Topline
Grappling with a shortage of air traffic controllers, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s much-hyped “hiring supercharge” has created a new problem—not enough instructors to train thousands of new recruits.
The FAA’s hiring push has created a bottleneck due to a shortage of qualified instructors at its training academy in Oklahoma City, Bloomberg reported last week.
The FAA told Forbes its latest “supercharge” hiring campaign, which closed mid-March, attracted more than 10,000 academy applications, of which more than 8,300 were referred to testing.
In July, the FAA said academy training had increased by nearly 30%, hitting a record 550 students that month.
Though the FAA expects to hire 8,900 new air traffic controllers by 2028, a combination of factors—including attrition, retirements and program washouts—will result in a yield of only 1,000 additional certified controllers by the end of 2028, with a shortfall remaining, according to an FAA workforce plan.
“We’re seeing bottlenecks in the system caused by a shortage in those training this wave of new controllers,” Chad Kendall, an associate professor and FAA chief instructor in the Department of Aviation and Aerospace Science at Metropolitan State University of Denver, told Forbes.
A decades-long shortage of air traffic controllers bedeviled the Obama, Biden and Trump administrations. Under the Biden administration, the FAA reached its hiring goal in 2024, turning out the most new recruits in nearly a decade. One major challenge is training time. It can take nearly four years to become a certified air traffic controller, including several months at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City followed by up to three years of on-the-job experience, according to the FAA website. This year, the FAA raised starting salaries by 28% (to $22.61/hour) during paid academy training and streamlined the eight-step certification path into five steps. But in the meantime, the FAA has over-relied on controllers working overtime to keep its towers staffed, according to a congressional study released in June.
While the hiring push has delivered a robust influx of applicants, finding enough instructors to train all the new recruits has been a struggle. Qualified instructors must be previously certified as an air traffic controller with experience in an airport facility, Kendall told Forbes. “The instructors are mostly retired controllers from the FAA,” Melanie Dickman, a lecturer at The Ohio State University's Center for Aviation Studies, told Forbes, adding that low pay is a sticking point. Teachers at the Oklahoma City academy “are increasingly required to work from 7 a.m. to midnight, powering through with endless cups of coffee they pay for themselves,” Bloomberg reported. “With a $60 housing allowance, many live in a down-market apartment complex located near an infamous strip club in a neighborhood where gunshots are not uncommon.” Consequently, “it’s a tough sell to get many retired controllers to uproot everything to move to Oklahoma City to work crazy hours for little pay,” Dickman said. “Most don’t do it for the income, but rather because they really care about what they’re doing.” Better pay and work conditions need to be on the table to address the shortage, Kendall told Forbes: “We're seeing reactionary changes, but we need more proactiveness with the contractors that the FAA is using to train this way to get candidates through the pipeline.”
The FAA has largely farmed out recruitment for air traffic control instructors to large contractors, including SAIC, ProAeronautics, InDev and Parsons. Their job listings—often seeking “experienced, part-time” instructors—can be found on ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn, Indeed and other online career sites. Ideal candidates need to have five years’ experience as an air traffic controller, but recruiters are looking at “having other qualified educators come in to help teach at least the basics courses,” Dickman told Forbes, adding “it would take time to train anyone who hasn’t been a controller to teach anything above the basics. And given the current salary, they would be hard-pressed to find many people with enough aviation experience to give up lucrative careers to move out and teach.” Kendall told Forbes he thinks there should be more government oversight for air traffic controller hiring and training, “especially with these high-profile accidents that we’ve had.”
“In our first 100 days, this Administration has made more progress on addressing the air traffic controller shortage than the last one did in four years,” said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
“It’s been very disappointing to see a lack of cultural change in the FAA. You can quote me on that all day,” Kendall told Forbes. “The culture of the FAA is reactionary, and it has been this way for far too long, where there aren't changes in the aviation and aerospace industry unless there is an accident with a lot of loss of life. And that's a sad thing.”
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