The Air Traffic Controller Workforce Imperative

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. These are among the recommendations in TRB Special Report 357: The Air Traffic Controller Workforce Imperative: Staffing Models and Their Implementation to Ensure Safe and Efficient Airspace Operations, from the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report, called for by Congress, 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.