How many is not enough?
Controllers adjust to the agency’s new increased staffing requirement for midnight shifts
Traditionally, with the wee hours of the morning comes a reduction in traffic, which allows some facilities with overall below-average traffic counts to shut down during the midnight shift. But with increasing traffic over the years, some facilities, such as Roanoke Tower, began running “one-person mids:” a midnight tower shift covered by one controller.
“For years after the strike, Roanoke Tower was closed for the mids,” said Kurt Erath, NATCA’s representative at the facility. “But one-person mid operations resumed after we acquired more airspace, and after several fatal accidents occurred. The mountainous terrain was too difficult for some pilots to navigate successfully in poor weather conditions.” Still, as traffic complexity and counts continue rising while staffing levels continue falling, the practice of running one-person mids is becoming increasingly problematic.
NATCA’s position on the issue has always been safety first. “Controllers are very good at multitasking, but they simply can’t be standing in two places at the same time,” said NATCA President John Carr. “There’s a lot of teamwork involved in this job, and to ask someone to run it solo is risky, no matter how good a controller he or she is.”
David Nicolich, a controller at Huntington Air Traffic Control Tower (HTS) in Ceredo, W.Va., agrees. “It’s not just a safety issue with working combined positions, but it’s also a question of personal safety,” he said. “With one-person mids, a guy has a stroke, or falls down the steps… I guess they’ll be found about six hours later when the day crew comes in.”
In an attempt to find a better solution, the FAA recently instated a new two-person requirement for mids. While this solution is arguably a safer plan, the implementation of such a requirement in the face of a staffing shortage has some controllers frustrated by the increased workload, and still no sign of a remedy for the staffing crisis. “We barely have enough staff for the day shifts. Now we have the new requirement to put additional personnel on duty for mids, but we’re not getting additional staff.” said Nicolich. “As usual, we’re being told to ‘do more with less.’”
Controller Stan Wright of Harrisburg Air Traffic Control Tower in Middletown, Penn., has noticed the same problem at their facility. “The region has called our staffing level ‘unsustainable’ through attrition, so we’ll never get back to being fully staffed,” he said. “Sure, it’s nice to have two people on the mids, but we lose one from the already short day shift. Morale here is way down, and I don’t see it getting better anytime soon.”
Some facilities, including Huntington Tower, have been able to cover at least the transition to two-person mids with approved overtime. But other facilities, such as Fairbanks Tower and TRACON and Colorado Springs Tower, are using overtime whenever it is needed to ensure they are meeting the new requirements. Other facilities have such significant staffing shortages that meeting the two-person mids requirement is difficult even with approved overtime, as is the case at Harrisburg Tower.
“It will be hard to get people for overtime,” Wright said. “Not because they won’t schedule it, but because you can’t get blood from a stone. There will be no one available to work because they worked the last six days. Then what happens? Same as always: we work with less people.”
On the whole, this newest addition to the growing list of complexities the agency is handing to its workforce is hurting morale among controllers. “If they’re looking to thin the herd,” says Nicholich, “they’re moving in the right direction.”
