ALPA and NATCA Team Up for Aviation Collaboration and Safety

Several ALPA representatives, including ALPA president Capt. Lee Moak, presented at NATCA’s 2013 Communicating for Safety (CFS) Conference this week. The Association’s perspective was universally praised as a positive step toward maintaining lines of communication with the controllers who guide you to your destination every day.

Moak participated on an aviation leadership panel that addressed how collaborative relationships between labor and management throughout the industry contribute to improved aviation safety. “When it comes to safety, we generally agree on 99 percent of everything, and perhaps disagree on 1 percent,” Moak said. “We can’t let that one percent define our relationship. What your members are most interested in is results. This is the time to come together in the aviation industry, labor, and regulatory environment.”

Other ALPA pilots who presented included Capt. Greg Downs (UAL) on the Confidential Information Sharing Program, a program to allow collaborative use of ATSAP (a program similar to ASAP for controllers) and ASAP data to enhance safety, as well as on an interactive panel on pilot–controllers communication; F/Os Blake Koehn and Matt Preysz, both of ASA, who detailed performance characteristics of the CRJ to help illustrate the connection between aircraft performance and ATC services pilots might request or be unable to accept; and F/O Marc Henegar (ALA), chair of ALPA's Air Traffic Services group, on performance-based navigation.

CFS hot topics included ways to improve pilot–controller communications, NextGen projects and their role in increasing NAS efficiency, and encouraging both pilots and controllers to see their workspace and workload from each other’s point of view.

To that end, Capt. Moak also introduced a collaborative video project to the controllers, showcasing the role ALPA is playing in educating airline pilots about the ATC system and facilities, including asking ALPA pilots to tour their ATC facilities and meet the controllers they interact with daily.

ALPA also played an instrumental role in helping NATCA establish a Professional Standards program, heavily modeled after ALPA's own. NATCA National Professional Standards representatives Garth Koleszar and Jeff Richards said the hidden success of the program is the realization that the peer-to-peer process really works. "It's worked for ALPA for 50 years; it's working for us now," Richards said.

During the awards luncheon, Koleszar and Richards presented ALPA's Professional Standards Committee vice chair, Capt. Charlie Schenk (FDX), with an award for helping to get the program up and running. “There's no way we'd be here today without the leadership of ALPA,” Koleszar said. They also thanked Capt. John Rosenberg (DAL), ALPA's Professional Standards Committee chair, who was unable to attend.

More than 1,000 air traffic controllers, the largest-ever group on record, attended the conference, many on their own dime, using personal vacation time. Their dedication to safety is infectious. For more CFS coverage, look for the March issue of Air Line Pilot, coming soon.