Air traffic controllers pitch professional conduct measures

WASHINGTON - The nation's air traffic controllers have begun taking steps to improve professional conduct, a union official said Wednesday.

Garth Koleszar, a leader with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association and an air traffic controller in Los Angeles, released details of a professional-conduct initiative before the National Transportation Safety Board.

The board concludes three days of hearings here on professionalism in aviation today with a focus on communications between controllers and pilots.

Koleszar said a joint union-Federal Aviation Authority working group has been meeting over the past two months to draft an agreement formalizing a set of standards for the nation's more than 26,000 air traffic controllers.

A half dozen yet-to-be-identified air traffic control facilities will be test sites for the program, which will feature FAA managers and union members.

Provisions for "professional standards groups" were established as part of a new labor agreement hammered out with the FAA in August, Koleszar said, adding the "NATCA's been pushing for this for seven years."

"We're incredibly professional," Koleszar said Wednesday after fielding questions from board members. "I'm proud of everybody I work with."

NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman said after yesterday's hearing that if change happens "organically," regulators might not have to act.

"We can improve safety just by people learning," she said.

Two recent high-profile cases involving NATCA members from Long Island have raised questions about how air traffic controllers perform their duties.

The NTSB cited one of the cases as a factor in its decision to hold this week's hearings: the midair collision in August between a helicopter carrying Italian tourists and a single-engine plane that took off from Newark.

The air traffic controller that handled the small plane, Carl Turner of Lake Grove, was engaged in a personal phone call for two minutes during which he transmitted an incorrect call sign to the pilot of the plane shortly before it crashed, killing nine people.

More recently, in February, a controller at Kennedy Airport's control tower let his children issue instructions to pilots repeatedly over air traffic control frequencies in what FAA administrator Randy Babbitt called a "lapse in judgment . . . and common-sense professional conduct."

Sources identified the controller as Glenn Duffy of Stony Brook.