07/06/10
It's a high stress job,
safeguarding thousands of lives
every minute.
But as many as one out of four
air traffic controllers
at any given control center
are barely out of training.
The problem dates back to
the 1981 strike
by air traffic controllers.
President Ronald Reagan
fired the lot of them.
The young controllers
hired to replace them
are now hitting
mandatory retirement age,
forcing the FAA to train
a brand-new crop of
twenty-somethings.
The FAA has planned for this,
hiring and training some
17,000 new controllers.
But inevitably, critics argue
that all those novices
make the system less safe.
Today the Washington Post
reports that so far this year,
there have been 22 near misses
in the skies above
the Washington DC area,
more than took place
in all of last year.
それは大勢の命にかかわる
大変な仕事。
だが航空管制官の4人に1人が
訓練を終えたばかりの新人だ。
1981年に管制官が
ストライキを起こし―
一斉に解雇されたのが発端。
代わりに雇われた人々が
今や定年を迎えるため―
若者を雇って
訓練せざるをえなくなった。
連邦航空局は事態を見越して
1万7,000人を採用したが―
その初心者たちが
安全性を脅かすとの声も。
ある新聞によると今年に入って
首都上空で22回のニアミスがあり―
昨年をすでに上回った。
