A JetBlue aircraft lands under the DC skyline featuring the U.S. Capitol building, near United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Airlines aircraft on the tarmac at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, U.S. January 25, 2025.
Jim Urquhart | Reuters
The Federal Aviation Administration said Friday it was sharply reducing its target for air traffic control staffing as it vowed to modernize scheduling and increase the time employees spend managing traffic.
The FAA said its new target is 12,563 certified controllers, down from 14,633. A National Academies of Sciences report last year said overtime costs for air traffic controllers, have jumped by more than 300% since 2013 to over $200 million, citing a misallocated workforce and inefficient scheduling.
The report said the time controllers spend on position managing air traffic has declined despite a 4% increase in traffic. It added it could increase time on position from around four hours per shift to more than five hours.
The FAA said “deploying modern staffing models and scheduling tools will improve controller staffing efficiency and reduce the need for excessive overtime.”
The FAA said as of April, approximately 11,000 certified controllers are deployed across more than 300 FAA air traffic facilities, with an additional 4,000 controllers in the training pipeline, including 1,000 who were previously a fully certified controller but are now training at new air traffic control facilities.
The FAA said it “will modernize scheduling and workforce management systems to improve efficiency.”
The FAA air traffic control workforce in 2024 logged 2.2 million hours of overtime costing $200 million. Annual overtime is up 308% per air traffic controller, or 126 hours per year since 2013, to 167 hours on average.
From 2013 to 2023, the FAA hired only two-thirds of the air traffic controllers called for by its staffing models as staffing fell by 13%, the report said, adding the agency has also been unable to implement a robust shift scheduling software package it acquired in 2012 that may be making the issue worse, the report said.
Controllers in many locations must often work six-day work weeks and mandatory overtime. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said in December the FAA lost 400-500 trainees that withdrew from training during a government shutdown last year.
