w
W W hen the average person
thinks of an air traffic controller, the
image that probably comes to mind is a
chain-smoking, disheveled character
chewing on his finger nails as he tries
to keep planes from splattering into
each other.
However, that is not the situation in
the tower at Eugene’s Mahlon Sweet
Airport.
There are four controllers at work,
only one of whom could be called busy.
The other three handle a plane every
five minutes or so and are able to relax
— joking, slurping coffee and fighting
monotony.
Controller Gary Nelson says his job
“is hours of boredom with seconds of
terror. I forget who said that but it is a
good way to describe what goes on.”
Chief controller Tom Jost says
Eugene has an average of 455
takeoffs and landings a day.
“That’s not real busy,” says Jost,
“but it’s enough to keep us from getting
bored."
Jost explains air traffic work at
Mahlon Sweet isn’t too stressful be
cause of the number of flights, but
“since we don’t have radar and every
thing we do here is manual, there is a
lot of stress involved.”
What? No radar? How do you know
where planes are?
“We have to rely on the pilot’s re
ports,” says Nelson.
Aircraft in Oregon airspace are con
trolled by a master computer in Seattle.
Flights to Eugene are turned over to
the Mahlon Sweet tower when they are
30 miles from the airport. A pilot relays
his position, estimated time of arrival
and other information to the tower. He
is given final landing instructions 10
miles from Eugene.
Nelson brings in a United Airlines
737 from San Francisco.
“Ah, Roger United 932, we have you
dear on 34 for landing.”
Now, you know exactly where that
plane is?
“Yeah, he’ll come bustin’ out of
those douds” — Nelson points to the
south — “in a couple of minutes.” The
jet emerges from the damp sweatshirt
sky. This time Nelson was right.
Jost says the quality of pilot today is
high, as he says, “It has to be." How
ever, it hasn’t always been this way.
"Yeah, back when I first got into the
business, I had to wonder how a few of
them got into the air,” Jost says.
As it is, there are Sunday pitots just
as there are Sunday drivers.
"We had a woman fly in here from
Plane controllers
fight boredom, not
ulcers, air crashes
By GARY LEY
Of the Emerald
Graphic by Jim Payne
Portland last year,” says Jost. “She
asked for permission to land and we
assigned her a runway. She said
Okay’ and then landed on another
runway.
“So we asked her why she didn’t
land where we told her to. She said,
‘but this is the runway I used when I
flew into Eugene last time.”’
A big, effervescent guy, Jost says 95
percent of all controllers are
extroverts. He goes on to explain
“This is a job where you have to be
certain in your decisions. In this case,
the meek very definitely do not inherit
the earth.”
Air traffic control is becoming a popu
lar business. Jost says more and more
people are going into it and that there is
no problem finding qualified people.
He estimates four of every ten appli
cants for the air traffic training school in
Oklahoma City, only will make it into
the field.
“Two will be disqualified through the
physical — heart trouble, high blood
pressure, bad eyesight, this kind of
thing— and four others will decide the
effort they have to make isn’t worth it.
There is a lot of work involved in be
coming an air traffic controller,”. Jost
says.
As federal employees, the Eugene
controllers have their salaries set by
Congress. Jost says the average
Eugene controller makes about
$22,000 and can retire at age 50 with a
pension of $12,000 a year.
Jost says most of the Eugene con
trollers are pilots themselves, and in
his own flying he often finds himself
criticizing the controller who handles
his approach.
“Y’know, I find myself saying, Geez,
I could have got myself down by now.’
It’s like anything else, we all think we re
the best at whatever we do,” Jost said.
Without radar or computers, the
equipment in the Eugene tower is not
as intimidating as one would expect.
The most sophisticated thing is a direc
tion finder (DF), a contraption that
locks onto a plane s radio signal.
On the screen of the DF, a green blip
throbs showing the direction in which
the signal is coming from but does not
indicate distance.
The controllers say their job will be
"a whole lot easier" once the tower
gets radar, an area of three or four
miles can be allotted around each
plane. Right now, 20 or 30 miles must
be provided.
Is there anything else he’d like to
make his job easier?
“Well," says Nelson, “a higher tower
would help."
Oral bidding for timber returns to NW area
The House voted Monday in favor of oral
bidding for Forest Service timber, a practice
recently banned but once long used in the
Pacific Northwest.
‘‘Passage of the oral auction bill repre
sents a great victory for the small, indepen
dent mills of the Northwest,” said Con
gressman Jim Weaver, D-Ore. Tuesday.
Weaver lauded the restoration of oral
bidding as assurance of “a stable timber
supply for the communities who rely on fed
eral timber."
Presently, lumber companies must sub
mit sealed bids for timber located on public
land.
Sealed bidding, traditional in the East
and South, has been required nationwide
for only the past eight months. The practice
has been opposed vigorously by the timber
industry in the Northwest, where most
commercial timber is located in national
forests.
Monty Montgomery, Associated Oregon
Loggers (AOL) executive vice-president,
said Tuesday the vast majority of AOL
members are delighted with the House
vote.
Orptfnn Hailv RmaralH
“We don’t have an official position on
sealed versus oral bids,” Montgomery said.
But an unofficial show of hands at the an
nual AOL conference in Eugene last month
showed 80 to 90 percent of the AOL favored
oral bids, he said.
The Senate adopted a similar repeal last
September, so the measure now goes to
Pres. Carter for his signature or veto. The
administration has opposed the bill.
Weaver, however, said, "The White
House has assured me that Pres. Carter
will sign the bill because of its importance in
fostering a diversified and healthy timber
industry.”
A 1976 law that went into effect only last
July required sealed bids unless the agricul
ture secretary — after a Forest Service in
vestigation — prescribed another proce
dure because of local circumstances.
The House Agriculture Committee lead
ership, labor groups and timber industry
supporters said the repeal measure would
allow a return to oral auctions, but would
limit them to prospective buyers who had
submitted sealed bids that exceeded the
timber’s appraised value.
But the House Environmental Study Con
ference disagreed, saying the measure ef
fectively would allow a return to historic bid
ding patterns that have been in practice
since 1945.
Under that practice, the agriculture sec
retary and the Forest Service tailor proce
dures to particular markets, emphasizing
competition and economic stability over
price-fixing problems.
Until the new law went into effect, sealed
bids were the norm in the South and East,
auctions in the Northwest — where most of
the public forests are — and a mix else
where.
The 1976 law assumes that collusion is a
greater problem than local economic bal
ances, said Rep. John Krebs, D-Calif., the
law's author. He said the Justice Depart
ment has six collusive-bidding investiga
tions in progress.
"Our position is that if there's going to be
collusion, it can happen just as easily with
sealed bids as oral bids," said Dave Fidan
que, Weaver’s aide in Eugene.
‘‘This law formalizes a way for the Forest
Service to monitor bidding patterns" to pre
vent collusion, Fidanque said.
The sealed-bids mandate was voted into
law by a House-Senate conference com
mittee on new forest-management policy
without the traditional hearings and commit
tee action. The House previously voted to
require sealed bidding on relatively small
sales.
Supporters of repeal said communities
that depended economically on timber
going to local mills established a pattern of
bidding through oral auctions to assure that
the needs of all local firms were met.
Supporters also said 20 mills have been
forced to dose since the new regulation
went into effect, and complained that out
siders are able to outbid local interests
under sealed bidding. The Forest Service
said it could not confirm any mill dosings.
The service has declared 183 towns
economically dependent on public timber
lands, mostly in the West, where the
agency’s sealed-bidding regulations allow
75 percent of the annual sales to be by oral
auctions.
Pam 7 Section A