‘Very stressful; it’s high stakes,’ Government shutdown strains overburdened air traffic controllers

There are currently more than 14,000 air traffic controllers employed by the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), but by many accounts that isn’t nearly enough. Even with 2024’s largest hiring of controllers in nearly a decade, a shortage persists.

The shortage of air traffic controllers was a problem already on the radar of the U.S. Department of Transportation, but the impact of the recent federal government shutdown has many travelers concerned about aviation safety and reliability.

The government shutdown has resulted in large absences of air traffic controllers, causing thousands of delayed flights across the country. As federal employees, controllers who were already exposed to tremendous stress and pressure due to the nature of their work are now working without pay. Many are not showing up for work, working jobs on the side to make ends meet and taking sick leave.

With air travel expected to surge as the holiday season quickly approaches, all eyes will be on lawmakers to come to an agreement and ease the burden on air traffic controllers and other federal employees.

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U.S. air traffic controllers ensure the safety of about two million aviation passengers per day—or almost one billion people per year, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. Controllers use their skills and judgment to safely direct more than 70,000 flights daily to their destinations.

Ohio University Assistant Professor of Computer Science Chad Mourning, Ph.D., says air traffic controllers have a crucial role in the multi-layered safety system of air travel. Mourning is an expert in aviation safety, has served as a research computer scientist for Ohio University’s Avionics Engineering Center and has ongoing funded projects by NASA and the FAA.

“Airborne fixed wing aircraft can't stop for red lights or stop signs, so we need ‘crossing guards of the skies’ to manage traffic,” Mourning said. “They coordinate takeoffs, landings, and the ground movements on the airport taxiways. They also provide some enroute guidance and communicate with pilots any situational awareness they may need about weather or other hazards.”

While safety is always the number one goal, air traffic controllers must also ensure that traffic is moving efficiently. Mourning points out that two plans cannot occupy the same space, so separation is key. Too much separation, however, can cause significant delays.

“Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta had around 800,000 aircraft operations—takeoffs and landings—in 2024; if they were each delayed by one minute that's over a year of delays,” Mourning explained.

Being an air traffic controller is far from a passive employment experience. Controllers must always remain alert to ensure the safety of thousands of travelers per day. People’s lives are in their hands and all that responsibility can be a lot for individuals to bear. The stressful nature of the job itself is one the primary reasons for a shortage in air traffic controllers over the past decade.

“It is very stressful; it's high stakes, and they intentionally take measures to keep them in states of hyper-vigilance such as rotating shifts so they can't get into habits that take flight schedules for granted,” said Mourning. “They do get ample breaks if they need them, and they can take stress leave, but some worry that taking leave will affect their long-term careers.”

Mourning says the FAA is aware of these issues and is working to create more non-punitive pathways to ease the barrier for controllers get any help they need, but currently, more controllers are leaving than joining. Air traffic controllers have a high turnover rate; many don’t make it through training or their first few years on the job. Those who do make it through have a mandatory retirement age of 56.

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To alleviate the shortage, the FAA has been compensating controllers with overtime pay. In the long term, they are hoping to hire 9,000 new air traffic controllers by 2028.

“They are currently about 3,000 shy of their target staffing levels,” explained Mourning. “One of the biggest issues is the high ‘wash out’ rate during training; they know they can't lower expectations, so they are trying other approaches like improving mentoring of trainees and improving partnerships with universities, so they have more experience going into training.”

Another reason for the shortage is a bottleneck in the training pipeline. New air traffic controllers are required to be trained at a single facility in Oklahoma where they spend several months. This is great for training consistency, but the lack of options can turn some away. Mourning says this, too, is being addressed.

“The Air Traffic Control Workforce Development Act was introduced in the Senate in February and to the House in May, and it empowers universities to provide some air traffic control training,” he said. “They'll still need to prove their proficiency to become ‘real’ controllers, but it's a headstart and will shorten some of the pipeline struggles we're seeing.”

As essential employees of the federal government, U.S. air traffic controllers must continue to work during government shutdowns with partial pay or eventually without pay entirely if the shutdown is extensive. Mourning says that being required to work with little to no pay can certainly impact the performance of controllers.

“You can see this by the increase in sick leave during government shutdowns compared to other times,” emphasized Mourning. “If you've ever experienced a short-staffed shift because a colleague called out sick on short notice, you can see how this would propagate to everyone else.”

Safety is obviously a concern with air traffic controllers job performance being affected, but Mourning says that the multi-layered safety system of air travel in the U.S. is largely effective at preventing catastrophe.

“Imagine each layer allows one in 100 accidents through, well if you have five layers that means an accident rate of one in 10 billion, if you remove a layer, now it's one in a hundred million which is still exceedingly rare,” he said.

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However, even with all the layers of protection, the law of large numbers catches up with the precautions, according to Mourning. He says 2025 is likely to see more flights than any other year, and an extra set of eyes or an additional well-rested mind could make a big difference.

“Risk is incremental, every plane isn't going to fall out of the sky because of a shortage [of controllers], but major airline crashes are exceedingly rare, so even one is going to spook people,” said Mourning.

Realistically, what most travelers will experience as a result of the government shutdown is delays. It may seem inconvenient that thousands of flights have already been delayed since the government shutdown began on Oct. 1, but Mourning says this is actually ideal. Delays can help get traffic manageable for the reduced number of controllers who are working.

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Media outlets throughout the nation tend to credit the absence of air traffic controllers for ending the government shutdown of 2019, but National Air Traffic Controllers Association President Nick Daniels disagrees with this narrative.

“We shouldn’t be the rope in this tug of war,” Daniels told New York Times.

Mourning agrees, and says air traffic controllers have been the example everyone points to when it comes to public sector unions since Reagan fired striking controllers in the 1980s. Mourning does think that lawmakers could potentially use travel delays as leverage to end the shutdown if it were to continue.

“Both sides will continue to blame the other side using every angle they can find, and flight delays will be somewhere on that list,” Mourning explained. “Especially if this goes into the holiday travel season.”