Overworked Air Traffic Controllers Add to Growing Concerns About Flight Safety

The U.S. government doesn't employ enough air traffic controllers — the people who coordinate the movement of planes on the ground and in the sky — a shortfall that has contributed to a swath of delayed flights and additional safety issues.

Staffing issues have plagued the Federal Aviation Administration since the early 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan fired traffic controllers en masse after a strike. As more traffic controllers retired and recruitment efforts were limited, the FAA has failed to adequately replace those workers, according to a November report commissioned by the agency.

The 35-day government shutdown of 2018-2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic only worsened the situation. The FAA now has 1,000 fewer traffic controllers than it did in 2012 and is understaffed by about 3,000 positions, according to reports. That's unlikely to improve, as the November report estimates a net gain of fewer than 200 controllers will be hired over the next decade.

About 40% of the FAA's facilities meet the agency's 85% controller staffing threshold, according to agency data viewed by the Journal. On a national scale, though, the FAA has only 81% of the fully certified controllers it needs to employ, according to the Journal.

“FAA’s flawed staffing model and inconsistent hiring has resulted in new hires not keeping pace with attrition over the past decade,” Rich Santa, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association union said earlier this year. “The status quo is no longer sustainable.”  

Although the FAA says it's able to limit safety risks, the agency has had to slow down air traffic over the past year to prevent incidents. An agency spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that it does so to maintain safety when there aren't enough controllers.

“Efficiency never comes at the expense of safety,” Frank McIntosh, the FAA’s deputy chief operating officer of operations, told the Journal. “I don’t think we have an erosion of safety based on our current levels of staffing, because we have ways of mitigating individual staffing issues.”

There have been around 300 near-miss collisions involving commercial airplanes over the past 12 months leading up to August, according to The New York Times. The National Traffic Safety Board has been examining safety issues as it investigates the string of near-collisions and — so far — hasn't said that staffing issues played a role in those incidents.

The FAA has reported 202 serious and "potentially significant" aviation-related issues over the last fiscal year, up from 133 in the prior fiscal year, according to the Journal. In one instance, an American Airlines jet narrowly missed a Frontier Airlines plane on a San Francisco runway.

Union leaders representing the controllers warn that their members are overworked and fatigued from long shifts, with some controllers working six-day weeks and 10-hour days. Santa, the union president, told the Journal that members are trying to mitigate safety risks, but are increasingly stressed by the work required and overtime.

One controller filed three incident reports in a single shift after a long week.

"There was nobody available to get me out even if I wanted to get out," the controller wrote in a report uploaded to a federal database that tracks aviation safety issues. "This trend at our [air] field is going to get someone hurt. We can't run 2 hour sessions 6 days a week indefinitely without it having a detrimental impact on safety," they added.

The FAA is expected to announce this week the formation of a special panel to review the impact and safety risks of on-the-job fatigue affecting air traffic controllers, according to CBS News, citing sources familiar with the announcement.