Investigation: FAA romance led to $970 million contract award, 3,300-percent increase in air traffic control errors

Published: 11:45 AM 10/20/2011

By Matthew Boyle

A recent spike in air traffic control errors is likely attributable to a change in the Federal Aviation Administration’s chosen contractor for training air traffic controllers, The Daily Caller has learned. That change was likely the result of a government contracting shuffle orchestrated by an FAA official and her lover — a former FAA official who worked for Raytheon at the time the contract was awarded. Raytheon won the contract, worth nearly $1 billion.

Potentially deadly aircraft incidents attributable to control tower mistakes have increased dramatically in recent years. Professor Jack Williams of Georgia State University told TheDC that these operational errors averaged 10.8 per month between December 2008 and October 2010 — a startling 3,300-percent increase compared to the period between January 2007 and November 2008.

Williams, contracted by attorneys representing a company suing Raytheon over that FAA contract award, has examined potential reasons for that increase.

He told TheDC that the only substantive change the FAA has made to the air traffic control system during that time was the aspiring controllers’ training program. The FAA consolidated two separately run training programs: a “basic training” class in Oklahoma City, and the on-site control tower training future employees undergo during the ensuing three to five years.

For decades, the FAA contracted with the University of Oklahoma for the classroom program, and with the specialist firm Washington Consulting Group for the on-site training.

Washington Consulting Group, which lost its contract to Raytheon in 2008, is the company now suing the defense-contracting giant.

A former FAA official, speaking to TheDC on condition of anonymity, said future air traffic controllers were trained this way for “50 or 60 years.” They would start at the Oklahoma City academy, and then train on-site for a few years in one of the three levels of air traffic controlling.

“There are three different sectors of the air traffic control industry,” the official said in a phone interview. “Airspace is segmented into three different areas. The lowest area is the area in the immediate vicinity of the airport and the surface itself — that belongs to the air traffic controller in the tower.”

The next level, the official said, consists of airspace up to approximately 18,000 feet immediately surrounding runways, a “great, big radius around the airport.”

“Outside that is the overall airspace, everything within the United States, up to 100,000 feet plus,” the official added. “That belongs to the en route air traffic control facilities, of which there are 22 in the country.”

Once aspiring air traffic controllers finished their classroom training, they would report to a facility for long-term practical training. That’s where they would specialize in one of the three levels of air traffic control.
FAA contracted those training services to Washington Consulting Group for approximately 25 years, until the mid-2000s. But FAA officials then restructured how the training process worked.