THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES OF SCIENCES, ENGINEERING, AND MEDICINE
Transportation Research Board and Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education
Consensus and Advisory Studies and Board on Human-Systems Integration
Committee on FAA Planning for Air Traffic Control Facility Staffing
*****
Congressional Briefings
Tuesday, June 17, 2025 – 10:00 a.m.
560 Dirksen Senate Office Bldg.
and
Tuesday, July 22, 2025 – 11:00 a.m.
Via Zoom
on
The Air Traffic Controller Workforce Imperative:
Staffing Models and Their Implementation to Ensure Safe
and Efficient Airspace Operations
Air traffic controller staffing is essential for aviation safety in the United States. Therefore, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) should continue to increase air traffic controller hiring, improve training success rates, incentivize transfers from overstaffed to understaffed airports, and implement robust fatigue management systems and efficient shift-scheduling tools. FAA should also rebuild its controller staffing based on its traditional modeling approach—as refined by needed updates and with local input—rather than adopting newer facility staffing models the agency developed collaboratively with members of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. FAA should also conduct recommended research to improve understanding about the relationship between facility staffing levels and safety and validate its facility models using risk indicators, some of which are confidential and therefore not available to the committee that prepared the report.
Requested by Congress in P.L. 118-63, Securing Growth and Robust Leadership in American Aviation Act, this new report notes that about 30 percent of the FAA facilities are staffed at more than 10 percent below their staffing targets and about 30 percent of facilities are staffed at 10 percent or more above their staffing targets. FAA experienced a series of externally imposed constraints on hiring since 2013, including two government shutdowns over budget and fiscal policy and the COVID-19 pandemic, that have notably affected several of the largest facilities that serve many of the country’s largest airports and have had an outsized effect on passenger delays.
These briefings were for members of Congress and congressional staff only. The report was publicly released on June 18, 2025 and can be found, in its entirety, on the Web site of the National Academies Press.