NATCA Bookshelf

ISSUES 32 NiW Today NATCA in Washington 2026 basis, something it did in the 2025-34 CWP. Proper and timely implementation of these provisions is essential to the safety, efficiency, and modernization of the NAS for the years to come. NATCA believes the FAA and Congress must continue to take a holistic, collaborative approach to resolving its staffing and training challenges and we remain committed to working with all stakeholders – the administration, Congress, and industry – to develop permanent, sustainable solutions. In addition, the FAA and NATCA have established a more efficient and expeditious transfer policy for current FAA controllers that encourages experienced controllers at lower-level facilities to voluntarily move up (at their own expense) to busier, more complex facilities. Although this alone will not resolve the staffing and training issues, it does allow experienced controllers to move to busier facilities where they are more likely to certify than newly placed FAA Academy graduates. Subsequently, it allows the Agency to place FAA Academy graduates in the less complex and less busy facilities where they are more likely to certify. Previously, FAA Academy graduates often were placed in high-traffic, high-complexity towers and radar facilities upon graduation, which resulted in poor success rates. Background Staffing and Hiring Challenges The air traffic controller workforce is continuing to experience a CPC shortage. In 2013, sequestration forced the FAA to institute a hiring freeze and shutter the FAA Academy from March to December. That compounded an already tenuous staffing situation in which the FAA was trying to keep up with the pace of controller retirements. The FAA also is trying to make up for the 35-day government shutdown that stretched from December 2018 through January 2019. Despite meeting its own hiring goals for much of the past decade, the FAA has not kept up with air traffic controller attrition over the same period. At the end of fiscal year (FY) 2025, there were 1,059 fewer CPCs than there were at the end of FY 2012, more than a 10% decrease. CPC totals have remained essentially flat since the end of FY 2016 even when the FAA has met or exceeded its own hiring targets. Maximum hiring for at least the five-year duration of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 will greatly assist the FAA achieve a staffing level required to meet its needs. However, maximum controller hiring will not solve this issue on its own. On average, 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, even maximum controller hiring will take several years to have a positive effect on CPC totals. It will likely take as many as 10 years of max hiring to reach the CRWG CPC target. Controller Training Challenges The FAA must have sufficient funding to train each of the approximately 2,500 new hires annually at the FAA Academy, and provide them with classroom, sim- ulator, and on-the-job training instruction at their as- signed facilities. New hires who are admitted into the FAA Academy in 2026 will require between two and four years of training before they become fully certi- fied 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, presently 93 have tower simulator systems. Thankfully, the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 directs the FAA to deploy tower simulator systems (TSS) to all FAA towers to enhance and expedite training time. These systems have been proven to reduce controller training times by 25%. 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. 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 workweek 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 FAA Academy graduates. In some cases, the trainees at a facility outnumber the CPCs, which creates a backlog of trainees and sparse training opportunities. Issue Staffing and Training Challenges Persist

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