By A recent preliminary report from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has raised concerns about staffing shortages at the air traffic control tower at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport that were “not normal” following a collision. The internal review, obtained by The New York Times, reveals that staffing levels at the time of the incident were below the standard required for the airport’s typical volume of traffic.
“The controller who was handling helicopters in the airport’s vicinity Wednesday night was also instructing planes that were landing and departing from its runways. Those jobs typically are assigned to two controllers, rather than one.
This increases the workload for the air traffic controller and can complicate the job. One reason is that the controllers can use different radio frequencies to communicate with pilots flying planes and pilots flying helicopters. While the controller is communicating with pilots of the helicopter and the jet, the two sets of pilots may not be able to hear each other.”
The FAA has not yet released a public statement regarding the findings of its internal review. Meanwhile, the collision has intensified concerns about aviation safety at one of the country’s busiest airports, and the investigation into the incident remains ongoing.
The crash wasn’t a fluke, writes The New York Post. “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.
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,” Steve West, a professor at Oklahoma State University who oversees its air traffic controller training program, told the newspaper.
During the tenure of Pete Buttigieg, near misses involving aircraft rose to their highest level in decades, rising nearly 25 percent compared to a decade earlier, according to The New York Times.
Then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told USA TODAY in 2023 that the incidents had been caused by multiple factors, including controller training and pilot error. “It’s enough that I’m concerned,” he said at the time.
The newspaper noted that “U.S. officials have taken steps to address the issue, from investing in airport runway lighting to enhancing controller training with modernized simulators. The rest period for controllers was also raised from nine hours to 10 between shifts, with at least 12 hours of rest before midnight shifts.
There were 30 runway incursions for every 1 million takeoffs and landings in 2024, down from 33 the year prior and 32 in 2022, according to the FAA. “In the first three months of 2024, the rate of serious incidents (Category A and B) decreased by 59 percent from the same period in 2023, from 0.56 per one million airport operations to 0.23 per one million operations,” the agency said.
The rate has fluctuated over the past decade, peaking at 35 incursions per 1 million takeoffs and landings in 2017 and 2018 and a low of 28 in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
A 2024 Government Accountability Office report has raised concerns about the FAA’s reliance on outdated air traffic control systems, warning that their deterioration could compromise the safety and efficiency of the national airspace. An evaluation of 138 FAA systems found that 51 are considered unsustainable, while 54 others are at risk of becoming obsolete. These aging systems present significant operational challenges, as maintenance is increasingly difficult due to shortages of spare parts and specialized technicians. The FAA has long faced criticism for its failure to modernize its technology, despite the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) initiative—a multibillion-dollar effort launched more than two decades ago that has been plagued by delays and mismanagement.
The urgency of these issues was underscored by a January 2023 system outage that grounded thousands of flights after a critical FAA system was accidentally disrupted. Although the agency is working to upgrade its infrastructure, the GAO report warns that full modernization could take more than a decade, leaving the system vulnerable in the interim. Critics, including former National Air Traffic Controllers Association president Paul Rinaldi, attribute the FAA’s slow progress to funding challenges and poor project management, noting that the United States is falling behind other nations in aviation technology.
Lawmakers have expressed frustration the FAA has yet to develop a clear, immediate strategy to mitigate these risks. A new law set to take effect in 2026 will require the agency to report on its modernization plans, but until then, concerns remain about its ability to prevent future outages or a potential crisis.
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