Today, in What Could Possibly Go Wrong? News: The Trump administration has come up with a novel idea to deal with the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers (ATCs). Let’s guess which of these it is! Is it…
a) Diversifying hiring practices, offering improved mental health care and support, removing the requirement for prospective ATCs to move to Oklahoma City to complete their training, and apologizing for trying to convince the nation’s entire air traffic control workforce to resign and go away?
OR
b) Creating a flashy YouTube ad to target gamers, the demographic that the government has identified as being perfect to fill the shortage?
Because we live in the most asinine possible timeline, the answer is, of course, b).
However, the news about the Trump administration’s bold strategy wasn’t the only news this week about America’s air traffic control regime. There was also the release of a report carried out by industry site AviatorDB, which looked into the reasons for the shortage. The research is pretty comprehensive, and even a cursory reading of the document reveals the problem with the “let’s recruit gamers!” strategy, which is that it assumes the root of the shortage is that not enough people are applying to be ATCs.
The thing is, that’s not the case. As per the report, just under 58,000 people applied for a career in air traffic control in 2022, and around 200,000 have applied since 2020. The problem is that almost none of these people actually end up as working ATCs—only around 2%, in fact.
There are many reasons for this. To even be considered, you need to be under 31 when you apply, and the initial screening, aptitude assessment, and medical assessment can take months—or even years. The vast majority of hopefuls are either rejected or simply give up. If you get past the initial stage, you need to complete a training course, which—unless you happen to be a graduate of one of nine “accredited universities”—requires you to move to Oklahoma City, where the FAA Academy is located. And once that’s done, you’re in for years’ worth of on-the-job training before you’re certified. Of those who made it to the Academy between 2017 and 2022, only 70% graduated—and of those, only 61% were actually certified as ATCs.
Curiously, the New York Times doesn’t mention any of this in its coverage of the latest Trump scheme. It also neglects to point out the fact that the job seems pretty miserable. ATCs die by suicide at a rate three times higher than the national average, with FAA data identifying “chronic fatigue from 10-hour shifts as the primary factor” in 75% of these deaths. The rate of anxiety disorders among ATCs is four times higher than that in the general population.
Part of this is no doubt due to the shortage making an already difficult and stressful job even more taxing—but part of it is also simply due to the job being difficult and stressful, which also goes some way toward explaining why so few applicants actually make it into the workforce. The system of mental health support also sounds like it’s rife with problems: ATCs reporting mental health issues are immediately removed from duty, which a 2024 report from the FAA’s Aviation Rulemaking Committee noted: “disincentivizes honesty.” The same report identified fear as “the driving emotion behind both pilots/controllers’ decisions to not disclose a mental health issue.”
The Trump government, of course, has no time for such quibbling, which is perhaps the only other time it has addressed the ATC situation was by suggesting—without anything in the way of evidence—that Democratic-sponsored DEI policies were somehow to blame for the well-publicized collision between a plane and a helicopter in January last year.
In fact, if the blame can be traced back to any Presidency, then it’s not a Democratic one. No, like pretty much every other problem in this godforsaken country, the historical reasons for the shortage ultimately come back to Ronald Reagan. Way back in 1981, some 13,000 members of PATCO—the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization—went on strike over “long hours, chronic understaffing, outdated equipment, and rising workplace stress.”
Reagan, who had been in office just over six months, listened carefully to these concerns fired all of the 11,345 striking controllers who refused a demand to return to work, decertified the union, and banned them from working in the civil service for life.
Despite the FAA’s prediction that it would take only two years to replenish the workforce, it took over a decade—and, as the AviationDB report points out, “Today, 25% fewer controllers handle three times the traffic [they did in 1981]. Each controller in 2025 manages roughly 1,178 flights per year—compared to 315 in 1981.”
It turns out that firing a large segment of a highly skilled and hard-to-replace workforce for raising entirely legitimate concerns about their jobs wasn’t such a great idea! Of course, the Trump government would never do such a thing. Anyway, we’re giving it six months before the inevitable “We’ll just get AI to do it!” policy announcement, which we await with bated breath—assuming we don’t all die in a plane crash between now and then, of course.
