Controllers face pay loss in walkout
Bv UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
The slowdown in commercial flight operations slowly spread Monday across the country, and the government warned absentee air traffic controllers they faced a double loss of pay for each day they stay off their jobs.
Transportation Secretary John A. Volpe said the walkout, six days old, "will not be allowed to go on indefinitely."
Volpe refused to say exactly how he planned to break the back of what the Federal Aviation Administration considers an illegal strike.
For the moment, at least, his strategy appeared to consist of holding a stick over controllers taking part in the walkout and offering a carrot to those remaining at work, in the form of cash bonuses in some cases as well as favored consideration for promotions.
In the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where only one-fourth of regularly assigned controllers showed up Monday at the regional control center, the FAA sent about 60 letters of "proposed separation" giving ab-
sentees five days to present valid excuses for staying home before they lose their jobs. Volpe made no mention of firings at his Washington news conference.
He said the result of a contempt of court hearing Wednesday against officers of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) could determine what the government does next. PATCO has ignored a United States District Court restraining order against the walkout.
A Brooklyn federal court judge, acting on a petition by 13 airlines and the American Transportation Association, issued a temporary restraining order forbidding any more "sick calls."
Judge Orrin G. Judd acted after attorneys for the airlines claimed the sick calls were "done intentionally and without any justification in law."
Judd's order directed PATCO to show Friday at 10 a.m. why the injunction should not be made permanent.
Meanwhile, with the New York-Chicago corridor operating at half its normal traffic load under FAA
orders, the situation in the San Francisco Bay area worsened, requiring a 50 per cent reduction in departures and arrivals there.
The slowdown hit Milwaukee for the first time, when half the 10 controllers at the Mitchell Field tower failed to show up for the morning shift.
An Eastern Airlines DC-8 arrived in Philadelphia 18 hours and 35 minutes late from Miami. Its scheduled departure time was 1:55 p.m. Sunday but not until 8:30 a.m. Monday did it get airborne.
Eastern blamed the delay on the controllers walk-out and said the plane burned so much fuel waiting on the runway it had to return for refueling before it could take off.
There were continued flight delays and cancellations, but crowds at many airports were about normal, suggesting that would-be air travelers had decided to seek other ways of reaching their destinations. Good flying weather in much of the country helped ease the controllers and supervisors on the job.
80th Year, No.103 The University of Kansas—Lawrence, Kansas Tuesday, March 31, 1970
Photo by Ron Bishop
Neurosurgeon named acting head at KUMC
Haworth comes down
Haworth Hall is being demolished. The razing began last Thursday and with it went another of KU's traditions. The building will be replaced by the proposed Wescoe Hall which has been in the planning for more than two years. Wescoe Hall will provide the much needed classroom space which Haworth was not able to provide.
Dr. George A. Wolf Jr., dean of the Kansas University School of Medicine and provost of the Medical Center in Kansas City, has resigned. Chancellor E. Laurence Chalmers announced the acting provost and dean would be Dr. Charles E. Brackett Jr.
Brackett, who will serve while the search committee looks for a new administrative head for the Medical Center, will take control of the Medical Center about April 21.
He is presently chief of the neurosurgery section and professor of surgery at the Medical Center. He joined the staff there in 1952 as an instructor in surgery. He has headed the neurological surgery section since 1964 and has been director of an inter-departmental program to study the relation of head injury to vital organ functions since 1967.
Brackett. 50, is a native of New England. He was born in Portsmouth, N.H., received an A.B. degree from Harvard and his M.D. degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1944.
Wolf, who has been the chief administrative officer of the Medical Center since September, 1966, has accepted an appointment as professor of internal medicine at the University of Vermont at Burlington.
UDK News Roundup
By United Press International
Suit to end demonstrations
ST. LOUIS—Four Washington University students, three of them in the ROTC program. Monday filed a $7.7 million damage suit to compel Chancellor Thomas Eliot to stop anti-ROTC demonstrations which plagued the campus last week.
The suit blames university officials for the continuing disruptions of ROTC classes, saying they had the power to stop them but failed to do so. Last Friday's classes were cancelled for all students after a night of violence, in which eight policemen and one student were injured and windows in campus buildings were broken.
Quake toll nears 2000
GEDIZ, Turkey—Thousands fled the smoldering rubble that was once Gediz, and pitched tents today in hills above the wreckage, rescue workers said, may hide enough corpses to raise the death toll in Saturday's earthquake to 2,000.
New postal wage offered
WASHINGTON—The Nixon administration has given the nation's postal unions an undisclosed written proposal, presumably a new wage offer, as attempts continued today to solve the grievances which triggered the country's first post office strike.
The proposal apparently resulted from a meeting Monday between President Nixon and Postmaster General Winton M. Blount. Blunt said Nixon was "very hopeful we can conclude the negotiations very soon . . progress has been made to settle the differences."
Students hijack plane
FUKUOKA, Japan (UPI)— Fifteen radical students armed with daggers Tuesday hijacked a Japan Air Lines jet and ordered the pilot to fly to North Korea after the plane had spent five hours in captivity on an airport thronged with riot police and spectators.
The Boeing 727 tri-jet left Fukuoka airport at 10:39 p.m. with 102 passengers, two of them Americans, and seven crewmen.
Minutes before the plane roared down the runway and climbed steeply into southern Japanese skies, the plane's captors allowed 29 passengers to disembark. They were women and children.
The hijackers demanded that the pilot fly them to Pungnyung, located northeast of Pyongyang, capital of North Korea. The flying distance is about 500 miles and the flight would take about
one hour at normal cruising speed.
The plane was on a 90-minute non-stop flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka, a major U.S. and Japanese air base on Japan's southern island of Kyushu. It originally carried 131 passengers and seven crewmen when it was hijacked, the first air piracy in Japanese history.
Two of the students belonging to the extremely radical Red Army told the pilot, Capt. Shinji Iishida, they would blow up the American-built aircraft if he refused to fly across the Sea of Japan to a military base in North Korea.
The students held the passengers and crew prisoner while the plane was refueled at Itazuke Air Base. The refueling was completed at 8:05 p.m. Two hours and 20 minutes later the plane took off.
Two passengers were identified as Americans. They were the Rev. Daniel S. McDonald, a Roman Catholic priest and Herbert Brill, an executive with the Pepsi Cola Company of Japan.
Father McDonald, 35, was working with the Japan Junior Chamber of Commerce in Tokyo.
In Seoul, military authorities announced that South Korean air force planes may try to intercept the hijacked plane if it flies over South Korean territory.
Hundreds of Japanese riot police armed with clubs, tear gas grenades and high pressure water cannons swarmed into the air base where the plane was standing.
But Ishida, biting his lip,
waved police and spectators away
from the red, white and blue air-
craft while ground crews refueled
it for a flight to Communist
North Korea.