Skip to footer

What can be done to alleviate shortage of air traffic controllers?

The labor union representing American air traffic controllers warns air traffic control facilities are understaffed, but they say there’s a solution. 

|
Mike Blake/Reuters/File
A Southwest airlines arrives to land at the San Diego International Airport in San Diego, California, April 22, 2013. The air traffic controllers’ union says the Federal Aviation Administration hasn't been hiring nearly enough people to replace retiring workers.

America’s busiest airports are experiencing staffing shortages among fully qualified air traffic controllers, a crisis that demands "urgent attention," a government watchdog told lawmakers on Tuesday.

Matthew Hampton, a Department of Transportation assistant inspector general, told members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's aviation subcommittee that the number of certified controllers are "below the minimum staffing requirements" the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has set for the facilities.

The situation is worst in thirteen of the nation's busiest air traffic control facilities including New York, Dallas, Denver, and Chicago, according to Hampton.

Hampton attributed the shortages to a combination of lengthy training requirements, which mean a large share of controllers are still being trained and not yet competent to work on their own, and the number of experienced controllers reaching the eligible age for retirement.

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association labor union has been sounding the alarm that shortages were coming for several years. The calls reached a new level of urgency in October when the union called for a congressional hearing, citing a 10 percent decline since 2011. As of August, the union said, there were fewer than 10,900 certified staffers at the 316 air traffic control centers in the US, the lowest in 27 years.

Tuesday, union president Paul Rinaldi presented the subcommittee with a series of recommendations to alleviate the shortage of qualified controllers monitoring US skies.

First and foremost, recommended that the FAA post an "open and continuous vacancy for the experienced air traffic controllers."

The association is also calling upon the agency to streamline its hiring process, by “easing the bottlenecks and bureaucratic delays in Human Resources, security, and medical.”

Thirdly, the union advised a less bureaucratic and more expeditious transfer policy for current FAA controllers, “one that takes into account the needs of the entire NAS as a whole, not 315 policies, one for each individual facility.”

The union noted, “this transfer policy would also encourage experienced controllers at lower level facilities to voluntarily move up, at their own expense, to busier, more complex facilities.”

This report contains material from The Associated Press.

[Editor's note: The original version misspelled the name of NATCA'S Paul Rinaldi.]

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to What can be done to alleviate shortage of air traffic controllers?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2015/1208/What-can-be-done-to-alleviate-shortage-of-air-traffic-controllers
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe