Flight Service Sigmet

While NAATS was having its union authorization vote, NATCA (National Air Traffic Controllers Association) was having a leadership election. John Carr lost to challenger Pat Forrey.

We were not privy to the campaign the two nominees waged, and our contacts in the centers and towers are not extensive enough to warrant more than an anecdotal glance at possible reasons Mr. Carr failed to win re-election, but so far we’ve come up with three :

- lack of results in recent negotiations
- Abrasive approach and commentary
- Inability to realize and work with the new labor/management realities in the FAA.

Granted, those are rather inter-related and there is probably more to the story, but all-in-all we are not surprised. In our posts of 12/11/05 (“Mr. Carr gets a Blog”) and 12/1/05 (“The Archaic Playbook”) we stated that Mr. Carr was not grasping the new realities of FAA labor-management relations. From what we’ve learned about the election outcome so far, it seems that NATCA controllers have agreed with our assessment.

# posted by Skywise @ 6:19 PM