Upping the Rank and File

For purpose of contemporaneously keeping pace with emerging technologies and reducing the duration of investigations, the National Transportation Safety Board dramatically increased hiring in 2023.

By the end of the prevailing fiscal year, NTSB personnel will number 433—a significant increase from the agency’s August 2019’s roster of 397 employees.

Since the beginning of fiscal 2023, the NTSB has hired 57 new workers, compared to only seven in 2017. By the close of fiscal 2023, the agency aspires to see seventy new employees join its ranks.

Notwithstanding the proliferation of a number of new technologies germane to both aviation and the investigation of transportation mishaps, the NTSB workforce had remained largely unchanged since the mid-1990s.

On 25 September, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy swore in 15 new employees, the largest cohort of new-hires welcomed by the agency in years. In August, the NTSB’s Office of Aviation Safety's air traffic control division took on four new members—thereby fully-staffing the office for the first time in seven-years.

Homendy stated: “My vision for the NTSB is an agency where everything we do—from our investigations to our advocacy to our internal processes and procedures—advances our critical safety mission. The first step was to right-size our agency’s workforce, which had been stagnant for decades, because it is our people who will ensure the NTSB is a mission-first agency for years to come.”

Homendy set forth the influx of personnel would permit the NTSB to increase by nearly fifty-percent the number of investigators allocated to its Office of Rail, Pipeline, and Hazardous Materials Investigations. Moreover, by increasing its staffing, the agency’s backlog of active investigations spanning more than two-years has been reduced from a high of 442 such cases in February 2022 to zero by 30 September 2023.

In 2021, the NTSB obtained direct-hire authority from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—the U.S. federal government’s chief human resources agency and personnel policy management entity—for mission-critical positions. So authorized, the NTSB streamlined hiring processes, reorganized its human resources department, hired the agency’s first-ever chief human capital officer?, and leveraged data to identify and remediate bottlenecks in its hiring process.

Homendy added: “I couldn’t be prouder of our exceptional team, whose hard work and dedication all year long have made these successes possible. A special thank-you goes to managing director Dana Schulze and principal deputy managing director Dolline Hatchett for leading these efforts. The NTSB has never been better positioned to serve our vital safety mission.”  

FMI: www.ntsb.gov