"Slow Down, You Move Too Fast"

Even on clear days at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, exhaust smog smudges the ends of the runways as they appear from the control tower, so that planes seem to wiggle down onto the concrete like bottom-settling fish. The 747s are at their most exotic in this oily haze: Landing gear like great stainless-steel ventral fins dangle from the bellies of the big planes, make contact, and then, bending back, seem to draw the tonnage above them down onto themselves. It's a display of delicate, rushing ponderosity that might conceivably fail to thrill some men--perhaps those who, as boys, could keep themselves from turning to watch a passing train.

A landing 747 fascinates in part because the physics of the proposition don't jibe: The contraption that flew at Kitty Hawk was light as a kite and a jet fighter might as well be a Roman candle, but this thing in the air looks like an abstract artist's impression of a slow-moving, airborne family of elephants. Beyond that, the plane's arrival satisfies the modern delight in sophisticated teamwork. The successful movement of a 747 into and out of O'Hare may be as difficult and serious as anything we ask technicians to do for pay. The state-of-the-art advances in systems control are made in space flight, but there are 100 or more bodies on a jumbo jet for every astronaut in an Apollo capsule. For routine death prevention, few jobs match air-traffic control at O'Hare, the busiest airport and tower in the world.

The surprising thing is that the tower remains remarkably accessible in this period of controller labor disputes, high-jackings and bomb threats. All you need is a legitimate connection with aviation or the media, and the facility's chief, Dan Vucurevich, or his deputy, Bob Schwank, will invite you up to the office they share with a secretary just under the cab--the visual-control room at the top of the tower. Passing muster there, if Schwank is your first contact, means explaining your assignment and then enjoying Schwank's zest for people and air-traffic control for half an hour while he decides if he can trust you.

If Schwank were a balloon and you blew him up two sizes, he'd look like Broderick Crawford. He even talks like a TV detective. There used to be a flying club in the area and some of the members sat around the hangar Sunday afternoons, drinking beer until they dared one another into landing at O'Hare or flying into bad weather. "It's the old under-the-gun syndrome," Schwank says of reckless private pilots. "They've been through broads, they've been through Vegas, and so they get their kicks flying stoned."

Schwank's attitude toward the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, the youngest and most militant controllers' group, is akin to James Farmer's attitude toward the Panthers. He argues that the Federal aviation administration--which he, as management, represents--has been pleading for higher salaries, earlier pensions and other benefits for years; it especially galls him that Federal smoke jumpers can retire after fewer years' service than controllers. But PATCO's tactics bring out the conservative in him. "We're not Wall Street," he says, "or Madison Avenue. We can't pay the way those boys can. We have to appeal to a spirit of loyalty, to the feeling that people had back in the Thirties, when it wasn't so easy to get a job." Referring to the Easter-week 1970 PATCO slowdown, he pictures himself walking through the terminal, seeing "the little ones, the siblings," forced by long flight delays to sleep in the rest rooms. They wouldn't have been sleeping there on account of air controllers 25 years ago, he implies, when he was manning the post for $1800 a year. Yet Schwank later emphasizes that management-controller relations are now much improved, and he remains fiercely proud of his crew, organized or not. "Every day, we handle the traffic that goes into and out of Lansing, Michigan, in a year," he says. "A hundred thousand people a day. Or think of it this way: The day shift at O'Hare does what Washington National does in twenty-four hours. Then the four-to-midnight shift comes in and does it all over again." Dramatic pause. "And then the midnight shift does what'd be a day's load at Cincinnati."

A lovely, 199-foot-tall tower with the streamlined shape of the Seattle Space Needle soars out of the apron in front of the carrousel building connecting the two main O'Hare terminals. The structure was topped off in 1969, and casual travelers over the past couple of years have doubtless assumed that this is the working facility. In fact, it doesn't begin operation until sometime this spring, when the five-story garage rising under it will begin to block off slices of runways from the present tower, which you have to look for to find from most points in the airport. Squarish, its cab giving it a pagoda top, the tower rises less than 100 feet above the concrete at Eastern Air Lines' gates, and the eyes of a controller in the cab are only about 40 feet above the roofs of the adjoining terminal buildings. At night, many gates--some of Delta's and TWA's, all of American's and North Central's--are hidden from the ground controllers.

Five short flights of narrow metal stairway climb up to the cab from Schwank's office, and at the last landing a two-potted coffee maker is tucked into the wall. The supervisor for the seven to nine controllers who man the cab sits at a combination desk and switchboard immediately at the top of the stairs. Like everything else in his domain, the accouterments of his little space appear to be an agreeable 15 or 20 years old. The salmon-pink call director at his right elbow is obviously less than five years old, but all the newness is smudged off it. The controllers are arranged along two of the out jutting window walls of the square cabin, at counters crowded with radios, notebooks, radar display screens, hand mikes and ashtrays. A dozen switching panels of varying complexity are angled in wherever there is room; some of these--such as the one for runway lights--are as makeshift-looking and absorbing as anything in Buck Rogers. Two of the working positions are outfitted with raised, slanted writing surfaces, pieces of gray-painted plywood mounted on pipe, and the wood is streakily gouged at the bottom edges, as if by penknives, so that the blond wood shows under the gray paint. The two narrow aisles in the room are crowded with heavily padded, brown-leather stools that are pushed back out of the way now, but will be pressed into service as the five-o'clock rush approaches. Rings run around the stools' legs, and the controllers stand up on these when colleagues' or visitors' heads persist in their line of sight to the action.

Various combinations of controllers handle each plane. For an outgoing flight, the operation begins in a huge radar facility in nearby Aurora, Illinois, called the Chicago Air-Route Traffic Control Center. The center's shifts of 150 controllers monitor all commercial and much other traffic in a broad area of the upper Midwest, and computers in Aurora spill out the clearances--altitudes and routes--that help keep the airlines on schedule and traffic separated. Well before a plane's scheduled departure, the man in the corner of the cab nearest the top of the stairs gets the flight's clearance from Aurora and copies it--as a few numbers and abbreviated phrases--onto a strip of stiff paper that he slips into a plastic holder the size of a six-inch ruler. About ten minutes before the captain of the flight wants to taxi, he has his copilot call the next man along the window, who gives the crew its clearance--which in the case of regularly scheduled runs is very often the same for each flight. Now the man who's delivered the clearance takes the flight strip and slaps it down in front of the controller at his right. This man clears the plane out to the top of its runway when it's ready to move and there's room for it. There the copilot, who has already talked to clearance delivery and to ground control, will be instructed to switch over to a third frequency, in order to talk to one of the two men in the cab actually getting planes on and off the runways. The flight strip is moved again at this point, and as traffic increases late in the afternoon the ground controller paces kitty-corner across the room, the long coil of his mike out behind him, eyes on the lumbering planes, clipping and darting to bang his precious flight surrogates in front of one or another of the local air controllers. These are the men who give the final go. As soon as the plane is airborne, the air controller takes the strip and drops it nonchalantly, hectically or with aplomb into the mouth of one of three open gravity tubes running down to the tower's own ground-level radar room, the facility's other operations center. The process for an incoming flight is essentially the reverse: The radar room notifies a landing pilot to call the local control post in the tower when he's about five miles out; after the plane has landed and turned off the runway he calls a ground controller, who talks him around into his gate.

The subtle everyday humor that thrives in situations like this--men all of a type who know one another well working the same job, no women around--is modified by the fact that everyone is at least partially abstracted into his headphones. Jokes ride on inflections of the phrases necessary to the job, the season's Hee-Haw lines, what-ever's handy as long as it can be slapped up with irony and delivered in less than a second. The banter is as commonplace and easy to like as the men themselves. One of the controllers in the cab this afternoon is about five foot eleven, and one, a trainee, is black. Those exceptions aside, the men are very much of a type: short; with very neatly trimmed hair; wearing short-sleeve shirts, narrow ties and snug-fitting, tapered wash-and-wear pants.

"You see a lot of bodies up here," says the tall fellow, who looks like a weak Michael Caine. "But you see myself and one other guy that's certified in everything. We're really hurtin' for people."

So only two of the nine are journeymen air-traffic controllers. The remaining seven are apprentices in varying degrees of training. (In fact, at each post there is a man who has been extensively checked out for the job; the journeyman rating comes only after a controller has been certified completely both here and in the radar room.) The fellow we'll call Michael Caine and the other journeyman are both 34. The rest are between 22 and 27. Most of them, the majority of all air controllers, first learned to handle planes in the Service, where air control is one of those technical jobs that really do what the recruiting posters promise--give boys out of high school and college dropouts the kind of skills that will qualify them eventually for remunerative jobs: Journeymen controllers after several years in the system at the busiest towers around the country make around $20,000. The Service background is part of the reason that extraneous Sirs clutter up some transmissions out of the tower, but there are a good many Sirs in the other direction, too. Many of the exchanges consist of pilot or controller repeating an air speed or a compass heading that the other has just given, and all include the aircraft or flight identification number, so it sometimes sounds like the rushed liturgy of an early-morning Mass. But through these busiest hours, at least, neither pilots nor controllers sound bored.

Variations within the type: Caine is set off from his colleagues in the cab now not only by his height but by a certain veteran bitterness. ("It's an overloaded system," he says at one point, "and the only reason the cocksucker works is because the guys who control it make it work.") And Lloyd Johnson, Jr. --real names now--the afternoon's black, is considerably funkier than he might be under the circumstances. Hopping around his post at clearance delivery early in the afternoon, he routes somebody to "Detroit city--that's Motown city." At five o'clock, the supervisor calls to one of the men on local air control, "Are you ready to trade with Lloyd, Bill?" Bill answers Yeah, and Lloyd, about to be tested at the post, says, "Well, here we go, get my feet wet." Then he adds in singsong, "Yes sir, y' all."

He seems to an outsider to control the position with authority and panache. The no-nonsense individual monitoring him finds little to say. Lloyd--little Lloyd Johnson with his green check pants, thin mustache and half-inch-thick Afro--stands with the on/off switch to his mike and a Camel in one hand and a fat ballpoint pen in the other, lifting himself on tiptoes occasionally to deal with the ten to fifteen multimillion-dollar aircraft approaching or trying to depart his two runways. For long stretches, he monotones clearances out to his planes without discernible pauses for breath between phrases. You wonder how the captains are reacting to that voice. At one point, in joyful response to the crush of action, he does a little Irish jig. For three years, he was one of the facility's radar-equipment maintenance men; his eyes sparkle with intelligence.

Meanwhile, Caine is having a spot of trouble. He and the slightly prognathous, pug-nosed trainee he's monitoring are controlling the older, northeastern complex of runways.

Trainee: Zero three delta, report approaching east of Navy Glenview, for two seven right.

Caine: Why not "Glenview"?

Trainee: Huh?

Caine: Why not, "report Glenview," instead of, "east of Glenview"?

Trainee: Well, yeah. I've already got one that's going to go right over just south of Glenview. I don't want 'em all going right to the same spot. I want them separated in case they all check in at the same time. If they're all in the same spot at the same time....

Caine: Are they all VFR? [Are they all operating visually, rather than with instruments?]

Trainee: Yeah.

Caine: Do you think they'd all get there at the same time?

Trainee: Yeah, they could, even though they're all VFR.

Caine: You really think so? Listen, "east of Glenview" could be a mile or five miles. When you get him right over Glenview you know exactly where he's at, is what I'm getting at. You say "east of Glenview," like I said, it could be a mile or five miles.

The kid doesn't have to talk to any planes through this, but five minutes later Caine is after him again, drawing him to one of this room's two television-screen reproductions of the radar-scopes downstairs to make a point. And this time, the trainee does have to talk to traffic as he acknowledges the instructions that Caine delivers in a voice that apparently started in the South and got flattened and exasperated in Chicago. Only a few minutes pass before another exchange:

Trainee: Philips [Airways] four twelve, plan the first left turnoff feasible, on landing, beyond runway three six. [Philips four twelve is landing on runway two seven right, which intersects runways three six and two two.]

Caine: Why?

Trainee: I want him to get off the runway. Because technically I haft a hold this guy [indicating the next plane in on two two] short of two seven right as long as he's on the runway. And I don't want him holding short because I got two more aircraft....

Caine: How much separation do you need between two aircraft on the runway?

Trainee: Four thousand five hundred feet, and after two you run out of room.

Caine: All right. And how many you got, three planes in there?

Trainee: I got three. One touching down.

Caine: You say plan your left turn-off real quick like that, hell, he's liable to go way down here [pointing far down the long strip]. You don't really need that....

Trainee: I said, "Beyond runway three six."

Caine: Really, there's no need to say anything. You bullshit too much is what I'm getting at. Let the cock-sucker land, left on the high-speed [taxiway] and that's all there is to it. Just like TWA, remember that?

Trainee: Yeah. Mid-States forty two, cleared to land two two. Wisconsin ninety seven, cleared to cross two seven.... After three more clearances, he gets his eyes out of the smog for a minute, takes the few steps to the panel of runwaylight switches, and stands staring at them. Anything to get out of the way of mean Michael Caine's turbulent karma.

Caine at his most expressive (Let the cocksucker land) kills other side conversations in the room and even seems to lower the voices going into the mikes. There is a feeling of embarrassment--at his language, his fervor--for him in the air. Well into the rush period now, a Lufthansa 747 touches down just as another one of the monsters--this one a TWA--takes off. The sun's image in one of the great panes of glass has laid a skew of glare on the window opposite it, and the reflection of the TWA 747 climbs steeply through a wash of salmon, bright colorlessness and then the purest, palest lime. From here only slightly more so than from O'Hare's raised, open terminal, the planes and especially their service vehicles are cleanly designed toys. Even the 747s will look manageable from the new tower, and the passengers who sometimes still walk across the concrete to board will look as inconsequential as pedestrians do from high-rise apartments.

The man in charge of departing ground control has been relieved for a moment: He rinses out a glass coffeepot in the weak spout of water from the cooler and back down at the landing makes more coffee.

Caine again, just before the visitor decides three hours upstairs is enough:

But when you get one on one out there, man.... Here, on the radar, look. Make it, fella. "You got this guy out ahead of you. Follow him." Or, "Widen out to the right." Tell him what to do. You gotta control it. As it was, you had'em pointing right at each other.

• • •

The radar room down at the bottom of the elevator ride is spooky, 13 to 18 men sitting around five green-glowing tables in the dark. Here are technology's votaries, if they're anywhere, but in fact they look no more demonic than the kids upstairs. Most of the operation is contained in a curving, six-piece battery of control tables and blinking, suspended switch cabinets that looks like a melting Moog synthesizer. Four men sit facing two vertical screens with almost identical pictures along the center section of this console, under a neatly printed and centered notice: All sick leaves must be scheduled in advance. Planes approaching Chicago are handed over to these controllers by Aurora at 20 or 30 miles out, at this position put onto the courses that will get them to their runways and finally--when they are five miles out--handed upstairs to the cab. Planes departing O'Hare, and also all instrument-dependent flights into and out of Midway. Chicago's other major airport, are controlled at tabletop scopes at the two bulging ends of the complex and at a third table close to it. Every 30 seconds or so now, the plastic flight strips pop out of the mouths of the tubes from upstairs onto one of these departure tables. Some of the controllers peel the strips off their holders at this point. A man sits with half a dozen or more of the curling pieces of paper in front of him, and there's no reason at all why two doors into the place couldn't open at the same time and send them scattering, but it doesn't seem to concern anyone.

A controller is relieved here, stands up, starts through the darkness. Someone asks him if he has vectored yet, referring to one of the tasks in this room. He answers, "Yeah, I've vectored, over." The darkness makes the room more intimate than the cab, changes the humor. A wisecrack is sent out into the dusk and it doesn't matter if no one laughs, because faces aren't clear. Although the room is on the ground level, it's windowless and has the feel of a deep underground bunker. It would be a perfect set for the pay-off in a Hitchcock movie.

The operation's supervisor seats his visitor at the tabletop scope where three men are handling Midway and south departures out of O'Hare. Mike Powderly, on Midway, looks at the tape recorder and calls across the room, "OK, Bob, you can tell your gag."

Now four heads bend over the green scope and between transmissions to his planes Powderly easily and economically explains what he's doing. "You should have been here earlier," he says. "We had really good inbound rushes at O'Hare. We were staggered three miles apart all the way out to here," fingering the edge of the screen, some 30 miles away from O'Hare at its center. He points out the eight smaller airports on the scope, the dots that represent Chicago's Prudential Building and the John Hancock Center, and the segment of airspace in which he has to maneuver Midway's traffic to keep it clear of the volume of planes into and out of O'Hare. Virtually all the planes with which this room is concerned carry transponders, gadgets that make radar control practicable: When a pilot is instructed by his controller to tune the device to a certain frequency, what is called his beacon then shows up on that man's screen as a double slash, remaining a single slash on all other screens. The double slashes especially leave lingering traces of themselves on the screen, and the traces collectively--the oldest of them fading down to a dot--form a wake behind the bold green of the newest impression. The density and direction of the wake show the plane's path and speed. The screen could be a lake in a nightmare, buzzing with motorboats, or a bright-treated slide of bacteria culture.

Doesn't it hypnotize you? Powderly is asked.

"No," he laughs. "It might scare the hell out of you, but it won't hypnotize you." He's a big man in his late 20s, with a prominent nose, and he likes answering questions, explores them. "I think the first few times you watch radar, you watch the sweep go around. And maybe that will do it. But after years of watching it, you don't even know there's a sweep on it. Unless it stops, of course." He talks to a plane and then comes back to the conversation. "When the weather's bad, it can give you a headache. Thunderstorms, sleet, hail, pilots wanting to go one way when you've got to run them another. That's being a controller. American 514 descend to twenty-five. Report the runway or the airport in sight. It's eleven o'clock and eight miles."

"Hand-job," a controller calls out, "I mean, hand-off."

Here, too, the average age seems to be under 30--and Powderly is asked why. "I don't know. They get old and cranky, and they get bleeding ulcers, and then they want to get away from the airplanes. They transfer out to other facilities and get supervisory jobs--obviously they can't all become supervisors here. Getting out is usually what they want then. Your timing has to be.... You know, it's nothing phenomenal, you don't have to be Superman to work in here. But when we're doing parallel approaches into fourteen, for example...." He points to a spot about 15 miles northwest of the airport: "The turn-on point for fourteen right is very close to the holding-pattern area up there, and you're trying to interrogate your guy coming in and there are all these other beacons. It confuses and aggravates the hell out of you sometimes. You have to be able to look at a group of aircraft, at varying speeds, and say who's going to be first. And you don't have time to work it out mathematically. In thunderstorms, when airplanes are running all over the sky, you have to sit down and say, 'Damn it, I'm gonna make it work right. I'm going to keep those airplanes apart.' And when you get a little older, you just can't do that kind of stuff. It's just too much on your nerves." Then, looking across the table: "What you got, Curly?"

Watching them work is a pleasure. Curly, absorbed in the screen, taps an ashtray off its edge with his pencil the way a pilot adjusts the trim tab in his plane, or a driver tunes his radio. Powderly says of planes he's just pointed out, "What I'm going to have to do is get away from these O'Hare arrivals over here. They're high and fast." Two of the single slashes heading into the bull's-eye jog a big quarter inch closer on each sweep. "They are fast," Powderly says, "I'm gonna have to hustle." He talks quickly into the standard telephone handpiece that serves as a mike at this post, bending his Midway departures out of the paths of the speedsters.

"What happens if there's a power failure?"

Powderly grins. "Well," he starts, "the first thing I do is scream and holler Then I rant and rave. Then I doubt the ancestry of everybody in maintenance And then I try to get some help through to my planes. Five-oh-nine, are you at four [thousand feet]?"

"Five-oh-nine at four."

"We've got backup power, of course," he continues, "and it trips in automatically. The transition period is when it's bad, because it takes a little bit for it to get going, just a matter of a minute or so, but that thing"--pointing to one of the double slashes--"can go a long way in a minute. So what you do.... The pilot either can switch over to a visual approach, or you give him an altitude and he just holds, circling, until we get the power back."

"Assuming you can still talk to him."

"Yes, that's true. American 509, three miles from Calumet, cleared for the approach. Contact the [Midway] tower on 118.7 at Kedzie, good night. If radio fails, we go to a backup radio. If the backup radio fails, we try to get them on a navigational aid, like a radio beacon. He navigates on it, but it also has the capability of broadcasting a voice. But, say that power is out, and all those frequencies are out. Uh.... The pilot has procedures that he is to execute in the event of lost communication. He'll proceed to the clearance limit and execute an approach. And to explain all that would take a long time. If you look it up in the manuals, it seems that there are sixteen pages of things that he's supposed to do in different situations. But really it's pretty simple. He knows what he's supposed to do and he will do it. The danger in that is that you have too many planes trying to do the same thing. And we don't run altitude separations into the fix. We run in-trail separations into the fix only. If that separation holds--if they all keep their speed--fine. But it's like a freight train. If the first guy slows up, the second guy has to slow up, too, and then you're talking about planes doing 360s all the way back to South Bend."

He looks back to the table, with an expression acknowledging the incompleteness of his answer. "I've seen us lose radio but not radar, or radar and not radio. There was always another frequency. I've never seen everything go out at one time. I think the fail-safe systems are phenomenal. Listen, there's never been a mid-air collision at O'Hare. But if everything did go out at one time...." He pauses again to consider. "Well, if your luck was good, you'd have the weather. Maybe the weather would be on your side." Another pause. "But if everything goes against you...." He draws away from the table, smiling, uneasy.

"Well, you know," he says softly, still smiling, "at that point, fate is the hunter."

A figure in the gloom interrupts to remember losing both radar and radio for four minutes, and in an exchange there's quick agreement that losing voice is much more serious than losing radar. "Yeah, there's nothing you can do," Powderly says. "You just sit there and watch. And it scares the hell out of you. That's what'll age a guy."

The request comes down from upstairs for a longer-than-usual, five-mile separation between incoming planes so that the controllers in the cab can feed out their heavy load of departures. One of the men on incoming traffic at the console behind us is having trouble making the distance. The supervisor calls his name across the room, and then shouts, "Five miles. Not four, not three, or any other number. Five!"

"OK, OK," the man says.

Fifteen minutes later, they're closing up again and now the man working next to him and a third controller, this one lounging around behind his chair, get on him at the same time. Their voices aren't all that friendly. The controller has to pull a plane up through his landing corridor and then loop him back to make the distance. Four times during the harassment, he says, "It might work out to be five."

"Slow down," someone even farther away sings softly to his blips, "you move too fast...."

• • •

Upstairs, a supervisor named Tom Rauner, a quiet man heading into his 40s with gray-brown hair and a soft, koala-bear face, had gone to the psychological heart of PATCO's case: "What really makes a controller pucker, so to speak," he said, "is the fact that he has all these things to do and he can't say, 'To hell with it, I'll do it tomorrow.' There's an enormous demand on the man at the moment he's doing it. Of course, it has the advantage that he can walk away from it, which isn't true in all jobs. But what the guy feels sometimes is that it's thankless. It's self-rewarding only, and that isn't good enough for him. He's in a world of his own inside those headphones. You can look at it from the outside for hours and it'll never be the same as standing there having to solve the problems. He's the only one who knows what he did, and there's no one to tell about it. I mean, he can't keep telling the same people about the ordeal he goes through every day."

As he spoke, a journeyman controller behind him was getting excited: "What are your plans now?" he asked his trainee. "You got any plans?" And then: "What did I tell you? I told you immediate take-off. I want you to do what I tell you!" And finally: "Put your fucking glasses on! You were lucky as shit last time!"

• • •

Seven miles east of the airport, the Edens Expressway coming down from Milwaukee flows into the Kennedy Expressway, which runs from O'Hare to Chicago, and for a distance of a hundred yards or so there are six lanes of traffic in one direction. Timid drivers coming off the Edens attempt to segue three lanes to the right, while jockeys in the high-speed lane of the Kennedy now have to jump two or three lanes left if they're to retain dominance. At least once each time through the pass, somebody's doing it stupidly enough to require a sudden recovery. Tonight there are two such lurching near misses. Illinois has no automobile inspection, and the near misses very often involve cars so badly wounded they'd be impounded in rural Puerto Rico. Holding a lane, descending on the city as warily as a commercial pilot coming in over the little airports to the north, the visitor wishes that the next time he had to get from O'Hare to downtown Chicago he could fly.