The deadly air collision that killed 67 people in Washington, DC Wednesday night came amid an air traffic control staffing crisis and alarmingly high rates of near-misses on airport runaways.
One air traffic controller had been doing the job of two people when an American Airlines plane smashed into an Army Black Hawk helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, according to Federal Aviation Administration documents obtained by The New York Times.
It wasn’t a fluke: The FAA has had air traffic control staffing issues since pandemic-era mass layoffs in 2020 from which it has yet to recover.
In 2023, the Department of Transportation revealed that a whopping 77% of critical air traffic control facilities were understaffed.
The same year, two Times investigations revealed that near-misses on airport runways – known as “incursions” – were astonishingly high, and that overworked, burnt-out air traffic controllers had fallen asleep on the job or gotten drunk at work.
Last year Congress passed a $105 million spending bill to address the problem, but the shortages persisted, and FAA was still down around 3,000 controllers, CNN reported, causing flight delays in airports across the country.
“The main thing that has stressed the system is the controller shortage and the pilot shortage,” said Steve West, a professor at Oklahoma State University who oversees its air traffic controller training program.
Meanwhile, the number of documented close calls on American runways remains stubbornly high, with the FAA reporting around 1,750 runway incursions in each of the past three years, compared to just 1,278 in 2014.
West believes the seemingly elevated incursion rates may be due to more rigorous FAA protocols that have categorized more incidents as official “incursions.”
However, he acknowledges that the FAA has had major trouble convincing people to become air traffic controllers in the first place – partly because the job is so punishing.
“It’s a very exacting job. There’s a lot of training that goes into it. You have to go through extensive background security medical checks. Then there’s on-the-job training,” he said.
And the stress only increases from there, he said: “Once you become an ATC, you are in a very accountable position. Everything you say, everything you do, can be scrutinized.”
The job — which comes with a median salary of $137,380 per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — has become even more onerous in recent years as existing controllers take on extra work to make up for the shortage, including, as Wednesday night’s calamity showed, pulling double duty.
