Why Air Traffic Control is Short Staffed

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent the official policies, positions, or opinions of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) or any other governmental agency. I do not speak on behalf of the FAA, and any information provided is based on my personal experience and knowledge.

I’ve been reading a lot of articles about why air traffic control is short-staffed, and since I have some experience in the area, I thought I’d take a crack at it. I have about twenty-five years of experience in the industry, and I’ve trained more than 30 controllers. Only one of them did not make it due to ability, and there were some definite psychological issues there as well. I believe that the agency is short-staffed because of the antiquated philosophy that an air traffic controller somehow has to be smarter and more capable than the average human. Are some people more gifted than others? Of course. If we try to staff our facilities with only the prodigies, however, we will fail unless other fundamental changes are made.

First, let me debunk or confirm a few rumors out there for anyone interested in the job. No, you do not have to have 20/20 vision, as long as you can wear glasses or contacts that correct to 20/20. The pay is good. My wife has a college degree, I do not, and I made twice what she did last year. Let me throw in some caveats. I have been in basically the same position for almost twenty years, so I’ve received a few raises. A new controller starts out making less than I did as a pizza delivery driver in 2003 until they get fully certified, which can take years. My wife gets to work from home, and her health benefits are better than mine. She has relatively little traumatizing pressure on a daily basis. I will talk about chronic stress later. I also worked well over 100 hours of overtime last year, and she didn’t work any overtime. She could make as much as me if she wanted, but she likes to work from home and not be in charge of too many people. The best benefit air traffic has over her job is the retirement pension, which her job does not have. Since so many air traffic controllers die before retirement or soon after, I’m not sure that perk is as great as it sounds.

So here is why we are short-staffed, in my opinion. A crucial part of the reason we are short-staffed is because we are short-staffed. Controllers, in general, already have this idea that they are somehow special and that not everyone is cut out for their job. Now, stack this with the fact that many of them have been doing the job of two or more controllers for so long they’ve forgotten what it was like having an extra person to help out, or maybe they have never experienced full staffing. That controller may be a prodigy who was hired and certified because they have a gift, and the tasks came relatively easily to them. Now they have to train some kid off the street who knows nothing about what they do. I’ll come back to the indoctrination training later. So, since this air traffic controller probably hasn’t had to train anyone in over a decade, and they are used to working with other prodigies, they have no idea how to deal with someone new. So, this new developmental controller endures six to eighteen months of chronic traumatic stress and being told they are just not good enough until they are kicked to the curb.

Chronic traumatic stress, in my opinion, is when you are regularly exposed to intense situations that cause fight-or-flight responses to kick in. This is when your focus narrows, maybe you actually have darkness around the edge of your vision, your heart rate increases, and you have a cold sweat that breaks out all over your body. No, you don’t hyperventilate and pass out; people who have panic attacks can’t be air traffic controllers, sorry. Your body has to process that stress, and it is exhausting and probably shortens our lives. You may have experienced this for short periods of time when skydiving or snowboarding and suddenly the mountain disappears underneath you for a dozen feet, during a medical crisis, or during combat. Many air traffic controllers experience this daily, sometimes for hours on end. After a year or so, your body somehow naturally suppresses the worst side effects, and you learn to deal with it one way or another. I drank a lot of alcohol as a young controller. Some controllers quit during initial training or just mentally give up until the agency forces them out.

Hazing is not as common anymore; there are a lot of rules preventing it, but it still happens in a much more subtle way. There is a constant critique of everything you do, starting with the daily list of faults from your trainer and little comments like “why aren’t you getting this yet?” There are comments from the peanut gallery constantly, and little to no positive reinforcement. Can you imagine how the newer “everybody gets a star” generation clashes with the older “you suck until you can prove otherwise” mentality?

So, we are short-staffed. The certified controllers are trying to certify people who can do their jobs, preferably as well as they can, in about 150 hours. Training times vary greatly and are not remotely consistent. There are facilities that are very basic with one runway and one taxiway, and the operating procedures book is only about fifty pages long, and a trainee gets about 400 hours to get through the facility. There are radar facility sectors that are dozens of times more complex with hundreds of pages of operating procedures, and a trainee only gets 150 hours to get certified. I get that the agency doesn’t want to justify training everyone for five years straight, but maybe they could experiment with other options instead of trying the same thing that hasn’t been working for thirty years. For example, start by doubling all the training hours and see how that affects the metrics. How much more money are you going to waste than you are already wasting by getting rid of people after a year or two of training?

The indoctrination process needs a change. The basic school in Oklahoma City, if you’re a civilian, is pretty much useless. It is a way to weed out candidates that have poor study habits or don’t play well with others. I feel that this can just as easily be accomplished in-house through on-the-job training and/or electronic learning. I spent three months in Pensacola, where Marines and Navy have basic ATC training, memorizing a ton of information, half of which I forgot before I actually started training, and only about ten percent was really applicable to where I ended up working. It is a three-month-long shit test, kind of like boot camp to weed out those that someone with a 1950’s mentality would perceive as weak. I have spent months in Oklahoma City over the years, and maybe five percent of what I learned there was actually applicable to my job. I spent two months learning how to work a final approach and then started out on a sector with no final. After eighteen months of training, I still had not seen a final approach in live training. Was I supposed to remember what I learned in Oklahoma over a year before? Oh, wait, it wouldn’t have mattered because the next sector does not have a final either! I know most people don’t know what I’m talking about, but if there is a pilot or controller among the six people who read this, at least they might get it. Part of the problem is that there are so few people who get it, and even fewer people who get it and who are in a position to do something about it. And why would they? Changing anything in the agency requires the equivalent of an act of Congress, and who wants to beat their head against that wall?

Physical school houses should be going the way of the last millennium, especially for a money conscious entity. I own a pair of VR goggles, I have played around with free development software like Unreal Engine. I think many of our training issues could be solved for pennies on the dollar. Take all those brilliant, experienced people in Oklahoma and have them start producing VR training content instead of wasting their talents teaching general knowledge to a bunch of hungover kids. 

Let’s talk about on-the-job training. I read an article recently where they suggested the agency should outsource more on-the-job training to contractors. I had to laugh. Unless that contractor has been certified at that particular facility and is only teaching on positions where they have been certified, it’s a waste of time and money. Just put the controller directly into on-the-job training instead and give them some extra hours. If I wanted to fly a plane, why would I want to learn the basics from somebody who has only piloted a submarine? You laugh, but there is that much variety between positions and facilities. That’s why having a basic school where everyone learns the same thing is so crazy.

Contractors could be a solution, however, if used differently. Give them a ‘supervisor’ certification on live traffic. This basically means they are not expected to work when traffic is crazy busy; they just have to be relatively safe under general supervision. Give them a raise for every position they certify on, and then let them specialize in simulation training on those positions. When they are not training, use them for staffing as a handoff, an assist, or any control position when traffic is slow. Like a supervisor.

I have mentioned in previous posts that controllers have a lot of ego, and some of them like to complain. That controller who complains that the controller next to them is not as good as they are is the same controller who will complain when there is not enough staffing. I believe that 99 percent of the people who can pass through the basic hoops to get into the FAA are capable of being an asset to the agency with patience and the correct training. Too many egos, however, are still saying that if you can’t get certified in a certain number of hours, you can’t do the job. My theory is that everybody is wired a little differently in the brain. Some people have lived a different lifestyle or have little genetic quirks. I think that eventually all of these people can develop the same neural pathways and have their synapses firing in the same general direction, so to speak.

I can think of at least three examples off the top of my head of controllers that would not be in the agency if they had had a less patient and ‘savvy’  training team. I can think of at least two other controllers who would not be in the agency if their training team hadn’t made mistakes and the agency hadn’t been legally obligated to give them more hours. Think about that, because some trainers did not properly document certain items, trainees were given a hundred or so extra hours and became certified controllers. I’m not going to get into all the loopholes, but let’s just say that for a savvy training team working together, there are a lot of ways to get a trainee more hours. What if the trainers didn’t have to be ‘savvy’? What if trainees just had more time? How many more controllers would we have?

So, there is a class for on-the-job training instructors which the FAA provides, and I recently had the privilege of attending for the fourth time. I was disappointed but not surprised to find that the class has not meaningfully changed since the first time I had it back in 1999. I’m not going to detail all the issues with the class, but one of the things that struck me was the emphasis on protecting your facility so that the developmental can’t get more hours when they are done. Document correctly, don’t haze them, be nice, not because it’s the right thing to do, but because you don’t want to create a reason that person can stay longer and ‘bog down the system’—the ‘system’ which sees trainees kicked to the curb even though the facility might not have another one for months or years, the ‘system’ which has been slapped with cheap, ineffective bandaids for years but never actually overhauled. What are you bogging down? Your ability to have proper staffing?

So that’s my two cents as far as training goes. I mean, I have a lot more to say, but I’m trying to keep this relatively tactful and concise. It’s nice to see that people are starting to pay attention and try to make some changes to get more staffing. These knee-jerk reactions are typical for a government agency, however, and in my opinion, at least two decades too late. They are supposedly offering an extra twenty percent of our base pay for people like me to stay in longer. After taxes, that’s not enough money to pay for my car payment, much less the gas it takes to get to work. There are just so many other options. Honestly, I’m sick of driving; some days it’s almost as stressful as work, and I’m ready to work from home like my wife. A much more dramatic restructuring and shift in mentality is required for a truly effective fix, and that would still take years. It will be interesting to see how things play out, but hopefully, I will be retired well before we see the results or consequences.