Tin pusher part one

Over the next three days I will be publishing a letter that appeared on the NATCA presidents' blog, the mainbang. NATCA's president, John Carr, gets a lot of materai; for his blog from his readers and this particuliar letter does a really great job of explaining the feelings and costs associated with being an air traffic controller.
On the main bang the author of this letter was never mentioned so I can not give credit to the mysterious woman who wrote it. All I can do is say thank you to her and provide another forum for her words to reach a different audience.

Dear John,

Its 1982, a typical steamy spring day in San Antonio, Texas when a young naïve girl from Southern California gets summoned to see the US Air Force Flight Surgeon. She can’t imagine why or what a Flight Surgeon even is. As the intimidating officer tells me---that eighteen year old girl---that I am about to undergo an extensive physical, I quickly object, insisting that I had already done so upon entering the USAF. Right down to being made to waddle like a duck in my underwear. It is then that she, the lady Doc, explains that all Air Traffic Controllers are subject to much more thorough exams and that my body is no longer my own.

“What do you mean Air Traffic Controller?!” I shriek. Isn’t that the crazy job where the President just fired everyone? No, no I explain, I am here to become a Linguist. “Oh, you’ll be learning another language,” she responds while listening to a heart that must have sounded like a runaway train. “Sort of a Pig Latin for aviators. No, nothing exotic like Arabic or French. You’re about to become an expert in Phraseology.” And then she went on to explain that whole “body not my own” concept of being subject to drug testing and not permitted to take medicine, over the counter or otherwise; and how everything I ever do again is subject to the explicit approval of a Flight Surgeon. From cold medicine to an after work cocktail, everything I injest will now be subject to someone else’s scrutiny, on demand.

It is 1983 and I am still green at the radar facility where the wind chill is 50 degrees below zero outside and I am still wondering when they will figure out their mistake and send me to the Linguistic school in beautiful Monterey, California. I thought to myself, “What have I gotten myself into, this separating of B-52’s and F-106’s along with the occasional Europe bound jetliner that must trek over North Eastern America before heading over water?”

I don’t know what is more traumatic for a 19 year old California girl; the 8 foot snow banks where there should be 8 foot waves, the potato farms where there should be malls, or the fact that as an Air Traffic Controller with a 6-day work week and shift work, that I have all but given up on a social life before I was old enough to start enjoying one. I was issued a parka, an ATC manual, and frostbite instructions. Where did they think that I would get frost bite working in a dark basement six days per week!?

It’s still 1983 and cancer steals my grandfather. With a tiny and dwindling family, I need to be there for my mother and sadly I am told that I may not attend the funeral far away in a sunny place called home, for I am an Air Traffic Controller in training and we are not permitted to take annual leave until we have completed the intense training program. As I sadly inform my mother that she is alone on this one, I vow that I will never miss another funeral. (I was still naïve, of course.)

Weeks later when my grandmother, my last remaining grandparent dies, and I cannot help myself. I try again. “Yeah, yeah, I know….I’m an Air Traffic Controller and I can’t go…blah blah blah.” Well my Dad had just passed three years before so there were only two family members to say goodbye to his mom and I wasn’t one of them. If you’re in the profession you know the drill…this was only the beginning of many years of missing heartbreaking funerals.

Weeks later my sister gets married. A beautiful Hotel Del Coronado wedding. The closest I get to the Hotel Del or Coronado Island is watching an old Marilyn Monroe movie that was filmed there before I was born. Again, little did I realize that this would be only one of many weddings that I would be forced to miss in the name of Air Traffic. Sometimes after a long night of studying and working KC135’s (flying fuel tanks) with engine fires and hot brakes I would collapse in the metal bed with the scratchy wool blanket and listen to the others coming and going and laughing and living. We (and I do mean “we,” as my profession morphed to become my family) had a song for those lucky ones, who still owned their own bodies, who worked nine to five, making heady decisions while pushing paper, not tin: “I want to be an Admin’ Ranger…livin’ a life of paperwork and danger.”

It’s 1984 and I am bound for civilian life. As I clean out a gun-metal gray locker in a gun-metal gray room, I take the Federal Aviation manual, the bible of all Air Traffic Controllers, the dog eared, scribbled on, highlighted, and long since memorized 7110.65 and purposefully and happily drop it into a nearby trashcan. I am reminded of all of those beautiful Junes when the beach beckoned and we would trash our notebooks on the last day of school with a sense of freedom and excitement. Of course it’s Caribou, Maine here and while late spring, the black snow banks on the roadsides were towering into the phone lines and unwilling to melt.

As I drive away from the base and glance back at the ATC tower where my dark home of two years sits buried in a drab basement, I have no idea that it is too late for me. The job is IN me. It is a part of me. It is now who I am. I am a tin pusher who talks fast, thinks fast, and speaks a different alphabet. That 7110.65 sits in the trash, but its words and its soul sit deep inside of me.

I had no idea that last day in Maine that a future of missed funerals and missed weddings still awaited me. I hadn’t an inkling that the future would unfold around missed birthdays, missed school plays, missed dinners and missed bedtime stories with children that haven’t even been born yet.

It’s 1985 and I have spent three months studying almost 20 hours per day and night to pass the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City. No television, no relaxing; my pilot husband sits on a Honolulu beach on a piloting assignment, and my best friend is a stack of 3x5 index cards to help me memorize non-radar rules of separating airplanes. The 15 foot snow banks of Maine replaced by the tornados and ice storms of Oklahoma.

Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years all come and go without family or celebration. Actually, I have a new family now---a mismatched group of students all pulling each other through an impossible screening process where we know that 60 % of us will not make it. The FAA Academy instructors even joked about it. “Look to your left and look to your right,” they said. “Of the three of you, two will not make it. If one of those other two people looks smarter than you, don’t unpack your bags.” We laugh together, cry together, and run problems together until the middle of the night. Our families back home are told not to visit because they might distract us.

We tell ourselves it’s OK to neglect them these few months; and all that matters is passing the screen; that we’ll make it up to them later. Forty percent of us passed that screen program in 1985. And not one of us made it up to our families. You see, we went on to our Towers, our TRACONs, and our Centers to a life of shift work, weekends, holidays, and constant stress. Whether a mom or a dad, single, married, or divorced, as government employees dedicated to the public’s safety we sacrificed our families, our friendships, and even our health for the system.

We miss school plays and home runs, Christmas mornings and turkey dinners, anniversaries and graduations. Our children eat their dinners alone and tuck themselves into bed. A staggering portion of controllers end up divorced from civilian spouses who can not tolerate the schedule and the stressed out faces we bring home, and those controllers marry other controllers because who else can understand the trenches and sympathize with the shift work and the war stories of the two that almost hit. Who else can speak the language?

I can not count the Christmas mornings that I watched for a “Santa” tag to playfully cross my scope, the result of a coworker’s holiday spirit, as my children sat home alone in front of a T.V. As any single parent knows, decent day care is not readily available for rotating shifts, nights, weekends and holidays.

It’s 1986 and I have quit! The stress that was Atlanta Center and its four year training program was already eating away at my marriage and my self esteem like an occupational cancer. Another 7110.65 finds its way into a trash can. This time I don’t feel that exhilarating sense of freedom but rather a weight lifted off my shoulders. Relief. Like the most stressful days of my life are now a memory and separating from the FAA is my chemotherapy.

Coming tomorrow....Tin Pusher Part Two