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Every jetliner is also equipped with a device that stridently warns a pilot who is unknowingly flying toward a mountainside, a tower or the ground. The instrument flashes a red light, sounds a whooping alarm and plays a recording that orders, "Pull up! Pull up!" The system seems to be working well. In 1976, the first year it was universally used, no U.S. airliner rammed into an obstruction. During the previous ten years, there had been an average of six such crashes annually.
As the jet proceeds across the U.S., a constant danger is that controller and pilot will somehow misunderstand each other. This apparently happened on Dec. 1, 1974, when TWA Flight 514 was approaching Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, D.C. Coming in too low, the plane crashed into a mountain while the helpless controller watched the blip disappear from his radarscope. Since that disaster, controllers, while giving the final clearance, read out specific altitude changes to pilots approaching all airports.
The fear of causing such a crash or a collision —known with studied casualness as creating an "aluminum shower"—puts the controllers under tremendous strain from the time they clear a jet for takeoff until they guide it to a landing (see diagram). FAA psychological tests have shown that controllers undergo more stress than combat pilots. At Chicago's O'Hare Airport, the world's busiest, they are allowed to work for only 90 minutes at a stretch during peak hours, landing a plane every two minutes while simultaneously keeping track of half a dozen more.
Roughly one-third of O'Hare's controllers suffer from peptic ulcers, and another third have gastric or emotional problems of one kind or another. While they work, the controllers gulp down antacid tablets from jars kept within easy reach. The Chicago branch of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization has sued the FAA, claiming that the O'Hare unit is understaffed, backup equipment is lacking, and training programs are ineffective.
What are the controllers' thoughts when tension builds? Says Charles Cacace, 33, a controller at New York City's J.F.K. Airport: "You don't look at an airplane as if it were carrying 300 people. It would affect the way you do your job. Makes you nervous.
You look at it as though it were a piece of tin needing to be put someplace, but in the back of your mind you always hope you don't get involved in some mess."
The grim reality of flying today is that the margins of error are slim indeed and that any mistake can create a holocaust. The skies are filled with jumbo jets carrying hundreds of passengers. Closing speeds can reach 1,000 m.p.h. or more, making it difficult for humans to react quickly enough in the event of error. The congestion at major airports is so great at peak hours —late Friday afternoon is especially bad—that air controllers have to order incoming jets to stack up at altitude intervals of 1,000 ft. The landing is a carefully choreographed minuet of the skies as the plane on the bottom of the stack is cleared to come in and all the others moved down a level. During peak hours at O'Hare, jets use not only two parallel runways, but one that cuts across the other two—putting added pressures on the harassed air controller sweating over his radarscope.