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It’s a flier alarm.
The feds are investigating charges that New York air-traffic controllers endanger passengers by working just three hours per shift and acting like slackers — chatting, texting and even watching movies when they should be monitoring planes, The Post has learned.
At times, so few are at their posts that a single controller must do the job of two or three and track 15 aircraft simultaneously, which is too many, according to allegations filed by a supervisor.
Evan Seeley, a frontline manager at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center in Ronkonkoma, LI, fired off complaints last month to the Federal Aviation Administration and the Office of Special Counsel, a federal agency that probes whistleblower claims. The Post obtained copies.
CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW A COLLISION ALMOST OCCURRED
Seeley raised his concerns on Jan. 17, three days before controllers allowed an American Airlines jet to nearly collide with two military cargo planes over the Atlantic.
The Boeing 777 passenger plane came within 200 vertical feet and 2,000 lateral feet of the behemoth carriers — a distance described as “dangerously close” by an airline-safety insider — in an incident not revealed to the public until Friday, after The Post asked about it. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating.
Sources familiar with the probe point to careless communication between controllers in giving instructions to the American fight, which was put on a crash course with the military planes. The error has been classified as a “Category A” error, the most serious type of near-miss.
Seeley’s OSC filings allege that union controllers operate with little oversight at the center, which coordinates high-altitude flights through the Northeast, including from JFK, La Guardia and Newark airports, and is best known for having handled the hijacked 9/11 planes.
Instead of focusing on their monitors, some of the barely supervised controllers socialize, gaze at photos on their phones and sit with their feet up on desks, claims Seeley, 26. A few play movies or solitaire on their laptops, despite FAA rules banning electronic devices.
On-duty controllers also are allowed to disappear for breaks that can last more than an hour, the whistleblower alleges, and workers pressured him to “close positions” — or shut down posts — so they could lollygag.
“Closing positions could potentially create dangerous air-traffic situations where one controller was working too many aircraft,” Seeley’s OSC complaint states. “Most controllers were working just three hours out of an eight-hour shift.”
Diligent controllers typically put in two hours at a time and take 20-minute breaks and 35 minutes for meals — spending 6½ hours on duty each shift, said veterans of the job.
Three traffic-control staffers told The Post that Seeley’s claims were accurate. “It’s the tip of the iceberg,” said one.
Asked about his complaints, Seeley issued a written statement: “Once OSC completes its investigation, New York Center will be forced to address serious issues that have gone unchecked for some time. A pattern of ignoring rules and policy creates a dangerous standard.”
The charges come after an embarrassing air-traffic flub last year, when JFK controller Glenn Duffy let his kids give instructions to pilots, and a deadly mistake in 2009, when Teterboro’s Carl Turner joked on the phone with his girlfriend as a small plane slammed into a tourist helicopter, killing nine.
Seeley, a five-year veteran who came to New York from Fort Worth last February, tried to reform the culture — and was met with resistance, then retaliation, his complaints say.
In January, after getting a glowing year-end performance review, Seeley was abruptly demoted — payback, he says, for trying to change the system.
‘This is gonna be close’
The near-miss between the planes began when one Long Island air-traffic controller failed to hear instructions asking him to stop the passenger plane at 20,000 feet, according to sources familiar with a probe of the incident. The transcript:
AA controller: “What did you want with that American?”
C-17 controller: “I wanted you to stop him at 20. Stop him at 21.”
The C-17 controller tells his own radar man to stop the military planes at 22,000 feet — but the AA controller thinks the direction is for him, and orders Flight 951 to that altitude, putting the planes on a crash course.
C-17 controller: “I said stop the American at 21!”
Automatic alarm inside the AA cockpit: “DESCEND, DESCEND, DESCEND!”
AA pilot: “OK, we’re following a descent.”
AA controller: “Do you have that traffic in sight?!”
AA pilot: “No, we do not!”
C-17 pilot: “This is gonna be close.”
AA pilot: “That was not good.”