Suggestions

The FAA maintains a website that is supposed to be for soliciting suggestions for improvement from employees.  It may exist purely as a psychological measure.  If someone is in desperate need of virtue signaling, it can provide relief.  It is a joke. Nobody ever looks at the suggestions.

I decided to try it anyway.  I had been engineering and installing a new LAN for the Denver TRACON with a group of people, some of whom were the technicians doing the grunt work.  These were good and reliable people.  They had to work nights to reduce the impact of some incident causing unscheduled disruption of service.  We did a lot of installation work at lowest traffic periods.  I was on day shift.  One of them came to me and asked advice.  He was concerned because he had been witnessing controllers falling asleep at night.  I fully agreed that it was unacceptable, but was unsure what to do.  I had seen it a number of times and it was no secret.  He wanted to know that I would back him up if he made a formal complaint.  I told him that I would and he went ahead.  

This resulted in a big finger-wagging controversy that went national and solved nothing.

This problem is unavoidable.  Try sitting in front of a screen with almost no traffic on it for hours on end, trying to maintain your attention when maybe you were running low on sleep, in the middle of the night when you are the only one in a dark room, night after night.  Sometimes, they will watch videos, which is against the rules, but it does keep them awake.  The boredom can be excruciating.  

Controllers can be obnoxious, but I have a lot of sympathy for them.  They may be pampered, but they bear a heavy responsibility and they are selected for their abilities.  They do care a lot.  As an AT manager told me, they know what might happen if they are even tangentially implicated in an incident.  If it involves loss of life, the scrutiny will be intense.  I knew one guy who had been a controller who changed jobs to being a Proficiency Development Specialist (a job category which was absorbed when Human Resources became the moniker, shifting the idea from the employee to be served into the person as a thing to be used).  He told me of a time when he was controlling a military twin rotor helicopter that lost one rotor.  Fortunately, the pilots were able to get it to a runway, but it landed badly, spilling the airmen all over, but none were seriously hurt.  That was enough to cause him to get out of air traffic control.  Some people do not have the constitution for it. I felt similar stress often when I was working because one wrong move could shut down a TRACON (Terminal RADAR Approach Control) facility. Electrical equipment was potentially dangerous.  Climbing towers and working alone at remote facilities was risky.  

It was my job to make the controllers' job as painless, safe and easy as possible.  I took that to heart and I think they sensed it. 

I had an idea.  The manufacturer of the headsets they use is Plantronics.  I suggested that we propose to Plantronics that some accelerometers be built into their headsets and programmed in a way that would detect when a controller was nodding out, the head movements would be analyzed to decide if he was losing focus on his job.  A prolonged head tilt far forward or far to one side is an obvious problem indication.  Then the algorithm would put a shrill tweet in his ear to wake him up.  My guess was that Plantronics would be glad to build it at no cost to the government, anticipating a new product market, but it never got that far.  My suggestion was mostly ignored.  

Then the AT union, NATCA, objected.  I thought they would like it because I would like it if I was doing their job.  It would be akin to those grooves cut into the asphalt at the edges of a highway lane to create a rude sound if the driver strays too far.  The union representative was afraid that management would use the data generated by the headset to penalize the controller.  I saw their point.

This might seem like a goofy idea, but I thought it worth considering.  Guardrails on highways probably seemed like a waste of money to some people, but the thing about safety engineering is that if a safety product leads to something that eventually contributes to preventing an incident, it was probably worth the money because the consequences of an incident can be mass casualties.  

So, rather than experimenting with the implementation of an equipment change that might reduce the risks associated with controllers falling asleep, we got stuck with no remedy because controllers were reasonably afraid that management would gain more control over their behavior, and abuse it.  The obvious solution was to design the headset so that there was no way for the headset to tattle-tale unless the problem was so severe that the controller was in serious trouble (narcolepsy), but the tension between management and union is cut throat.  Especially in Miami.

Safety can be sacrificed to play political games.  I saw this again and again.  It is rationalized that there is so much redundancy built into the system that a failure is really just a fire drill to make sure everything works as planned, so the political hucksters playing chicken are really providing a service.  We should be grateful that they are increasing the chances of a mishap, in their minds.  

In my youth, I could not imagine social circumstances under which people would be tied to a pole and burned alive.  How could a society become so cruel?  Maybe this was how.  In no way am I trying to justify horrendous excesses in punishing people.  I am saying that such excesses may occur because there is no penalty for wilful abuses for so long that those abuses become standard practice (due to political advantage), and one way to flush out such practices is to attach a penalty like keelhauling or burning alive.