(10 of 10)
Both Secretary Lewis and the FAA's Helms argue that the striking controllers can be safely replaced, though Lewis concedes that air traffic would have to be reduced from former levels for as long as 21 months. Lewis claims that last week's experience shows that, contrary to the controllers' decade-old refrain, the 17,500-controller system is overstaffed, perhaps by as many as 3,000 workers. Another 3,000 supervisors as well as 2,000 nonstrikers were working. Lewis would also close as many as 60 small airport towers, freeing 1,000 controllers for other duty. These closings began last week. Thus, in the end, 7,500 new controllers would have to be hired and trained.
All that would take time, though Lewis claimed that some 20,000 people have inquired about becoming controllers since the strike began. The FAA's Oklahoma City training school was considering a triple-shift, six-day weekly schedule in which it could produce more than 5,500 graduates in a year, even allowing for the normal failure rate of 20%.
Can the U.S. air-control system undergo nearly a complete change of staff and still function safely? The sheer magnitude of the undertaking would suggest not, at least for a while. Yet Jerome Lederer, founder of the private Flight Safety Foundation and one of the nation's most respected aerospace safety experts, is confident that it can. He warns, however, that all the operators of aircraft, from corporate jets to jumbo airliners and giant cargo planes, must "not be permitted to overload the system." The FAA vows to keep traffic limited to the ability of the substitute, newly developing staff to handle it.
That will mean grave inconveniences in a jet-dependent age, but, carefully done, probably no serious diminutions in the standards that have made America's air-traffic control system the best in the world.
For a public that may need constant reassurance, there will be an independent, ongoing reliable source; the airline pilots themselves. The moment the strike began, their own union, ALPA, started monitoring every flight's safety conditions.
Says ALPA President John J. O'Donnell:
"So long as airline pilots continue to fly their appointed routes, the public can be assured it is safe."
—By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Gary Lee/Washington and Peter Stoler/New York, with other U.S. bureaus
*Calvin Coolidge, whose picture decorates the Reagan Cabinet room, earned a national reputation as Massachusetts Governor in 1919 for breaking a Boston police strike. But as President, Coolidge declined to take on striking coal miners in 1927.
*Not all labor protests require a high decibel count. Last week members of West Germany's Bavarian State Opera struck in their own fashion: In Act III of Die Meistersinger, to the astonishment of the audience, they simply walked through their parts, mouthing their lyrics without making a sound.