Airline Executives attending this week’s Global Aerospace Summit, convened by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, DC, expressed mounting frustration with air traffic controller staffing (ATC) shortages, which they’ve been blaming recent years’ near-constant string of nationwide flight disruptions.
Discussing the nation’s 3,000-person controller shortage, they said ATC understaffing (which falls under the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) purview) stands to continue causing widespread air travel disruptions for at least five years to come.
In a May interview, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg revealed that roughly one in five controller positions in the U.S. currently sit vacant. “We have thousands of controllers in training right now but also a number who are eligible to retire,” he said.
Right now, the FAA has a total of about 13,300 controllers, more than one-quarter (26 percent) of whom are reportedly still trainees. The nation’s certified controllers currently number about 10,700, roughly the same as in 2022 and 2021, but own 10 percent from 2012 levels.
Nick Calio of Airlines for America (A4A), a trade group that represents major U.S. carriers, told CNN at the conference that the FAA’s hiring efforts are “not going to be enough” for rapid recovery, even the maximum number of trainees are admitted and graduate from the agency’s single certification academy.
PHOTO: A control tower at Philadelphia International Airport. (photo via ErikaMitchell/iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus)
The FAA has about 2,600 controllers currently in training and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), is requesting another $117 million in government funding to bring 1,800 more onboard next year. The FAA declined to comment beyond referring Reuters to its August statement, which said it has met its 2023 goal of hiring 1,500 controller trainees, which still leaves it 3,000 short of staffing targets.
He suggests sanctioning universities with air traffic controller programs to also provide certification courses, as is already done in other countries.”It will take five to seven years [of hiring] to break even if all goes well,” Calio said. “Do we need five to seven years of further disruption on a daily basis? I don’t think so.”
United Airlines’ CEO Scott Kirby told Reuters that the ATC staffing issue, “was two decades in building and it is going to take years to get it addressed.” He opined that the controller shortage is especially problematic when airlines are trying to cope with extreme weather conditions. “The same weather that in the past we could have managed through now can cause hundreds of delays, or even hundreds of cancellations,” said Kirby.
American Airlines’ CEO Robert Isom, who has been outspoken this year already in his criticism of the FAA, said, “If you were pleased with this summer in terms of air transportation, it’s going to get a lot tougher, and if you weren’t pleased, it’s going to be a lot worse as we look forward.”
A government watchdog organization said in June that critical ATC facilities are facing such significant challenges that it poses a risk to the safety of air traffic operations. At several key facilities, controllers work mandatory overtime and six days a week to cover continued staffing insufficiencies.
Even so, “Controller availability is not the cause of most cancellations and delays that we see,” Buttigieg asserted in his May interview with CNN. “The (staffing) gaps that we’ve seen have built up over years. This is nothing that we can’t prepare for… But this is part of why we’re working so hard to train new air traffic controllers.”
For the latest travel news, updates and deals, be sure to subscribe to the daily TravelPulse newsletter here.
Topics From This Article to Explore
