I have been at Cleveland for the past 29 years and have witnessed the repeated failures of the FAA to provide a safe and efficient ATC system while wasting untold billions of the taxpayer's dollars. This article is an attempt to point out the reasons for these failures on a local level and to suggest what I hope are possible solutions. Our job as controllers has been and should continue to be, providing safe, orderly, and expeditious handling of air traffic. We provide a service to a flying public that expects nothing less than perfection, and rightfully so.
Failure is unacceptable.
Divided into 7 areas, each with up to 7 sectors, a weekday shift has about 110 controllers. Our traffic count has grown dramatically in the 90's and we typically handle 8,500 to 9,500 operations a day. I have personally worked as many as 28 aircraft at once, as have most Cleveland Center controllers. Chaos on July 14, It's a hot and humid day in the Midwest. This cuts off the flow of traffic across the busiest airways in the world, affecting cross-country flights from the east and west coast as well as all the traffic in and out of ORD from the east.