Patrick Forrey, President, National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Biography provided by participant
Patrick Forrey began his three-year term in September 2006 as the fifth president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association after a 23-year career as an air traffic controller at the Cleveland Air Route Traffic Control Center (ZOB) and nearly two decades as an elected NATCA Representative. Forrey served as the union's Great Lakes Regional Vice President from 2000 to 2006 after 10 years as the union's facility representative at Cleveland Center. In addition to earning a Bachelor of Science degree in communications, he has completed extensive arbitration advocate training, air safety investigator training and classification and compensation training. Forrey is also a licensed pilot. Ingrained in Forrey's core value system is the belief that unions fight for an individuals rights to respect and dignity in the work environment and that a union must collectively bargain for the prosperity of the membership and promotion of the profession.As a NATCA leader, Forrey insists that the union continue to foster a relationship between labor and management and to lead the world in innovation and productivity.
I just released this statement following the announcement today by the Obama Administration that it will appoint a team of mediators to immediately address the contract dispute between the Federal Aviation Administration and NATCA. “With this bold step, President Obama is fulfilling his commitment to the safety and modernization of the air traffic control system and to the dedicated men and women safety professionals who run the system each day. President Obama is showing the leadership that will guide a positive way forward in which aviation safety professionals will be included as valued stakeholders. As the president made clear, a… Read more
The FAA, in a memo written by its own manager at Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center, admits that a loss of human capital and empty chairs in front of the radar scopes at Denver TRACON has forced it to restrict the flow of traffic into busy, growing, capacity-blessed Denver International Airport. That means flight delays, caused by FAA mismanagement of the controller staffing crisis which included imposed work rules and pay cuts on Labor Day 2006 that caused a surge in attrition far beyond FAA's projections and left the country's busiest air traffic facilities woefully short of experienced controllers.… Read more
The FAA's aviation safety professionals represented by NATCA believe that topping the aviation side of the administrative challenges list for Secretary-designee LaHood is the urgency to resolve our contract dispute with the FAA. As I wrote in my press statement Friday upon the nomination of Secretary-designee LaHood by President-elect Obama, the FAA is arguably the most anti- labor agency in all of government. Secretary-designee LaHood will have the unenviable task of rebuilding an agency that long ago lost the confidence of its front-line safety workforce. Our nation's aviation safety professionals must never again be treated as the enemy if we… Read more
While this discussion on the surface transportation law is interesting and important, I would like to draw your attention to a serious infrastructure problem that has reached a critical mass - our nation's runways and airspace. There's other reauthorization business on Capitol Hill to attend to, namely the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill, which was passed by the House in September 2007 but left unfinished by the Senate after a lengthy and frustrating succession of extensions and delays. NATCA, which represents FAA air traffic controllers and several thousand other FAA-employed safety professionals, would submit that passage of this FAA bill… Read more
Biography provided by participant
