to staff a second air traffic tower that opened at O’Hare in 2008 and to work inside a third tower that will be needed when a new runway to be built on the south airfield opens, officials said.
O’Hare tower is staffed with 52 fully certified air traffic controllers, 15 controllers in training with some experience and four new hires classified as “developmentals,” according to the FAA. Six more controllers in training are scheduled to arrive this year. Two O’Hare controllers retired last year, and more retirements are expected this year, the FAA said.
The total of 12 operational errors in 2010 was up from only five errors in fiscal 2009, the FAA said. The five additional errors that occurred during controller training in 2010 compare with only one error during training in 2009 and none in 2008, according to the FAA.
Several recent changes have been made to the training procedures at O’Hare to prevent a spree of errors, officials said. It started with hiring a higher caliber of trainees.
Also, to stop the skill level of veteran controllers from degrading because of extended periods of teaching new controllers, O’Hare tower management implemented a four-day moratorium on training in January to let the fully certified controllers concentrate on their work. The breaks from training will be repeated every three months, officials said.
The increase in controller errors at O’Hare reflects a national trend of rising errors. The FAA reported almost 1,900 air traffic control errors in the U.S. in the last fiscal year, up from about 1,000 errors in 2007.
But FAA officials said they expected the spike in mistakes, which they attributed at least partly to changes in error-reporting requirements and a more vigilant safety culture. The new FAA management style reduces the emphasis on placing blame and meting out punishment and concentrates instead on finding out why errors occur and what can be done to prevent them and reduce risks. A system has been set up to encourage controllers to voluntarily self-report errors so potentially dangerous scenarios can get attention before they become trends that could lead to fatal midair collisions and runway accidents, officials said.
“Error reporting is definitely up by hundreds of percent,” said Bryan Zilonis, regional vice president in the Great Lakes region for the controllers union. “Because O’Hare gets so busy, it is easy for a controller to commit an error and say nothing. But now the controllers are more comfortable reporting their errors.”
Errors also rose last year at an FAA radar facility in Elgin that handles aircraft approaching and departing O’Hare, Midway Airport and smaller satellite airports in the Chicago region. The errors at the Chicago Terminal Radar Approach Control, or TRACON, totaled 62 last year, up from 53 in 2009, FAA data showed. Operational errors during training fell to 14 at TRACON last year, from 19 in 2009.
Two controller errors were reported at Midway last year, the same as in 2009 and 2008, FAA records show. One additional error, involving training of a new controller, was reported at Midway last year, compared with none in 2009 and 2008.
