Airline pilots flying over Ohio en route to New York, Los Angeles and beyond are accustomed to listening to the background chatter of air traffic controllers ensuring their safety as they cross the American heartlands. But in the early hours of Sunday morning they were surprised to hear dialogue of a different kind: the actors Samuel L Jackson and Ed Harris berating each other in the movie Cleaner.
For a period of more than three minutes, pilots in the Ohio region flying over 17 000 feet were only able to hear the soundtrack of the thriller. Unable to communicate with the regional radar centre that controlled their flight, they had to listen in to Jackson playing a former police officer working as a crime-scene cleaner.
On the ground, the air traffic controller on duty on the night shift at Oberlin, Ohio, had decided to take a break from the stresses of the job and catch a movie. Inadvertently, whoever it was had set the controller’s microphone to the transmit position, blocking incoming calls and broadcasting the film instead. The mistake was only rectified when an airforce pilot managed to get through to the controller on their dedicated military channel.
The incident near Cleveland was just the latest in a spate of embarrassments for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that has cost the head of its air traffic control division his job and prompted a public relations crisis across the service that guards the safety of some of the busiest skies in the world. Over the past two months there have been at least six incidents in which air traffic controllers have fallen asleep on the job, with a total of eight controllers and their managers suspended as a result.
In one incident, the controller went as far as to make a bed for himself. In another, a plane carrying a sick patient was unable to rouse the duty controller who was asleep for more than a quarter of an hour. The flurry of incidents has provoked an equivalent flurry of public statements from the president down. Barack Obama said that such cases were unacceptable, adding that “when you’re responsible for the lives and safety of people up in the air, you better do your job”.
Emergency measures
The head of the US air traffic control service, Hank Krakowski, resigned last week. His boss, the overall chief of the FAA, Randy Babbitt, introduced a series of emergency measures including an extra hour of rest between shifts — bringing it up from eight to nine hours — and the appointment of a second controller in the 27 airports where only one had previously been on duty for overnight shifts.
Babbit has also ordered a top-down inquiry into the problem of controllers falling asleep on the job. The investigation will look at both staffing levels and the hours that controllers are working.
The nation’s 15 700 air controllers guide some 60-million flights to their destinations annually, ensuring the safety of about one billion passengers a year. Their overall record is impressive — North America had the world’s best safety record last year with 0,1 jets lost per million flights, compared to the global average of 0,6. But Thomas Anthony, director of the aviation safety and security programme at the University of Southern California and a former controller himself, said that shift patterns could still lead to extreme weariness and a compulsion to sleep on the job.
Many controllers were subjected to the “rattler shift” where they cram five days’ work into four physical days: “I know from my own experience that by the end of that rattler shift you are essentially in the state of a zombie. The accumulated fatigue is like being drunk.”
Anthony added that a full investigation of the entire system, along the lines of that being proposed by the FAA, was needed. “When serious incidents like this happen in aviation it is never down to a single cause, there are always several contributing factors.”
Nodding off
February 19: An air traffic Controller slept for five hours at Knoxville airport, in Tennessee, during which time seven planes landed. The controller was said to have made himself a bed out of cushions and a blanket. He was woken up by a colleague, but then reportedly went back to sleep.
March 23: The only controller on duty overnight at the Reagan National airport, Washington in Washington fell asleep, as two jets came in to land. One of the planes was forced to circle the airport until they could make contact.
March 29: Two Texan controllers suspended for having gone silent in the early morning at the airport in Lubbock, Texas. A controller at Fort Worth airport in the same state tried to make contact with them repeatedly to pass on control of a plane coming in to land.
April 11: Air traffic controller suspended for sleeping on duty at the Boeing Field/King County International Airport in Seattle. He was already facing disciplinary action for having nodded off twice on the job on the evening of January 6.
April 13: Medical flight carrying a seriously sick patient to hospital was forced to land unassisted at after they could not reach anyone in the control tower of Reno-Tahoe airport in Nevada. The controller on duty in the tower was found to have been asleep over a 16 minute period at about 2am.
April 16: Controller fell asleep in the early morning. The controller was one of 12 on duty during an over-night shift at the Miami air route control centre in Florida, that controls planes at high altitude heading to the Caribbean and Latin America.
April 17: Air traffic controller in a centre in Oberlin, Ohio is caught out watching a film when the soundtrack was broadcast to all pilots in the area. Controller and a manager suspended. – guardian.co.uk