Current and former air
traffic controllers warn that the Federal Aviation Administration’s
hiring practices and “immunity program” have led to problems, such as
those that may have resulted in the recent midair collison near Ronald
Reagan Washington National Airport.
The FAA’s focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
hiring practices has resulted in the employment of less qualified air
traffic controllers (ATCs) and a staffing shortage, former ATC's say.
This, in addition to an “immunity program” that fails to hold ATCs
accountable for their mistakes, are likely contributing factors American
Airlines plane collided
with a military helicopter on Jan. 29 that resulted in both aircraft
plunging into the Potomac River near the Washington, D.C.-area airport.
All 67 people aboard died.
The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are investigating the incident.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said Thursday
that the helicopter’s advanced tracking system was turned off at the
time of the crash. As for the FAA, an ATC tried unsuccessfully to contact the helicopter less than 30 seconds before the collision, according to audio from air traffic control.
Warned about dangers
The FAA was warned in a 2023 report
that air traffic controllers were increasingly making last minute
flight adjustments to deal with traffic and shortages of controllers in a
trend that raised safety concerns. The safety expert report that warned
America’s air traffic control system is suffering from quality-control
issues and staffing shortages that put safety at risk.
The November 2023 report also warned that personnel
shortages among air traffic controllers were forcing people to work
longer hours and make sudden, last-minute changes to flight plans that
increased risks.
Regulators acknowledged that in 2023 there were 19 serious
near-misses at U.S. airports that could’ve been catastrophic, one of the
largest totals in many years.
Some former ATCs have pointed to the FAA’s change in hiring practices under the Obama administration as partly to blame for the current state of air traffic control, which led to a class action lawsuit that is ongoing.
"Biographical survey" vs "Cognitive and skills-based testing"
In December 2013, thousands of students who had
participated in the FAA’s Collegiate Training Initiative (CTI) – a
program specifically designed to prepare individuals to become Air
Traffic Control Specialists – were informed that their previous scores
on a cognitive and skills-based test, the AT-SAT,
would be discounted. Instead, the students would have to pass a
biographical survey before retaking the cognitive portion of the test.
What the program graduates did not know is that only 14% of
them would pass this new biographical questionnaire, despite half of
them having previously passed the skills-based test and met all of the
FAA pre-qualifications to be referred on the next step to becoming Air
Traffic Control Specialists.
Eventually, one of the CTI graduates, whose career was derailed by the biographical questionnaire, sued the FAA for discrimination in a class action lawsuit.
Michael Pearson, who was a FAA air traffic control
specialist for over 26 years, is a lawyer in the lawsuit against the FAA
regarding alleged racial discrimination in the agency’s hiring
practices. Pearson told Just the News on Tuesday that ATC
didn’t follow proper procedure, which led to the crash. He said there
was a conflict alert on the radar, giving the ATC “27 seconds to do
something.”
“When a [conflict alert] goes off, you take immediate action,” he said.
While the media largely appears to holding the crew of the
Army helicopter to blame for the crash, Pearson believes that the ATC is
primarily at fault. Pearson says that the controller "didn't tell the
jet that the helicopter was in sight,” despite being “required to, and
didn’t give safety advisories” when the conflict alert went off. Also,
the “helicopter route was horrible,” and “the controller didn't apply
the rules properly.”
Regarding the FAA’s hiring practices, Pearson said that the
FAA “stopped hiring” in order “to figure out how to eliminate the CTI
program” because the agency leadership believed there were “too many
white people.” While the CTI program wasn’t eliminated, the FAA stopped
using it to hire people, he also said.
There were 36 schools with the CTI program, before the FAA
stopped hiring CTI graduates. From about 2010 through 2014, there was
“no hiring done,” resulting in the FAA being “down thousands of people”
as controllers retired, Pearson said.
He thinks the hiring freeze may have contributed to
controllers’ fatigue, attrition and low staffing – resulting in the
crash in at the Reagan airport.
Another issue is the Air Traffic Safety Action Program (ATSAP),
which the National Air Traffic Controllers Association says “helps
resolve safety issues that otherwise might not have been identified or
resolved.”
No consequences
With ATSAP, “employees are promised that no punitive or
disciplinary actions will be taken as a result of reporting errors that
could impact safety, provided those errors are not the result of gross
negligence or illegal activity,” according to the association.
Pearson calls ATSAP an “immunity program" that results in
the FAA having “no way to decertify controllers who can’t be retrained.”
Like the change in ATC hiring practices, ATSAP also began around 2010.
John Gilding, who is a former controller, supervisor, and professor for Arizona State University’s CTI program, told Just the News on Thursday that the FAA is “resurrecting” its use of the CTI program to hire controllers.
Before ditching the program, the FAA would hire CTI
graduates, military controllers then people “off-the-street” – who had
no experience in ATC and only graduated high school – in that order of
prioritization, Gilding said.
After hiring them, they go to the FAA Academy in Oklahoma
City. And if they graduate, they are then dispersed “throughout the
country to various facilities, then they go on to on-the-job training,”
he said.
The controller hiring pipeline can’t just be “reloaded,”
Gilding said, as “a lot of schools shut down” their CTI programs because
they couldn't afford to keep them. “When students found out the program
was dead, they stopped enrolling,” he said.
It might take five to eight years “to get the CTI program
back up to full strength,” but “will the FAA do another rug pull in
seven to eight years?” he asked.
Gilding added that controllers are working six days a week, 10 hours a day, leading to burnout, "mistakes and serious errors.”
“In our career field, if you run people into peak exhaustion, someone's gonna die,” he said.
Regarding the D.C. crash, Gilding said that he and Pearson
reviewed the publicly available information and found that “there was a
stunning amount of air traffic error there,” and that he “stopped
counting at six or seven mistakes the controller made.”
“ATSAP might be the problem,” Gilding said regarding the reason for the mistakes that led to the crash.
In response to a request for comment on Friday, the FAA sent Just the News its FAQ page on the crash and a link to its hiring practices.
The FAA told Just the News in a statement: "Growing the
nation’s air traffic controller workforce is a top priority for the FAA.
We continue to hire and onboard new controllers. Their work is critical
to meeting our safety mission. The FAA hired 1,811 air traffic
controllers in Fiscal Year 2024."
A controller who asked to not be identified by name told Just the News
on Friday that during a controller’s on-the-job training, supervisors
can have different standards for when someone is “ready to be
certified.”
While the overall standard for certification is that a
controller “moves planes without breaking any rules,” they could still
take actions that supervisors with higher standards believe are not
acceptable, meaning a controller needs more practice, the controller
said.
"Get out of Jail" card
The controller also addressed ATSAP, saying that
controllers use “self-reporting … as immunity from punitive action from
the FAA,” even if it’s “just retraining.”
“The problem is that a lot of controllers, after ATSAP rolled out, saw it as a get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said.
Before ATSAP, there was a three-strike rule, the controller
said, where if a controller had “three errors in two years, then they
could be terminated by the FAA.” This forced “accountability on the
controller’s part,” the controller said.
While ATSAP “allowed us to speak out on safety issues in
the system” when there wasn’t really “a good avenue for that before,”
the FAA “went too far,” the controller said.
A controller could make a mistake “three to four times
before the FAA could give you retraining,” which is called “skill
enhancement training,” the controller said. However, “to me, if someone”
makes a mistake “three to four times, they have a much bigger problem,”
and “waiting to that point” is too long,” the controller also said.
Some controllers are “taking the job not as seriously as they should because there's no threat to them,” the controller said.
The “real threat is collision,” which isn’t typical, “so
people have complacency” because there are “so many systems put in
place,” the controller said, adding, "Hopefully, the crash is “a wakeup
call for people."
Group, not individual performance
The controller also said another “big issue” is that there
has been a shift “away from individual performance to group performance
management.” Thus, management does “not go after one controller,” but
rather, the whole facility, even if it’s an individual’s issue.
"I think most controllers are dedicated and do a great job,
but as in any profession, there are some lower performers that are not
being addressed, and their mistakes are grouped into the facility as a
whole," the controller explained.
Following the D.C. crash, President Donald Trump called out
the efforts during the Obama and Biden administrations to prioritize
DEI in the FAA hiring practices, including for important air traffic
control specialist roles, and issued an executive order requiring a review of government hiring in the industry.
