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"During a thunderstorm, the controllers' voices, while crisp and professional, take on a raw edge. Their instructions to pilots are shot out in staccato bursts with no pauses. As tension mounts, profanity flows like water—though the pilots do not hear it. They understate their shared fears. 'Delta, is your heart beating as fast as mine?' a controller will ask with his mike shut off. 'C'mon, you turkey,' another will say about a slow-responding aircraft. 'Who's got Eastern?' one controller will shout. 'Let's get him the hell out of there.' "Last week the swaggering kids were gone. In their place were gray-haired men wearing ties. There was a staff of 15 rather than the usual 24—and all but one was a supervisor. The atmosphere was more somber than usual. The pace was slower, with long pauses between spoken words. But even the supervisors could not resist breaking into joke-cracking tower talk. Referring to a pregnant female colleague handling departure control, one temporary quipped: 'I've told her we're keeping her till her pains are six minutes apart.' "
Basically, however, the controller's job is a lonely, stressful ordeal. He stares at his scope and gives instructions to pilots, who, as ultimate commanders of their own aircraft, can ignore the advice. But responsibility for the lives of all those airborne s.o.b.s (souls on board, in controller lingo) weighs heavily. They see that constant burden as no less than that of the pilots aloft. Though the jobs are not all that comparable, many of the young controllers resent the higher pay (reaching $115,000) and greater prestige of the airline skippers. "You know how much pilots make," said Striker Matt Blum, 26, as he picketed at O'Hare. "They're flying an airplane with 150 on board, and they're using automatic pilot. We're sitting at a scope working ten airplanes at once, with 150 people on each plane. We have more responsibility, and we spend more time working." So why did Blum become a controller? "It looked like pinball machines in a penny arcade." He adds, somewhat contrarily, "And controllers make good money." Blum's base pay is $27,000 a year.
Jealous of the pilots, fearful of being worn slowly down by the stresses and responsibilities of their own task—yet proud of their skills and fascinated by the space-age gadgetry they have mastered—the controllers gradually came to the conclusion that they had been taken for granted too long. The Government would have to be taught a lesson.
The air controllers have long been unhappy about what they perceived as the sluggish pace at which the FAA supplied them the modern equipment needed to cope with increasingly crowded skies.
They felt that nearly all their job-related complaints were being ignored by the FAA when they were represented by the National Association of Government Employees, which included a myriad of other federal workers as well. The controllers broke away, forming PATCO in 1968, partly at the urging of F. Lee Bailey, the noted criminal lawyer, who is a pilot himself. PATCO's first president was John Leyden, a New York controller who in the late '60s had been honored by the FAA as its "controller of the year."