Bush order could result in allowing private firms to run air tr

WASHINGTON -- Two decades after former President Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers, President Bush quietly signed an executive order stripping their successors of guaranteed government jobs.

Bush has proposed studying whether to hire a private company to take over the air traffic control system, now run by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The president of the air traffic controllers' union immediately criticized Bush's order, which was announced Thursday.

"This action is a slap in the face to the men and women who worked President Bush's aircraft as he flew from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska on Sept. 11," said John Carr, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the successor union to the group disbanded after 1981 when they went out on strike.