Flying the FAA’s Unfriendly Skies
A new Inspector General report tells you what Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg won’t about the air-traffic controller shortage.
By The Editorial Board, WSJ
July 3, 2023 6:23 pm ET
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stressed this weekend that flight disruptions are improving—and that they aren’t the government’s fault. He must not have read his department’s recent Inspector General report. It warns that problems could persist for years owing to a government-caused shortage of air-traffic controllers.
The Federal Aviation Administration’s chronic staffing problems increased during the pandemic as the agency hewed to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid guidelines. According to the June 21 IGreport, “COVID-19 led to training pauses over a period of nearly 2 years—significantly increasing controller certification times.”
As a result, the FAA has failed to train enough new controllers to replace those who are quitting or retiring. The New York Terminal Radar Approach Control is staffed at 54%—the lowest in the country. But this statistic understates the problem since about 64% of its workforce is in training, significantly higher than the national average of 27%.
Imagine how a manufacturing plant or office would operate if two-thirds of its employees were interns. Supervisors would be overwhelmed. That’s one problem as the FAA tries to catch up on training new controllers after its academy reduced class sizes by as much as 50% during the pandemic to comply with CDC social-distancing guidelines.
The FAA also adopted a color-coding scheme to identify Covid “threat levels” and halted training in facilities coded red or orange, which often included New York. Newark Tower paused training at least four times for periods of more than 30 days. At the start of the pandemic, it made sense for the FAA to implement some Covid precautions. Few Americans were flying then so they didn’t have a major impact. But the FAA continued excessive precautions even after vaccines rolled out and travel picked up.
“Anytime there was a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, managers had to conduct contact tracing and place exposed controllers on leave for 10 to 14 days, depending on their vaccination status,” the IG explains. “This created significant staffing challenges for facilities.” Covid training disruptions were exacerbated by a union collective-bargaining agreement requirement that training pauses be followed by refresher courses. As a result, “controller certification times have significantly increased,” the IG report says.
It doesn’t help that the FAA accepts applications only once a year during a three-day window. Applicants must be younger than 31 years old and, if hired, must retire at 56 or apply for a waiver. So the agency forces experienced traffic controllers out the door while making it harder to bring in replacements.
Mr. Buttigieg says the FAA plans to hire 1,500 new controllers this year and another 1,800 next year, but that’s optimistic. The IG report says the FAA won’t know the impact of training delays “for several years and cannot be certain it will successfully train enough controllers in the short term due to uncertain training outcomes.”
In other words, Americans may be sitting on the tarmac for another few summers. Bring refreshments. Mr. Buttigieg is literally passing the buck to airlines by ordering them to compensate flyers for “controllable” cancellations and delays. How about the government take responsibility and compensate flyers and airlines for its controllable dysfunction?
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