When midnight rolled around and flight traffic thinned out, air traffic controllers guiding planes in the busiest U.S. corridor whipped out laptops to watch movies, play games or gamble online.
Controllers on break inflated air mattresses and napped on the floor. Some left before their shifts were over. They cursed at managers, refused to train new controllers and flouted rules requiring them to pass on weather advisories to pilots.
“It was blatant and in your face,” Evan Seeley, a former manager in the Ronkonkoma, N.Y., tower, said in a recent interview.
Those and other allegations made by Seeley, who came forward last year, were corroborated by investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration, according to reports released last week by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an agency formed to help and protect whistle-blowers inside federal agencies.
Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner sent a letter May 8 to the White House and Congress detailing findings in Seeley’s case and six other verified whistle-blower complaints, saying the FAA and Department of Transportation were slow to address them or hadn’t acted.
In New York, investigators found a facility where FAA managers were unwilling or afraid to discipline controllers’ union members, the reports said. Supervisors who tried to enforce the rules had their cars vandalized or were threatened. The result was widespread rule violations that undermined safety, reviews by the special counsel and FAA found.
Seeley, who had worked in Fort Worth, Texas, before coming to New York in February 2010, said he was shocked by what he saw.
“The advice from the seasoned front-line managers was: You keep your head in the sand,” he said.
The FAA has a higher rate of employees seeking whistle-blower protection than any other U.S. agency, according to the special counsel office’s preliminary review.
“There did not seem to be the level or urgency that we thought many of these claims really deserved by the agency,” Lerner told reporters.
The New York case was an exception to Lerner’s concerns in one regard: As the FAA was rocked last year by disclosures that controllers were sleeping on the job across the U.S., agency teams descended on the facility on Long Island. Within months, they’d corroborated most of Seeley’s allegations.
On Sept. 6, the FAA replaced the facility’s top managers and brought in experienced supervisors from other locations to serve as mentors for the remaining staff.
“It is clear, given the number of Mr. Seeley’s allegations that were substantiated in this investigation, that significant corrective actions are required,” the FAA’s internal investigation found.
While Lerner said she was satisfied with the outcome, she noted in her letter that the response occurred after Seeley took his concerns to the media.
The FAA didn’t respond to questions for this story about specific complaints, saying in an emailed statement that it has an office dedicated to investigating charges by employees of impropriety and safety lapses. That division, the Office of Audit and Evaluation, oversaw the investigation in New York, according to documents released by the special counsel.
“We are concerned when we hear about rare examples that deviate from the high standards we set for ourselves and are determined to work with the FAA to correct any such issues,” Paul Rinaldi, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said in an emailed statement.
Safety is the top priority of the union, which represents about 15,000 controllers, and it’s working with the FAA to improve professional standards, Rinaldi said in the statement. “NATCA condemns any behavior in the control facility that undermines that goal,” he said.
Seeley arrived at the New York Center at age 25 after entering a one-year training program to become a manager. He said he was told he was the youngest tower supervisor in the country.
He said friends in Fort Worth warned him about the reputation of the New York Center, which oversees higher-altitude traffic in the skies above parts of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland.
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‘Hazing’
During Seeley’s first day on the job, a controller cursed out another supervisor in front of Seeley. Within a week, copies of a photo from Seeley’s Facebook page appeared all over the facility, including in the men’s room. The manager who had informed him of the photos said it didn’t warrant a response, he said.
“She said they are just trying to get under your skin,” Seeley said. “They’re hazing you a little bit. If you make a big deal out of this, it will just get worse.”
One night, a controller using his laptop failed to notice a warning on his radar screen that he needed to switch to a backup system, Seeley said.
Seeley hadn’t made any effort to stop the use of personal electronics at that point. This was different, he said, because of the warning. He reported the controller.
Another manager urged him not to press the matter. “He said, ‘You need to think twice,'” Seeley said, and the manager added, “‘I wouldn’t do this. It’s not going to go over well for you.'”
Within weeks, someone ran a sharp object across Seeley’s car, scratching the paint, he said. On another occasion, one of his tires was slashed.
FAA regulations are precise in describing how controllers must issue instructions so that their staccato radio transmissions aren’t misunderstood. The regulations also require that controllers pass on weather reports and other information to pilots.
These rules often weren’t followed in New York, Seeley said. When investigators visited the facility last year, they listened in on 32 hours of activity. Almost half of the controllers they evaluated did not comply with FAA rules, according to the agency’s findings.
On Jan. 2, 2011, Seeley was demoted from his management position to controller. His supervisors told him his performance was subpar. Seeley said it was retribution, though that wasn’t part of his whistle-blower complaint.
Later that month, as he was studying for his new job, he returned to his desk to find a message on a nearby blackboard: “Rat fink, watch ur back,” it said, said Seeley. An arrow pointed to the chair where he’d been sitting. Seeley complained to the special counsel.
On Jan. 20, an American Airlines jet and two U.S. Air Force C-17s almost collided while under the control of two New York controllers. They passed within 200 feet vertically and less than a mile of each other, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
Poor communication between the controllers, one of the issues Seeley had raised, was one of the reasons for the incident, he said. He decided to take his story to the New York Post.
A short time later, he was offered a transfer back to Fort Worth and accepted.
Seeley said he hasn’t seen the issues he saw in New York at other facilities. While there was tension within the Texas center when he returned, that has mostly died down, he said.
“Now I have as normal a career as I can expect,” he said.
Safety worries
Other documents released by Lerner, the special counsel, showed that a half-dozen air traffic controllers in the Detroit region came forward as whistle-blowers in the past four years, with more than 20 allegations of safety hazards.
Instead of attempting to remedy the situation, the FAA’s air traffic group seemed to encourage further violations, according to a memo from an agency investigator.
“Despite continued validation of safety allegations at Detroit, we found no evidence demonstrating substantive corrective action remediating these concerns,” the FAA’s director of audit and evaluation wrote in a Feb. 14 report, which was among the documents released last week.
At Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, two controllers said it was impossible to ensure safety of landings and takeoffs because FAA procedures couldn’t guarantee that planes would stay safely separated, according to the letter. The special counsel agreed, Lerner said.
Lerner distributed what she said were radar tracks of a Delta Air Lines Boeing DC-9 and a Pinnacle Airlines Bombardier CRJ-200 almost colliding in the air on Christmas Day 2009 above the airport, where Delta operates a hub.
The letter also charged that Delta violated FAA maintenance rules on wiring and fuel tanks, and that planes departing Teterboro Airport in New Jersey routinely got too close to jets flying to Newark Liberty International Airport.
In four of the seven cases in the letter, whistle-blowers had to make their allegations twice before the FAA acted, Lerner said.
The special counsel’s office has received 178 disclosures from FAA employees since 2007, 87 involving safety issues, Lerner said.
“This does not seem to be an aberration,” she said. “This goes way back.”
Half the safety-related aviation complaints were substantiated by initial investigations, compared with 5 percent of complaints that involve other government agencies. Of those 44 substantiated FAA cases, all but five were later verified in whole or part by the Transportation Department, according to the letter.
At the New York air traffic facility, supervisors were replaced and disciplinary action was taken against three managers in 2011, according to the letter.
The Transportation Department has been working with investigators on these cases since February 2010 and is committed to making improvements where necessary, according to an emailed statement.
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“We are confident that America’s flying public is safe,” the department said in the statement.