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23 I s s u e s N A T I O N A L A I R T R A F F I C C O N T R O L L E R S A S S O C I A T I O N | W W W . N AT C A . O R G N i W To d a y reduced its hiring target by 400 as a result of the 35- day shutdown was significant setback for the agency. Despite meeting its self-imposed hiring goals for much of the past decade, FAA has not kept up with air traffic controller attrition over the same period. At the end of FY 2023, there were 1,160 fewer CPCs than there were at the end of FY 2012, a 10% decrease. CPC totals have remained essentially flat since end of FY 2016 despite the FAA meeting or exceeding its hiring targets. It is the FAA's annual hiring targets that are set by AFN that are the problem. At the end of FY 2023, the FAA had 2,855 ATCs in training, including 1,870 developmental stage trainees and 985 CPCs-in-training (CPC- ITs, who transferred to new facilities, but have not yet certified on the new airspace). At the end of FY 2018, the FAA had 2,482 developmental stage trainees and 1,320 CPC-ITs for a total of 3,802 trainees. This decline of over 900 trainees means that the pipeline has dwindled, and the FAA is not making progress on hiring and training ATCs. Consequently, as of the end of FY 2023, the FAA netted an additional 15 CPC compared to the end of FY 2022, resulting in 1,160 fewer CPCs employed by the FAA than a decade earlier. Although the FAA upwardly adjusted its hiring goal for each of FY 2024 through 2026 to 1,800 new trainees, only 60% of all controller trainees reach full certification within five years (many of those who do not are removed or resign from employment with the FAA). Thus, this increased hiring goal will take several years to have a positive effect on CPC totals. In addition, without updating the CWP to be based on the CRWG's CPC staffing standard the FAA will struggle to determine appropriate staffing targets at each facility. C o n t r o l l e r Tr a i n i n g C h a l l e n g e s The FAA must be funded sufficiently to train each of the 1,800 new hires annually at the FAA Academy and provide them with classroom, simulator, and on-the-job training instruction at their assigned facilities. New hires who were admitted into the FAA Academy in 2024 will require between two and four years of training before they become fully certified and capable of separating traffic on their own. Another contributing factor in the length of controller training time and attrition is the underfunding of simulation training and an inability, often because of staffing shortages, to use qualified controllers in the simulation portion of certification training. Of the FAA's 263 towers and tower/ approach control facilities, only 40 have one of the two permanent platforms of tower simulators. Understaffing within individual facilities also forces the FAA to delay or cancel required refresher, recurrent, and crew resource management training for CPCs. This training is paramount to developing and maintaining CPC skills, such as issuing safety alerts and recovering from unforeseen circumstances. Moreover, CPCs train new hires, often taking those controllers away from their primary job of separating traffic. Thus, facilities that already are at critical staffing levels, requiring mandatory overtime and a six-day work week to fully staff all positions, face a difficult situation when the way to improve staffing levels is for CPCs to undertake the time-intensive process of training academy graduates. In some cases, the trainees at a facility outnumber the CPCs, which creates a backlog of trainees and sparse training opportunities. As a result, the FAA also relies on contractors to provide on-the-job training during simulation. However, even when contract instructors are available for training, they are often hired at facilities where they never have worked, meaning that they may not be familiar with the facilities' unique operations. Further, many contract instructors have not been operationally current for years. In some cases, contract instructors are capable of providing only general information during simulation training. Although CPCs are better equipped to serve as simulation/classroom instructors, historically low CPC staffing levels have hindered their ability to do so. In addition to instructor availability concerns, most radar facilities only have one person who is proficient with the simulation development software, which creates a bottleneck when that person is unavailable. This issue also persists at the FAA's 21 Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCCs), in which the average training time is nearly 2.5 years. However, at two en route facilities that fully engaged CPCs in the simulation/classroom training process, Los Angeles Center (ZLA) and Fort Worth Center (ZFW), training time was reduced by 8-12 months. When CPCs provide training within a facility, it allows the most relevant information to be passed directly to S t a f f i n g A n d Tr a i n i n g C h a l l e n g e s P e r s i s t Issue

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