The Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General wants to get to the bottom of the air traffic controller shortage and is launching a major audit of systems used to recruit, train, and deploy new controllers. In a memo published Tuesday, Nelda Smith, Principal Assistant Inspector General for Auditing and Evaluation, said she will concentrate on the FAA’s latest efforts to swell the ranks of controllers, which are down 3,500 from the full complement recommended for running the system. “Acknowledging this challenge, in February 2025, the Secretary of Transportation announced a campaign to “supercharge” controller hiring,” the memo says. “The campaign closed in March 2025 and attracted more than 10,000 applications. Of these, more than 8,300 applicants were referred to the FAA Academy … for testing, resulting in approximately 600 trainees, the highest number of Academy students in history.”
But the effort has faced major headwinds, and Smith said she wants to find ways to help the agency achieve its goal of hiring 8,900 controllers in the next three years. “Our objectives are to assess (1) FAA’s efforts to address the Academy instructor shortages, training capacity limitations, and trainee failure rates, and (2) the Academy’s progress with updating the air traffic controller training program curriculum,” she wrote. The audit will begin within the next month and be done at FAA headquarters in Washington.
Why would the OIG teams not go out in the field?
600 trainees out of a pool of 10,000 may say a lot about our education system. We’re not preparing kids properly. I realize some were screened for background or medical “issues”, but 94% not making the entrance threshold for the FAA academy should leave us wondering about how we’re going to staff other critical roles.
It truly is an “either you got it or you don’t” type job. Intelligence really doesn’t make it happen. During my many years at it, I saw controllers that were like magicians, ORD especially, who had no academic background at all. And I saw trainees that would try, masters degrees, but just flat didn’t get it. We had professional pilots, especially after the strike, give it a try, not be able to think and act at the needed level. Their thoughts were probably too good, but they couldn’t act fast enough to put it all together. Guess I’m glad I was not too sharp about much else. I do think me being a pilot made the whole thing much more interesting to me, but many of the non pilots I worked with were much better wheel and deal kinda folks who were better ATC than me. It’s just an odd career field. And most folks after beginning to understand what is involved, don’t want to do it, especially with the schedules and such.
You’re right Roger. Nine years in Centers and 16 in High Level TRACONs I agree with you. We had a lot of High School grads who were fantastic. I went to the Academy 3 weeks after graduating College and it was harder and higher pressure than anything in college. I LOVED the job until “Train to succeed” raised its UGLY head and left YEARS earlier than I planned for that reason. I still fly regularly and much of what I hear would have gotten us fired.
One has to think long and hard to determine if a high stress job that requires so much is worth the effort. At 51 years of age there is much less thinking about it for me – but I do not recall recent history where I would have suggested a career in aviation (any field other than MRO) to any young person. Quite the contrary. Get a career that allows you to live comfortably and skip the aviation bullshit when and where able.