WASHINGTON — The current shortage of staff at air traffic control facilities is attributable to past hiring constraints and a misallocated workforce, the effects of which may be exacerbated by current inefficiencies in shift scheduling, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The congressionally mandated report offers guidance to the Federal Aviation Administration on establishing reasonable and sound facility staffing levels and implementing improvements in hiring, training, scheduling, and fatigue management to safeguard operation of the national airspace system. The report urges Congress to provide the resources that the FAA needs to make necessary improvements.   The FAA’s air traffic control workforce of approximately 14,000 controllers spread across 313 facilities ensures that roughly 45,000 daily commercial flights carrying 3 million passengers and air cargo operate safely and efficiently around the clock by maintaining required separation between commercial, military, and general aviation aircraft in the air and on the ground, and by providing weather and traffic information to pilots.   Commercial aviation safety in the U.S. has improved dramatically over the last 60 years, primarily because of the combination of advances in aircraft design, aircraft accident-avoidance technologies, the skill and training of pilots, air traffic control, safety culture, and several other factors, the report says. While U.S. aviation safety is the best in the world, air traffic controller shortages persist, with a significant proportion of facilities being chronically staffed below their staffing standard targets.   “Flying commercially in the U.S. remains remarkably safe, but maintaining this world-class level of safety requires constant vigilance,” said William J. Strickland, former president and chief executive officer of the Human Resources Research Organization, and chair of the committee that wrote the report. “Scanning the horizon, it’s become clear that the U.S. needs to make a few important course corrections to ensure that FAA’s facilities are adequately staffed, helping keep our skies safe for decades to come.”

Staffing Standards

From fiscal years 2013 to 2023, the FAA hired only two-thirds of the air traffic controllers called for by its staffing models. By fiscal year 2024, nearly a third of air traffic control facilities had fallen 10% below model standards and about 22% had fallen 15% below. This staffing shortfall is partially due to hiring constraints from two government shutdowns and the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in hiring freezes, training reductions, and other disruptions. Additional hiring and further innovation in hiring and training are needed to overcome the lingering effects of these events and to appropriately staff all 313 facilities.   The committee was asked to evaluate FAA’s current staffing models in comparison to an alternative approach, but their accuracy could not be determined with the data available. Despite this, the report finds that the FAA’s current modeling approach is sound, and recommends that the agency continue to use and improve it. Rather than changing approaches, the report emphasizes the importance of making more concerted efforts to staff air traffic control facilities in line with modeled estimates. The FAA should critically evaluate its models and improve them where possible, and return to its practice of adjusting individual staffing targets as needed to reflect facility-specific factors.   Special attention should be given to meeting the staffing standards of the small number of large, high-traffic facilities that have overworked controllers and an outsized impact on commercial aviation delays, the report says.

Workforce Pipeline Management

To become a fully certified controller, trainees typically undergo a justifiably rigorous process that takes years. The certification process can take up to four years for the most demanding facilities, even for the relatively small percentage of applicants who meet qualifications, score well on the screening test, obtain medical and security clearances, and make it through the FAA Academy, the agency’s air traffic control training school.   The report highlights two troubling trends in the certification process, namely that failure rates for achieving full certification at individual facilities — where controller training continues — are increasing, as is the time required to reach full certification at the large facilities that handle a significant share of commercial air traffic. It is important for the FAA to continue to find ways to reduce the time it takes to hire, train, and certify new controllers and identify and correct reasons for increasing training failure rates.   The FAA has been revamping its recruitment processes in order to rapidly increase the number of hires it makes each year, and it is taking other positive steps to improve and accelerate training and ensure the strength and quality of its workforce pipeline. Though the agency has taken steps to address constrained training capacity at the FAA Academy, this issue persists at hard-to-staff facilities.   For the most part, the report emphasizes, the main way to address shortages at understaffed facilities will be to hire more controllers and train them faster. A responsive policy would also facilitate more transfers of controllers from facilities above their staffing standard ranges to those that are below their staffing standard ranges. The report says that the FAA’s policies and procedures have not been successful in this regard. Although transfers typically require 1.5 years to recertify for a new facility, this is far shorter than the average time required to bring a new hire to full certification. While the FAA has the authority to offer special incentives to attract controllers to hard-to-staff facilities, Congress should provide the agency with any additional resources needed to motivate more transfers to the facilities that most need them.

Fatigue and Scheduling

Controllers at understaffed facilities can be required to work more overtime and longer workweeks. Fatigue resulting from overwork or inadequate time off for sleep and recovery is a known risk factor in aviation, the report says. The committee was unable to evaluate the real-world impact of declining staffing on fatigue and safety due to the lack of robust research in this area. The FAA should carry out the needed research using the data it has started collecting to understand better the possible relationships among fatigue, staffing levels, and shift scheduling, and make the relevant data available for independent research to assist FAA’s understanding of these critically important relationships.   The FAA has made important progress, having recently mandated longer recovery periods between shifts and initiated the elimination of particularly fatigue-inducing shift schedules. The report recommends that Congress provide FAA with the necessary resources to implement a more robust fatigue risk management system and develop and deploy shift scheduling software to reduce the incidence of controller fatigue and make more efficient use of controller resources. It should monitor the agency’s timely progress in these areas.   The study — undertaken by the Committee on FAA Planning for Air Traffic Control Facility Staffing — was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation.   The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, engineering, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln.

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