O’Hare Air Control Errors Probed

CHICAGO — Federal safety inspectors are launching a special investigation of air-traffic controller errors at O’Hare International Airport because of an unexplained jump in their mistakes, an official said today.

Mike Benson, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington, said controllers have made 20 errors in routing jets in the congested sky over the Chicago area since the beginning of the year--three of them on Monday and Tuesday of this week. He said the 20 amounted to more mistakes than O’Hare controllers made in all of last year, but he didn’t know the exact number of errors committed in 1987.