The opportunity and obstacles on the road to ‘supercharging’ ATC hiring

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On Feb. 27, U.S. transportation secretary Sean Duffy announced a plan to “supercharge” air traffic control hiring efforts at the Federal Aviation Administration. In the Trump Administration’s first major piece of air traffic control reform, the effort will increase wages by $5 per hour (30%) for students at the FAA’s training academy in Oklahoma City, streamline the ATC hiring process for applicants with no prior experience and realign candidate selection with a new “merit-based hiring process” that relies more heavily on a standardized aptitude test to fast track some applicants.

The plan is an attempt to remedy a critical problem. About 35% of students at the academy never become a controller, a senior FAA official told The Air Current, failing out of or leaving the program in what has become a serious blow to the FAA’s staffing goals, constrained the capacity of the National Airspace System (NAS) and contributed to an overall “erosion of safety margins” in the NAS, FAA safety experts found in 2023.

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The agency netted just 36 new controllers system-wide in fiscal year 2024, as ramped-up hiring efforts were effectively negated by attrition, mandatory retirement at age 56 and other losses. Despite several years of other efforts to increase hiring, the agency is still nearly 20% below its annual cumulative staffing target of about 13,000 controllers, TAC has learned.

While Duffy looks to narrow this gap with the new initiatives, questions remain over their ability to move the needle on staffing. Increasing training throughput at the academy could theoretically produce more controllers assuming they pass training, but academy graduates still need to complete on-the-job training at a real facility, a process that is much more dynamic and unpredictable. And while the Department of Transportation hopes pay bumps for students will incentivize applications and retention, the relatively low wages for new controllers undergoing this difficult on-the-job training remain unchanged.

“We need to pump up Oklahoma City,” said outgoing President of Airlines for America (A4A) Nick Calio during a March 4 Congressional testimony, explaining that Congress needs to also open up other pathways for hiring that circumvent the academy bottleneck — a sentiment shared by top U.S. airline leaders. Although Calio commended Duffy for his efforts, he was quick to say “It’s not going to be enough, the numbers don’t add up.”

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