Bureaucrats don’t understand airplane safety

Esmael E. Candelaria, Henderson

Saturday, April 16, 2011 | 2:03 a.m.

Stories about the “sleeping sickness contagions” in some airport towers brought back memories of when bureaucrats and politicos reacted the same way when I was an air traffic controller for 30 years: A problem surfaces in stories in the media and those folks come up with pat answers.

Sadly, the solutions to those problems may have been suggested by active controllers but conveniently ignored by the Federal Aviation Administration and Transportation Department bureaucrats. After all, the bureaucrats know best, right?

And, of course, Sen. Harry Reid’s solution? Throw more money at it. He turns it into a political football and trashes the folks who have suggested taking a look at the FAA budget.

A decrease in the FAA budget does not necessarily mean jeopardizing air safety. There is probably a lot of fat in other divisions of the FAA.

During my 30 years we would plead and beg for help with problems. Nothing was done until the PATCO strike in 1981. We controllers who obeyed the law and didn’t strike received all kinds of help that we had been begging for.

I don’t know what suggestions the folks at those towers kept submitting, but assigning a second controller might not solve the problem. Has anyone ever experienced that, when in a quiet environment and the other person dozes off, you have a tendency to get bored and sleepy, too?

Like a friend suggested, it might be more effective and cheaper to hire a “baby sitter,” like a retired controller, to keep the sleepy heads awake — at minimum wage rather than an expensive full-fledged current controller.