CHICAGO — As Tawn Makela grapples with the controls of the weather-ragged Learjet, she hears the wind rustle pieces of the American economy.
Crammed inside the plane is a mountain of clear plastic bags, each stuffed with checks: Paychecks. Rent checks. Mortgage checks. Tax refund checks. Checks to buy companies. Checks to settle divorces.
She's carrying nearly 2,500 pounds of paper worth more than $1.5 billion. That's just for the first leg of Makela's shift, which takes her from Chicago to Columbus, Ohio.
Check pilots -- An article in Tuesday's Section A about freight pilots who fly bundles of checks worth billions of dollars around the country misspelled the town of Bolingbrook, Ill., as Bollingbrook.
By the time the sun rises, and she returns home, she will have spent nearly nine hours in the air -- picking up and dumping off a fortune in Syracuse, N.Y.; Windsor Locks, Conn.; and St. Paul, Minn.
"It's more money than most small countries have in their entire economy," said Makela, 35, a Chicago-based pilot for AirNet Systems Inc. "What we do is cool. It's cool to say that you are responsible for so much cash."
To collect their money, U.S. banks depend on pilots such as Makela -- known by some as "freight dogs" -- to transport an estimated 36.7 billion checks a year from one financial center to another.
Sometimes this pricey cargo is sent directly to a bank's regional offices, which will process the check and pay out the money. Other times, the checks go to a clearinghouse -- such as a branch of the Federal Reserve -- which, for a fee, will route the funds appropriately.
But that's about to change. And the freight pilots' way of life is threatened.
Check 21, a federal law that took effect in late October, lets financial institutions send digital copies of these checks to one another over the Internet. That will allow banks to collect payment sooner, and eliminate the physical process of moving checks across the country.
The nation's leading financial groups say they will gradually phase in electronic processing this year. The Federal Reserve Banks, which already have rolled out new Check 21 software and services, will cut their number of check-processing centers by nearly half over the next year.
At the same time, consumers are leaving their checkbooks behind in favor of debit and credit cards.
In 2003, the number of electronic payments surpassed check payments, according to a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve and electronic payments companies. Payments made by paper check have declined at an annual rate of 4.3% since 2000, according to Federal Reserve officials. Electronic transfers, however, have grown 13.2% annually.
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