- WESTBURY, N.Y. - Workers at one of the nation's busiest air traffic control
centers have found a novel way to keep their radar screens working and
6,000 planes flying each day.
-
- Cheap, household fans blow cooling air
on the more troublesome of the aging, 22-inch radar displays.
-
- If the out-of-date electronics get too
hot, the screens can fail and threaten to interrupt or delay flights at
New York's three major airports.
-
- The units are so old that replacement
parts are no longer made. Maintenance workers must scavenge for backup
electronics. And a replacement system isn't due to be installed until sometime
in 2000.
-
- So far, the deteriorating equipment has
not slowed traffic significantly or created a hazard. The Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA) says it can ensure that breakdowns don't worsen substantially.
-
- But FAA officials, controllers and maintenance
workers all acknowledge that upgrades are long overdue for the radar displays,
which are the key instruments that keep planes safely apart.
-
- Because New York-area airports handle
nearly one of 20 of the nation's commercial flights each day, delays here
could cause enormous ripples in airports across the country.
-
- ''This is not a joke. This is not Chicken
Little,'' says Brian Fallon, safety representative at the New York center
for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. ''This is some real
serious stuff. It's really been by the grace of God that we haven't been
confronted yet by a real catastrophic breakdown.''
-
- Concern about aging equipment is nearly
universal throughout the nation's air traffic control system. Much of the
system functions on equipment that was designed and built decades ago.
The FAA is embarking on a massive top-to-bottom overhaul, but with few
exceptions, improvements have been slow in coming.
-
- If the air traffic control system is
in dire need of improvement nationwide, it is especially critical in New
York.
-
- Air traffic controllers here direct more
than 2 million flights a year, most of them using Kennedy, LaGuardia and
the Newark, N.J., airports. Taken together, flights at the three airports
total significantly more than any single airport or metropolitan area in
the country. Yet New York's radar displays are unlike units found anywhere
else in the nation. They were introduced as test models in 1987, then improved
and redesigned before they were placed in other air traffic control centers.
However, the originals remained in use here.
-
- Now, the units are so outdated that a
1997 federal report predicted that by the end of 1998, radar display failures
would begin occurring so frequently that they could slow traffic into the
already congested New York airspace. If too many screens fail at the same
time, controllers must keep planes farther apart, which would cause delays.
-
- Battered by constant repairs and used
far beyond their expected five-year life span, the radar screens break
down frequently. Eighty-five failures were logged in 1998, an 8% increase
from the year before.
-
- Henry Brown, president of the Professional
Airways Systems Specialists in New York, the maintenance workers union,
says his members visit Radio Shack regularly or ''search the streets''
to find parts for jury-rigged repairs.
-
- ''We've been able to stay one step ahead
of the devil,'' Brown says. ''I'm just not sure how long we're going to
be able to do that.''
-
- For now, the radar screens in New York
manage to function well most of the time. Significant delays have not materialized,
FAA officials say, because of steps they have taken already.
-
- New vents in the cavernous control room
have moderated temperatures. Maintenance workers redesigned the display
consoles to improve the flow of cooling air. A new air-conditioning system
also will be built soon.
-
- ''We're going to keep it running, and
we're going to keep it running safely,'' says Monte Belger, the FAA's acting
deputy administrator.
-
- The FAA also is upgrading virtually all
the electronics at the facility, from radars to computer networks, although
the work will not help directly with the display screens.
-
- Officials are working with unionized
maintenance workers and flight controllers to ready a new radar display
system to replace the old one. But software problems and delays in that
system were confirmed last week. It might not be ready for New York until
the end of 2000.
-
- The New York facility is one of 184 so-called
Terminal Radar Approach Control centers, or TRACONs, run by the FAA. They
form a kind of midpoint in the FAA's air traffic management network, monitoring
planes outside the narrow radius around each airport and below the high-altitude
jet pathways. New York's TRACON covers an area about 60 miles around Manhattan.
-
- Controllers, housed in a windowless structure
surrounded by a barbed wire-topped fence, sit at banks of terminals in
an eerily dark room lighted mostly by the circular sweep of the radar displays
and a few stray lights on knobs and communication equipment.
-
- The displays were supposed to be phased
out in the early 1990s, but the replacement system was scrapped when the
FAA canceled a systemwide upgrade in 1994.
-
- The biggest potential for problems occurs
when several displays fail at the same time. At least 15 times from Jan.
1 to Nov. 30, 1996, four or five displays were being repaired simultaneously,
says the 1997 federal report, written by the center's managers and maintenance
officials.
|
