CNN
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When an American Airlines flight fatally collided with a military helicopter near Reagan National Airport Wednesday night, the airport’s tower wasn’t fully staffed, with one traffic controller handling the jobs of two people.
But the situation was hardly an anomaly. Airports around the country have struggled with controller staffing levels for years, according to a CNN review of government data and interviews with aviation experts.
The most recent data from the Federal Aviation Administration shows that across all airport towers and terminal approach facilities nationwide, only about 70% of staffing targets were filled by fully certified controllers as of September 2023. When controllers in training are included, that rose to about 79%.
Some traffic control towers at major airports around the country – including Philadelphia, Orlando, Austin, Albuquerque and Milwaukee – had less than 60% of their staffing targets filled with certified controllers. Reagan Airport had about 63%.
Aviation experts say it’s too early to tell whether a lack of sufficient staffing could have played a role in the disaster over the Potomac River that took 67 lives this week. But the tragedy could raise awareness of the staffing issues that go beyond a single airport.
Air traffic controllers in the US have been warning about the impact of low staffing levels for years, submitting anonymous reports to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System. At least 10 reports submitted by controllers included concerns about staffing, work schedules or fatigue in the last year alone, the NASA database shows.
“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.”
“We are already on forced 6-day work weeks working overtime every week,” another controller in Northern California wrote. “This Leads to Controller fatigue very quickly. We need more staffing.”
Self-reported safety incidents by aviation personnel recorded in NASA’s database detail hundreds of incidents since 2015 in which pilots said they were forced to take evasive action to avoid collision with another aircraft or helicopter when trying to land or depart from the country’s busiest airports.
There were more reports of such incidents at Reagan National – which processes over 25 million passengers per year – than at any of the top 10 busiest airports in the country. Pilots and controllers coming through DCA reported at least 50 incidents of aircrafts being forced to move out of the way of other planes or helicopters in the past ten years.
Las Vegas, where nearly 60 million travelers pass through the airport every year, counted more than 40 reports of evasive action in the ASRS database over the last decade.
In Miami, which sees double DCA’s passengers per year but only filled 60% of its target control tower staffing with fully certified controllers in September 2023, pilots and controllers reported about three dozen incidents in which they said aircrafts needed to take action to avoid collision in the past 10 years.
Reagan National stood out as well in the number of reports describing near collisions between aircrafts and helicopters. Pilots flying through DCA reported at least 23 such incidents since the data was collected in 1988. Most of the busiest airports in the US had less than 5 reports detailing near-misses between planes and helicopters in that timeframe.
In 2023, after a series of close calls at airports around the country, the FAA commissioned a safety review of the national airspace system. An independent team produced a report that found inadequate air-traffic control staffing, combined with outdated equipment and technology, was “rendering the current level of safety unsustainable.” The report added that overtime among air traffic controllers had reached historically high levels and contributed to absences and fatigue.
With “fewer eyes on the airspace… the opportunity for mistakes in instruction is multiplied,” the report stated, noting there were about 1,000 fewer fully certified air traffic controllers in August 2023 than in August 2012, despite more complexity in the national air space.
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, a union, has also been warning about staffing shortages for more than a decade.
The union’s president, Nick Daniels, stated in a letter Thursday that it’s “premature to speculate on the root cause” of the DC collision. In response to a question about how one air traffic controller was working two different tower positions at the time, Daniels said it’s not uncommon for air traffic controllers to “combine” or “de-combine sectors to ensure that we can maximize efficiency and safety.”
The shortages come in part because of attrition during the Covid-19 pandemic and the stringent training that is required for new hires, experts say.
An inspector general report from 2023 stated that the pandemic led to training pauses over a period of about two years, which increased certification times for new controllers as older controllers continued to retire, though the report also noted that the FAA had made “limited efforts” to ensure adequate staffing.
“It takes a long time to train an air traffic controller,” Mary Schiavo, a former Department of Transportation inspector general, told CNN. “It’s very expensive. And about a third of them wash out because it’s very rigorous.”
The FAA has recently touted more success in hiring controllers. In the government’s most recent fiscal year, which covered October 2023 through September 2024, the agency exceeded its hiring goal by bringing on more than 1,800 controllers, the agency said in a statement, calling it “important progress… to reverse the decades-long air traffic controller staffing level decline.”
Separately, in a statement shared with CNN, the FAA noted that aircraft in the US are kept safely separated by standard routes in and out of airports, on-board collision-avoidance systems on airliners as well as runway safety technology at the busiest airports.
The DC disaster has also raised alarms about the Trump administration’s offer of employment buyouts to air traffic controllers, as part of a larger program letting federal employees accept a deferred retirement. If a substantial number of controllers accept the deferred retirement, that could undo progress that federal officials have made in filling vacant positions.
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“That would have a huge impact on what we already have as a shortage,” Rep. Jennifer McClellan, a Virginia Democrat, said of the buyout proposal. “You already have workers that are stressed and trying to meet the needs to keep the American people safe.”
CNN’s Scott Glover, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Winter Hawk, Rob Kuznia and Audrey Ash contributed to this report.