A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released on Wednesday may offer the most comprehensive view yet of the nation’s air traffic controller shortage and the potential paths to resolve it.
The National Academies, which performs research for the federal government, found that ATC staffing levels have been declining for 15 years. In 2010, the number of understaffed ATC facilities was relatively small, and some were even overstaffed, but in the following years the FAA hired only two-thirds of the controllers called for by its staffing models. By fiscal year 2024, nearly a third of ATC facilities had fallen 10% below adequate staffing levels and about 22% had fallen 15% below.
The gradual slowdown in hiring eventually dug the nation’s ATC system into a giant hole, committee chair Bill Strickland said during a livestreamed presentation Wednesday.
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“If you think you need 10 people for your business and two of those people leave and you only hire one, now you only have nine, you don’t have 10,” he said. “And if you do that for 11 years you end up with a lot fewer people than you need, and that’s the situation FAA finds itself in.”
Researchers said the FAA was forced to curtail hiring during government shutdowns and the COVID-19 pandemic. They also pointed to the increasing dropout rate in the ATC training and certification process.
In 2010, 93% of trainees who entered the FAA’s ATC academy graduated, but by 2019 that figure had fallen to 79%, and in 2024 it dropped to 75%. Of all the trainees who set out to become certified professional controllers, only 61% actually received that credential as of 2019, down from 81% nine years earlier.
The FAA also stumbled by failing to distribute controllers to sites where they were most needed. The agency’s system of voluntary transfers does not fix the problem, the report found, leaving some facilities short on workers for long periods of time.
“Even if you have all the controllers that you thought you needed, remember, there are 313 facilities out there and every one of them needs to be staffed at the level that your staffing standard says you need, and unfortunately that’s not the case,” Strickland said.
Curiously, the report found that while controller overtime use has risen significantly since 2013, there was no apparent correlation between overtime and staffing levels at ATC facilities, meaning that adequately staffed facilities were likely to use just as much overtime as understaffed ones. There has also been a 4% reduction in hours worked per full-time equivalent, which would not be expected given that fewer controllers are now managing more flights.
“This is unexplained to us,” Strickland added.
Possible Solutions
The report’s authors said they did not have detailed enough information to make precise recommendations about reforms to the ATC system. One of the few fixes likely to make a difference, they noted, is increased funding from Congress, which would help the FAA funnel more prospective controllers into the talent pipeline.
A small change the FAA could make without too much effort is the opening of a new channel for ATC facilities to relay concerns specific to their location. That information could help the agency make decisions about staffing levels and better estimate the time needed to train controllers on a given sector of airspace.
The researchers also said the FAA should gather more data on fatigue levels among air traffic controllers and study whether staffing shortages lead to fatigue. With additional funding from Congress, the FAA could develop fatigue risk mitigation systems and shift scheduling software designed to keep controllers well-rested.
When asked how many air traffic controllers the FAA will ultimately need to get back to appropriate levels, Strickland pointed to two models, one using traditional FAA calculations and another developed by the air traffic controllers’ union in collaboration with their membership. The first model requires 12,242 certified professional controllers and controllers in training, while the second model requires 14,633 certified professional controllers only.
Strickland said that, in his opinion, the true target will have to be between those two numbers, because the FAA’s model does not factor in adequate time for all the responsibilities controllers are now expected to perform.
He also cautioned that increasing hiring will not solve the problem if the FAA cannot figure out how to direct controllers to understaffed facilities.
“Just hiring numbers doesn’t get you there, you have to put them where they need to be,” he said.
