The U.S. has had a shortage of air traffic controllers for years.
Air traffic controller staffing “is at an all-time low,” said Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, their union.
In an interview with CNBC, Daniels said the situation has “hit a critical point.
“We currently have 10,800 certified professional controllers where we need [to have] 14,633. Any hiccup, a government shutdown or anything that disrupts the pipeline of the air traffic controllers coming in, will absolutely hurt the capacity of the flying public, and how many planes we can put in the air at any given time safely,” he added.
While the shortage is not new, and staffing has been hovering around similar levels for the past decade, recent events like the fatal collision of an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter in Washington, D.C. — despite it not necessarily coming as a result of errors by air traffic control — are calling more attention to the importance of filling these jobs.
The Federal Aviation Administration has limited flights in congested areas like New York because the number of controllers is insufficient.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has repeatedly said the staffing shortfalls are causing numerous air travel delays.
“On blue sky days last year, so days with no weather in the system, 68% of our delays were because of air traffic control restrictions” Kirby said at the CERAWeek energy conference earlier this month. “We have a delay in New York every single day, no matter what the weather is, because they’re simply understaffed.”
In 2023, the FAA announced the Enhanced Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative, which allows qualified schools to provide equivalent training. The air traffic program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Daytona Beach, Florida, campus was just certified in 2024 and is the fourth school in the program.
Additionally, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that trainees at the FAA’s main air traffic controller academy in Oklahoma would receive $5 more an hour to help with recruitment.
The aging computers and other systems used by the FAA are also concerning.
“We have computers — and I kid you not — today in 2025 that are based on Windows 95 and floppy disks” Daniels said.
After an outage of a key pilot-notification system in 2023 grounded thousands of flights, the U.S. Government Accountability Office determined that 51 of 138 FAA systems that provide things like communications are unsustainable and need to be modernized.
Watch the video to learn more about how the FAA got so behind on technology and hiring air traffic controllers and what it’s doing to fix it.
