The United States has been short of air traffic controllers for years.
Nick Daniels, president of their union, the National Association of Air Traffic Controllers, said:
In an interview with CNBC, Daniels said the situation has “at a critical point.”
“We currently have 10,800 certified professional controllers needed. [to have] 14,633. What hiccups, government shutdowns, or disrupting the incoming air traffic controller pipeline will completely damage the ability to fly and the number of planes that can safely enter the air at any time,” he added.
The shortage is not new, and staffing has hovered at similar levels over the past decade, but recent events like the fatal collisions of American Airlines’ regional jets and Army Black Hawk helicopters in Washington, DC, have focused on the importance of filling these jobs, even though they have not necessarily come as a result of errors caused by air traffic control.
The Federal Aviation Administration has limited flights in busy areas like New York due to insufficient number of controllers.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has repeatedly said that the lack of staffing has caused numerous delays in air travel.
“Last Blue Sky Days, there were days without weather in the system, with 68% of delays being due to air traffic control restrictions,” Kirby said at the Cerawek Energy Conference earlier this month. “No matter what the weather is, we’re late every day in New York because they’re simply understaffed.”
In 2023, the FAA announced an expanded air traffic training initiative that will enable qualified schools to provide comparable training. The Daytona Beach Air Transport Program at Enbredl Aviation University in Florida, Florida, was just accredited in 2024 and is the program’s fourth school.
Additionally, Transport Secretary Sean Duffy announced that trainees from the FAA’s leading academy of air traffic controllers in Oklahoma will receive an additional $5 per hour to help recruit.
There is also concern about aging computers and other systems used by the FAA.
“Today we have a computer in 2025, based on Windows 95 and floppy disks.
After the outage of the major pilot notification system that grounded thousands of flights in 2023, the US Government’s Accountability Office determined that 51 of the 138 FAA systems that provide something like communications were unsustainable and needed to be modernized.
Watch the video to learn more about the FAA’s employment of technology and air traffic controllers and what it is doing to fix it.
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