When last week’s air disaster happened in D.C., the spotlight was thrown quickly on air traffic control – even without having any inkling that controller error contribution to the collision.
That’s because there’s been a lot of attention paid recently to diversity efforts at the FAA, and because the President has railed against those sorts of efforts.
There’s a lot of misinformation about what happened. Here’s the basic truth, and how much it matters today.
- Starting in 2014, the FAA shifted from prioritizing graduates of Collegiate Training Initiative schools to hiring ‘off the street.’ Attending a college program with air traffic control curriculum no longer helped get hired at the FAA. It had been the primary way controllers started their careers.
- That came after Obama FAA Administrator Michael Huerta announced a piority to “transform the (FAA) into a more diverse and inclusive workplace that reflects, understands, and relates to the diverse customers” it serves.
- To screen applicants, the FAA introduced a ‘biographical assessment.’ I’m not going to detail that here – it’s readily available on a Google search, with as much as has been written about it since last week. But it’s true the FAA in 2018 removed the biographical assessment as a screening tool.
- Some minority candidates were fed “buzz words” to bump their resumes up to top priority. Saying your worst subject in school was science served as a golden ticket. Correct answers to the take-home biographical questionnaire were given in their entirety. These questionnaires were later banned.
- Candidates still met qualifications and went through proper training. There’s no indication that unqualified controllers were hired. The problem isn’t the quality of controllers, but the quantity of them. FAA wasn’t hiring enough – they didn’t have enough training seats. (There is an argument that some of the controllers hired might have taken longer to get placed, or that retention may have been lower, but I don’t believe any data has been released that substantiates this.)
There are now hundreds of near-collisions per year. Staffing is an issue, but why? Twenty years ago the agency’s Inspector General told them to lean into Collegiate Training more.
This would have solved for the bottleneck of the FAA’s own introductory program. They did not do this. The diversity focus, causing them to move away from a component of the solution, did not help.
A year ago, then-FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker announced a program – the Enhanced AT-CTI initiative – to once again leverage Collegiate Training – allowing graduates to skip the FAA’s three-month introductory classroom program at their Oklahoma City Academy (which is the step prior to being assigned to an FAA facility).
The Enhanced Initiative was created to allow qualified institutions to provide their students with equivalent FAA Academy air traffic control training. The Enhanced AT-CTI graduate, with FAA oversight, will be placed directly into a facility if hired as Air Traffic Control Specialists. After graduating from one of the approved schools, new hires can immediately begin localized training at an air traffic facility. These graduates still must pass the Air Traffic Skills Assessment (ATSA) and meet medical and security requirements.
Three schools have signed agreements for this (Embry-Riddle, Tulsa Community College, and the University of Oklahoma). This should begin to help with the FAA’s own bottleneck in hiring, but doesn’t go far enough.
DEI mattered in the sense that the FAA turned away from leaning into programs that developed air traffic control talent. But they wouldn’t have had enough controllers either way. The agency finally ‘got’ that.
My worry with the focus on DEI – which based on what we know so far had nothing to do with the tragic collision of a military helicopter and a commercial airliner last week – is that while the focus is on appalling behavior (the behavioral screen, and in some cases giving cheat codes for it) that’s not the primary safety issue in air traffic control.
- FAA technology upgrade projects that date to the early 1980s haven’t been completed (and won’t be for years)
- Procurement processes are a mess
- There’s little accountability, because the agency regulates itself which is never a best practice.
FAA air traffic control still uses paper flight strips. They’ve been trying to go electronic since 1983. And they won’t get most of the way even this decade, as transportation researcher Bob Poole notes:
On July 17, the Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report on the slow progress of FAA’s program to equip U.S. airport control towers with electronic flight strips (to replace traditional paper flight strips physically handed from one controller to another). The bad news is that instead of only 89 towers scheduled to receive this improvement by 2028, there will now be only 49 towers equipped by 2029.
The FAA set out a plan in 1983 “to equip 150 to 250 airport control towers by 2000.” They went way over budget and didn’t accomplish much. Most recently, a “contract with Lockheed-Martin (now Leidos) was to equip 89 towers with TFDM by 2028.”
That’s been scaled back to 49 towers, but “only 27 of them will get the full version that includes surface management functions, while the other 22 will get only the electronic flight strips.”
They’ve cut airports including Honolulu, New Orleans, San Juan, Anchorage, Burbank, Hartford, Ontario, Orange County and Sacramento among others.
Meanwhile, all of Nav Canada facilities went electronic 15 years ago (and all control towers and TRACONs even earlier). Their solution is used in Australia, Italy, the U.K. and Dubai.
We could license the Canadian solution, or other commercial ones, but instead the FAA has been working on contracting for their own solution since three years before the Beastie Boys were fighting for your right to party.
In addition to an inability to make capital investment decisions as easily as NavCanada, FAA’s procurement systems are byzantine and ineffective.
Look at NavCanada. How many primary radar types do they have for terminal surveillance? One. How many does FAA have? Three, dating back to the 1980s. The manufacturers of two of them are out of business. FAA has four types of secondary/beacon radars. NavCanada does a wholesale replacement, launching a project at the end of life to replace them all at once. NavCanada has one primary switch for all systems: tower, approach, and en-route. One backup switch for all. They just did a replacement tender for them all…FAA is never a single buy. All are indefinite quantity contracts. So suppliers deliver 10 to 20 systems a year.
We don’t have enough people given the limited technology, and better technology would promote safety. FAA has chosen not to use technology, as well, that would limit the need for more staff at particular facilities.
And since FAA regulates itself, there’s little accountability. While some prefer a NavCanada model, it would be an improvement even to split out regulation and standard-setting from service provision into different agencies.
These are real issues. Diversity hiring was a detour and distraction but not the major issue. There were plenty of qualified candidates to hire, and only so many spaces given FAA’s constraints that they never overcame (and which are a big reason for today’s understaffing).
We aren’t giving controllers the tools that they need to do their jobs. We need more controllers to make up for lack of technology at their disposal.
And we shouldn’t let political lightning rod issues distract from the real work that needs to be done. Fix those too! But it would be terrible to let them become the only focus.
