America’s air traffic control system is in crisis. Can it be fixed?

What’s wrong with the system? 
For starters, there’s an acute shortage of air traffic controllers, who are responsible for directing about 45,000 flights carrying 2.9 million passengers every day. The Federal Aviation Administration has about 13,800 certified controllers at more than 300 facilities, which is 3,000 below the recommended staffing number. With 90% of control towers understaffed, controllers are routinely expected to put in 10-hour days, six days a week. And those controllers have to rely on what the FAA itself describes as “outdated technologies that are unable to meet” modern demands. Partly because of those cascading problems, 2023 saw 19 “serious runway incursions” at U.S. airports where a collision was narrowly avoided, the highest number in nearly a decade. Public concern over air traffic control swelled in January after 67 people died in a midair crash between a military helicopter and a commercial flight over Washington, D.C.—a preliminary FAA report said staffing at the control tower was abnormally low for the shift. And concern surged again in April, when controllers for New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport lost communication with planes for about 90 seconds due to a single burned-out copper wire. The next month, an air traffic control facility in Colorado suffered a similar outage. “It’s a crisis and the public doesn’t know about it,” said one Newark controller. “Nobody wants to pay attention until lives are lost.” 

Why is there a staffing shortage? 
Air traffic control is a historically understaffed profession, and the pandemic only made things worse. When Covid hit and air travel slowed, the training of new recruits was put on hold, even as many older controllers opted for retirement. These experienced workers can’t be quickly replaced. To be considered for an air traffic control spot, candidates must be under 31, have U.S. citizenship, and pass a background check, skills assessment, and medical exam. Only about 10% of applicants to the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City are accepted—the academy has capacity for 2,500 students but this year received only 1,950—and only about two-thirds of those complete the training program. “It’s a lot of work,” said one student. “It’s like a full two-year degree in four months.” After graduating, another two to three years of classroom and on-the-job experience is required to become a certified controller. The career lifespan of a controller is limited because the profession has a mandatory retirement age of 56; many quit before then, despite earning six-figure salaries. 

Why is turnover high? 
Because it’s a stressful job that controllers are expected to do in often less than ideal conditions. In recent years, controllers have submitted hundreds of complaints about run-down facilities with bug and mold infestations, dangerous staffing shortages, and unstable colleagues. Between 2021 and 2023, the FAA received at least seven reports of controllers sleeping on duty and five of people working while under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Some controllers develop physical and/or mental health problems because of nonstop schedules, but avoid seeking professional help lest it cost them their medical clearance. The result is a demoralized, distracted, and exhausted workforce that is more prone to making mistakes. A database of air safety issues maintained by NASA includes numerous accounts of mistakes by weary controllers, including one from a staffer in Southern California who instructed a plane to fly too low and attributed the error to being “extremely tired” after “continuous” overtime. 

What about technology issues? 
Much of the equipment in control towers is decades old and analog. While other countries use digital displays and infrared-based systems, American air traffic controllers are trained to use floppy disks, paper flight-tracking strips, and World War II–era radars. Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told a March congressional hearing that the FAA has failed to request adequate funding for infrastructure needs for two decades. The agency’s annual $3 billion budget for facilities and equipment, he said, has forced it to adapt a “fix-on-fail” model that leaves “little to no money” for modernization. 

Is anyone trying to repair the system?
The Trump administration has promised to “supercharge” the hiring of controllers, who have been spared the cuts inflicted on other government workers. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently announced a $5,000 bonus for FAA Academy graduates, with an additional $10,000 for those willing to work at one of the 13 facilities deemed hard to staff, as well as annual 20% bonuses for controllers who stay on past the retirement eligibility mark at 25 years. Duffy has also unveiled plans to replace 618 old radars and build six new air traffic control centers, the largest such project since the 1960s. The tax bill currently working its way through Congress includes $12.5 billion for modernization over the next three years, but the Modern Skies Coalition—an organization that includes unions, aircraft manufacturers, and trade groups—says an extra $18.5 billion in emergency funding is needed. 

Is it still safe to fly? 
Air travel remains by far the safest mode of transportation. The crash over Washington attracted so much attention in part because of the rarity of such accidents in the U.S.: It was the first fatal American commercial air disaster since 2009 and the worst since 2001. But some aviation experts worry that, after years of safety improvements, things may now be going backward. “I have friends and family [asking], ‘Should I get on an airplane?’” one retired controller told Axios. “And I’m like, Well, it’s not there yet. But it seems to be trending that way.” 

A push for privatization 
Could a private company run air traffic control better than the government? It’s not a new question: The Clinton administration proposed privatization in 1995, only to back away in the face of opposition from corporate jet owners and private pilots, who pay almost nothing to use the current system. Following the crises at Newark and elsewhere, lawmakers are again contemplating privatization, which would free air traffic control from cumbersome government procurement requirements that slow the adoption of new technologies. Advocates note that in recent decades some 60 countries have separated air traffic control from their aviation safety regulators, often by creating an independent government corporation or other nonprofit provider. Under that arrangement, Canada today handles more air traffic with fewer controllers than it did three decades ago. Flying from Canada to the U.S. “is like time travel for pilots,” said aviation consultant Scott McCartney. You “leave a modern air traffic control system run by a company and enter one run by the government struggling to catch up.”

George Floyd’s murder sparked “the racial reckoning that wasn’t,” said Nia-Malika Henderson in Bloomberg. This week marked five years since Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Footage of Floyd’s death, with Chauvin kneeling on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds while Floyd gasped “I can’t breathe” ushered in a Black Lives Matter movement that “galvanized millions to push for racial progress.” White people started speaking about the impact of racism, while companies rushed to announce DEI initiatives. “Buildings, schools, and roads were renamed. Statues came down.” But many of the initiatives promoted by the movement, like police reform, never came to fruition. The number of people killed by police has increased every year since 2020, and the looting that coincided with some protests enabled Republicans to portray a national, multiracial uprising as a race riot. Some conservatives now even claim Chauvin didn’t murder Floyd and have called on President Trump to pardon him. For a brief, inspiring moment in our history, Black Lives Matter seemed to be a turning point. But a backlash fueled by fear helped return Trump to office on a wave of “white identity politics.” 

We should be “grateful we escaped a dangerous societal overhaul,” said Mike Gonzalez in The Wall Street Journal. Floyd’s death was “a tragedy that Marxists manipulated into a revolutionary moment” that saw 2,385 looting incidents and 624 arson incidents. “The nation fell into a trance,” with corporations and cultural institutions “pledging obeisance to the new creed.” A “mass delusion” portrayed America as “an ‘oppressive’ nation gripped by ‘systemic racism,’ whose reigning ideology was ‘white supremacy.’” Fortunately, “America fought back.” 

Floyd’s murder was “a national shame,” not a delusion, said Nekima Levy Armstrong in USA Today. Still, much of 2020’s “momentum has quietly evaporated.” Corporate promises of diversity and inclusion have been abandoned. When the protests faded, “an army of reactionaries went to work,” said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Instead of racial progress, we got “a Trump-led white backlash.” The words “diversity” and “racism” have been demonized and banned. Even Washington, D.C.’s Black Lives Matter Plaza has been scrubbed clean of its bright yellow letters, erasing one of the movement’s most lasting symbols. In the current climate of fear, retribution, and repression, it’s “almost impossible to imagine how the spark of positive energy that swept America five years ago could be reignited.”

Mariska Hargitay always felt she was different from her siblings, said Joy Press in Vanity Fair, but it wasn’t until her 20s that she understood why. The daughter of Hollywood bombshell Jayne Mansfield, the Law & Order: SVU star had long thought her biological father was the Hungarian bodybuilding champ turned actor Mickey Hargitay. Then, at 25, she saw a photo of Nelson Sardelli, the Italian entertainer Mansfield dated during a brief separation from Mickey in 1963. Hargitay, born the following year, instantly knew Sardelli was her biological father. “It was like the floor fell out from underneath me,” she says.

When she was 30, Hargitay went to see Sardelli perform in Atlantic City, N.J., and introduced herself. He burst into tears and said he’d waited years for this moment; Hargitay, now 61, had the opposite reaction. “I was like, ‘I don’t want anything, I don’t need anything from you. I have a dad.’ I wanted to be loyal to Mickey”—the father who had raised her after Mansfield’s death in a 1967 car crash. Yet she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d been “living a lie my entire life,” and whether she was a wanted child or an “illegitimate” mistake. Hargitay slowly formed a bond with Sardelli but also came to believe that “I grew up where I was supposed to. I’m Mickey Hargitay’s daughter—that is not a lie.”