FAA Accepts Blame for Air Traffic Errors

April 24, 2008— -- Anne Whiteman has had some particularly bad days on the job helping to man Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport's air traffic control system.

Whiteman said she has seen air traffic controllers playing a game of chicken with airplanes. She even recalled one day when the system had a dozen or so operational errors in an hour's time frame -- so many that pilots calling to complain were being put on hold.

She said two colleagues once played a trick on her by putting two planes on a collision course. Distracted by the ruse, one of the men forgot to monitor his aircraft and the plane flew past the airport.

"I thought two aircraft were going to collide, and I didn't have anyone in my corner, and I was scared," Whiteman recalled Thursday. "I was scared not just for me but for everyone else."

Something happened every shift, she said, "where somebody would do something outside the boundaries of normalcy."

Today, years after Whiteman first complained that Federal Aviation Administration managers were covering up controller mistakes, the FAA accepted blame and announced it is seriously stepping up its efforts to clean up the system. The announcement comes the same day that a report investigating Whiteman's allegations in Dallas makes its way to the Office of Special Counsel, an office that enforces laws protecting government whistle-blowers.

The inspector general's report finds that errors in Dallas were intentionally misclassified by managers. It happened 62 times between November 2005 and July 2007. When controllers would make "operational errors," managers would record them as "pilot errors" instead. Operational errors are a key way for the FAA to gauge safety, and if they are hidden or downplayed, the agency gets an inaccurate picture of what's really going on to direct traffic in the skies.

The Office of Special Counsel will have the whistle-blower look at the inspector general's report and comment on it before making the report public.