Bring Your Kid to Work, ATC Style

When I saw the caller ID this morning with CNN’s address I figured something awful was up. Usually is.

“Can you talk about the Kennedy incident,” the producer asked me? Didn’t sound like she wanted me to talk about the impending runway closure. The young lady wanted my opinion on the kid controlling traffic at JFK last month (click the link below to listen). The father – a fully certified controller at JFK – and his supervisor were suspended for letting a young boy – the controller’s son – plug in to the tower radio with his dad and say “Cleared for takeoff,” and “Contact departure.”

Some callers on the CNN segment today were outraged that a controller would so thoughtlessly endanger the lives of so many people, while others thought a guy giving his son a taste for the job wasn’t a bad idea as long as dad was right there watching over things. And dad was doing just that. The kid never controlled anything. He said the words his dad told him to say, nothing more. And he sounded pretty good to tell you the truth which is why the pilots on frequency loved it.

No one at the upper echelons of the FAA or the controller’s union was laughing however and honestly, there was little else they could say. This looked bad for sure. In retrospect, this was surely a boneheaded thing to do, not because it WAS unsafe, but because it LOOKED unsafe to everyone. And PR is about the way things look, not the way things are.

First a few facts

The controllers at JFK are the Top Gun of their profession, as are the controllers at LaGuardia, Newark, Atlanta, O’Hare and dozens of other towers where controllers probably talk to well over a thousand planes every day. They are quite literally the best of the best. Anyone who’s flown an airplane into any of these cities will confirm that.

Now, would a controller try something like this to be funny … absolutely. Would a controller try this knowing full well he could override the boy’s transmissions in a heartbeat if anything looked even remotely concerning? Absolutely. Would a controller try a stunt they obviously knew would put people in danger on the ground and in the air? Nope … not on your life.

But that’s not how the public or anyone else in charge will see this. I’m sure there will be a rule soon in the controller’s handbook that says no one under 18 may even touch a radio, much less talk on it. This incident will also make it more difficult for regular pilots to visit ATC facilities, I’m sure.

In light of the incident when two NWA pilots blew past Minneapolis last fall because they were playing on their laptops instead of flying the airplane, I’m just not that worried about this incident. Sure it’s going to be embarrassing as a controller, but it is not unsafe. Was it a dumb idea? Yeah, if the controller had really thought about it. Did I ever do anything stupid when I was a controller, anything I’d ever be embarrassed about now? You betcha. In the heat of the moment though, with qualified people all over the place and the pilots playing along, it just didn’t look like that big a deal.

Am I endorsing what happened at JFK? No, not at all.

But I’m also not forgetting that some of the folks at JFK tower were probably on duty on 9/11 and watched those airplanes fly into the Twin Towers. And they also watched with widened eyes as their city burned like Hell on Earth had truly begun. So what I’m saying is that in a city that has had little joy in the past 10 years, maybe everyone might just agree to whack these controllers on the hand this time, give them a letter of reprimand if needed. But I’d vote to cut these guys a little slack on this one. I think we have many more important things to deal with in this industry.

Listen for yourself though. Here’s the recording.

Rob Mark, editor