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The US air traffic control system has been stretched nearly to its breaking point by a decades-long staffing shortage. It’s causing problems not just for the air traffic controllers that remain but the flying public at large.

And it won’t get better any time soon.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which runs the air traffic system, stepped up the pace of hiring in 2024 under President Joe Biden. But even though 2,000 qualified applicants were hired last year, they might only just barely replace the 1,100 who left the job either through retirement or due to the heavy toll the stressful job takes on those who enter the field.

That’s because nearly half of those hired in any given year will wash out of the program before they get to actually control aircraft after about three years from their initial start date.

So even with an increase in the pace of hiring, it could take as much as 8 to 9 years to reach full staffing, according to Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union representing 10,800 certified controllers across the nation. He said that 41% of the union’s members are working six days a week, 10 hours a day, just to provide a staffing level that still isn’t adequate. Those 10,800 controllers currently on the job are filling the 14,600 positions needed to meet the current demand.

“We’ve been raising the alarm on this for years on end,” Daniels told CNN. “We need air traffic controllers. We need maximum hiring, so that these stresses and pressures can be taken off of us who are holding the system together today.”

“If we’re going to recruit the best and brightest, we have to make this job (one) that people want to do,” he said.

Anonymous reports to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System showed at least 10 submissions by controllers that included concerns about staffing, work schedules or fatigue in the last year alone.

“We have been short staffed for too many years and it’s creating so many unsafe situations,” one controller in Southern California wrote last year, recounting how a small aircraft requesting assistance could not be helped due to workload issues. “The FAA has created an unsafe environment to work and for the flying public. The controllers’ mental health is deteriorating.”

So, shortage is not only due to the rigorous standards that make it difficult and time consuming to fill the pipeline with new controllers, but the stresses, demands and hours controllers must work are leading to an attrition rate that makes it difficult for the new hires to make a dent in the shortage.

The fatal crash at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport last week brought new attention to a decades-old problem. There are simply not enough air traffic controllers to keep aircraft a safe distance from one another.

The cause of the crash between an American Airlines flight from Wichita, Kansas, on final approach for landing at the busy airport, and a US Army helicopter has yet to be determined. Crash investigators are not blaming the air traffic controller directing the traffic, who advised the helicopter to be aware of the regional jet’s position in the area ahead of the crash.

But CNN has confirmed that one controller in the Reagan Washington National tower was staffing two different jobs, handling both local air traffic and helicopter traffic in the area. Daniels, the president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the controllers’ union, is not allowed to comment on the causes of crash itself since the union is a party to the ongoing investigation.

Despite the lack of information on the cause of the fatal mid-air collision, President Donald Trump blamed the FAA’s diversity, equity and inclusion policy, or DEI, for the crash, even though he provided no proof or evidence that the crash was caused by the controller or its hiring process. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order ending this DEI and other DEI programs throughout the federal government that were designed to broaden the applicant pool for hiring, wrongly claiming that the program lowered hiring standards for the job.

“I put safety first. Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first,” he said. “We have to have our smartest people.”

But despite Trump’s claims, the policies and standards for air traffic controllers had not gotten tougher under his administrations than under his two Democratic predecessors. Under both Trump’s first term and the Obama and Biden administrations, all controllers have had to pass some of the most rigorous processes for any government position. They have to go through aptitude testing, medical and psychological screening and security clearance, followed by training in an academy and then years of on-the-job training.

Daniels and others say that the FAA effort to broaden its pool of applicants through DEI in no way reduced the standards for those who got selected.

“Whatever group we hire are going to have to through the same process, no matter what,” Daniels said. “No matter your race, no matter your gender. The more that apply that will be able to handle those rigorous standards, we want them to come and become an air traffic controller.”

The FAA did not respond to questions about its hiring process or the end of the DEI program that was announced by Trump administration officials.

But experts in the field say even if it turns out that the shortage of air traffic controllers played no role in last week’s tragedy, everyone in the industry agrees that the shortage is affecting everyone in the flying public.

“It is not sustainable,” said Michael McCormick, the head of the air traffic management program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, which is helping to feed potential controllers into the system. “Everybody needs their downtime. Working 6 days a week continuously is fatiguing.”

He said the FAA has had to limit the number of flights serving some markets, including New York and Washington, because of the shortage of controllers.

“Safety wise, it’s not an impact,” he said about the controller shortage. “But efficiency wise, it is.”

Despite the shortage, air traffic controllers all got the offer that went to federal employees last week, to pay them through September if they would resign now, an effort by the Trump Administration in its early days to cut government spending. The letter threatened that there could not be “full assurance regarding the certainty” of their position if they declined the offer.

Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told CNN that “critical safety positions” in the Department of Transportation were not being offered the chance to resign and get more than a half-year of pay.

“We’re going to keep all of our safety positions in place,” he said. “No early retirement. We’re all going to stay and make sure our skies are safe.”

But Daniels said that FAA management has not confirmed to the union that the offers controllers received are being rescinded, nor did it tell the union that their members would receive the offer before the emails landed in their inboxes.

“We thought it was a spam email,” he said.

Even if the controllers can’t leave with extra months of pay by giving notice, there is a serious attrition problem among air traffic controllers feeding the shortage.

FAA rules require all controllers to retire when they turn 56. But Daniels said some controllers are leaving before that age limit. They’re eligible to retire after 25 years on the job, or after 20 years on the job if they are age 50 or above. The stress that goes with the staffing shortage and the six-day work weeks is making it difficult for some to stay as long as they might have with a fully staffed workforce.

“The working conditions … have become consistently unsafe for those in the sky, as well as the physical and mental health of the controllers,” wrote a controller in NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System examined by CNN. “Overloaded sectors and sessions over 2, sometimes 3 hours have become common occurrences. We have recently had a heart attack, multiple panic attacks (including my own), people losing their medicals due to depression, and some that just outright quit the FAA because it has gotten so bad.”

But the way the FAA and the industry handles mental health issues may be exacerbating the shortage at best and masking far greater problems at worst.

Reaching out for mental health assistance can lead to air traffic controllers losing their jobs. The current rules do not allow controllers to be on SSRI drugs such as Prozac, Lexapro or Zoloft, drugs to treat depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions, even if those conditions have nothing to do with their jobs.

“We are parents, we are American citizens that deal with the same stresses and pressures outside of work as everyone else does,” Daniels said. “And if you’re also at work six days a week, 60 hours inside that work week and then all of the stresses that come at work, all those factors combined can absolutely lead to an air traffic controller being distracted or not being in a place that they want to be.”

He said that if a controller’s doctor prescribes medication to deal with a depression from a death in the family or other non-work events, they can seek a waiver to be able to take that drug, but that process can take a year or more.

“(It’s a) very archaic method in the way that our health is looked at,” he said. “We are trying to work with the agency … to give controllers real time help so they can continue working and taking care of themselves simultaneously.”

But President Trump attacked the idea that anyone dealing with mental health issues should be on the job as a controller at his press conference last week, saying that it amounted to an effort under Democratic administrations that sought to hire people with “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities” as controllers, which also is untrue.

“My experience in the FAA is that there is a robust selection and training program,” said McCormick.

– CNN’s Casey Tolan, Pete Muntean, Alexandra Skores and Vanessa Yurkevich contributed to this story.