ATC Towers Unlikely To Reach Full Staffing Under Current Operations

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told Congress on December 16 that if the agency continues operating as it currently does, air traffic control towers across the country are unlikely to ever reach full staffing levels.

Bedford was testifying during the “The State of American Aviation” hearing before the Aviation Subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Capitol Hill. When asked by Rep. Hank Johnson Jr. (D-GA) when ATC towers would be fully staffed, Bedford replied, "The honest answer, sir, is, if we continue with business as usual, never.”

"We'll never catch up. The system is designed to be chronically understaffed,” he added.

Bedford explained that controller retirements, burnout, and retention issues all confront the FAA’s efforts to staff control towers. He said to mitigate staffing shortages, the agency needs to expand the training pipeline and invest more to develop new controllers.

The FAA met its 2025 goal of hiring 2,026 new controllers and aims to add another 8,900 by 2028, which means the agency would have to hire nearly 4,500 over each of the next two years. While that seems very ambitious, Bedford said longstanding shortages cannot be resolved through incremental changes alone.

Lawmakers also voiced concerns about aging infrastructure such as towers, radar systems, and repeated delays in modernization programs as well as cost overruns and schedule slippages.

Bedford said the FAA is trying to squeeze a planned 15-year modernization roadmap into a significantly shorter timeframe. This has been supported by $12.5 billion already appropriated for air traffic control rehabilitation.

The current effort is relying on a Prime Integrator to coordinate the replacement of radar facilities, upgrades of other facilities, and deployment of modern technology across the entire national airspace system. Bedford acknowledged that execution and oversight are lingering concerns, given that Peraton, the company selected for the role, was founded relatively recently in 2017.

The effort to modernize the U.S. national airspace system has been deferred or interrupted by funding issues for the past twenty years and it finally appears that a concerted effort is being made to move the entire enterprise forward. Still, it will take time, and initial estimates of the timeframe for completion were perhaps more than slightly optimistic.

FMI:  www.faa.gov/