Federal air-safety officials are looking into why no air traffic controller was available early Wednesday when two jetliners were trying to reach the tower for clearance to land at Washington’s Reagan National Airport.
The two jetliners, arriving from Miami and Chicago, landed safely just minutes after midnight. The pilots took matters into their own hands and relied on the precaution of repeatedly broadcasting their positions by radio.
The lone controller on duty — a supervisor who isn’t a member of the controllers’ union — later acknowledged that he may have been dozing, according to people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal reports.
However, according to The Washington Post, records show that the on-duty staffer also failed to respond to other controllers in the region who used a “shout line,” which pipes into a loudspeaker in the tower, to try to reach him. That contributed to speculation that the Regan National Airport controller accidentally was locked out of the tower.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood responded by ordering the Federal Aviation Administration to put a second controller on duty overnight at the airport, and to study controller staffing levels around the country. “It is not acceptable to have just one controller in the tower managing air traffic in this critical airspace,” he said.
Both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board are looking into the matter.
This is the second incident involving air traffic controllers being absent from their post at the Reagan airport in as many years. In the previous episode, the controller left his keycard inside the tower when he stepped outside, and was locked out.
Air traffic controllers’ errors have spiked in recent years, with the number of reported operation errors in the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30 hitting 1,889, up from 947 errors the year before.
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