Data from the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t paint a rosy picture for staffing of airport towers and approach facilities in the United States.
CNN reports that roughly 70% of staffing targets were filled by fully certified controllers as of September 2023. When controllers who are currently in training are included, that number rose to about 79%.
And for some traffic control towers at major airports around the country, such as Philadelphia, Orlando, Austin, Albuquerque, and Milwaukee, there was less than 60% of staffing targets filled with certified controllers. Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, where an American Eagle flight collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter on Wednesday night, had about 63%.
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association union has also been warning about staffing shortages for more than a decade.
In April 2024, the union said in a release that, “NATCA is concerned that with an already understaffed controller workforce, immediate application of the Administrator’s new rules may lead to coverage holes in air traffic facilities’ schedules. These holes may affect National Airspace System capacity. Requiring controllers to work mandatory overtime to fill those holes would increase fatigue and make the new policy nothing more than window dressing.”
On Thursday, the union’s president, Nick Daniels, said that it was premature to speculate on the root cause of the DCA collision. He also said it’s not uncommon for air traffic controllers to “combine” or “de-combine sectors to ensure that we can maximize efficiency and safety.”
These staffing shortages come in part because of attrition during the Covid-19 pandemic and the stringent training that is required for new hires, according to experts. In 2023, an inspector general report noted how that the pandemic led to training pauses, increasing certification times for new controllers.
The report also noted that the FAA had made “limited efforts” to ensure adequate staffing.
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