NEWARK, NEW JERSEY – JUNE 02: People move through Newark Liberty International Airport following a news conference by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy at the airport, where he announced the reopening of a major runway at the airport, nearly two weeks ahead of schedule on June 02, 2025 in Newark, New Jersey. Delays and cancellations have plagued Newark, one of the nation’s busiest airports, for months. Air traffic control outages, runway construction, and an announcement by United Airlines that over 20% of FAA controllers at Newark walked off the job have all contributed to the delays. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
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The Federal Aviation Administration has already reached its hiring goal of 2,000 new air traffic controllers for this fiscal year. However, travelers may still experience ongoing flight disruptions due to the strain in the U.S. airspace system from ongoing staffing shortages and infrastructure issues.
Deputy FAA Administrator Chris Rocheleau announced the controller hiring milestone during the Regional Airline Association Leaders Conference in Washington last week.
“As a result of the secretary’s supercharged initiative, we took roughly a 13-month process and took five-and-a-half months off that process by, instead of doing things in a linear fashion, doing them simultaneously,” said Rocheleau, as reported by Aviation Week.
According to the FAA, onsite Academy training has increased by nearly 30%. The FAA had over 600 Academy students in training in August, setting a new record. “Our average graduation rate is probably around the 63 to 65% range,” Rocheleau said. “We’re going for 75 to 80%.”
The agency plans to add 2,200 new controllers in fiscal 2026 and nearly 9,000 through 2028.
FAA ATC Hiring Targets Met, But Staffing Shortages Remain
WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 01: U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy holds a news conference about adding more air traffic controllers to the workforce at the DOT headquarters on May 01, 2025 in Washington, DC. Counter to the Trump Administration’s historic layoffs of federal workers, Duffy announced incentives to train new air traffic controllers and to retain controllers that may be close to retirement. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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The National Airspace System will not immediately benefit from the new hires. Controller training typically lasts 18 to 24 months, with high attrition rates. In its 2025-2028 Air Traffic Controller Workforce Plan, the FAA projects it will lose “nearly 1,600 controllers due to retirements, promotions and other losses” this year.
The FAA reports that it exceeded its controller hiring target last year, hiring 11 more than the 1,800 air traffic controllers it had targeted to hire. The FAA has hired 5,778 new controllers over the past 5 years.
The agency reported total attrition of 1,400 controllers last year including “FAA Academy and developmental controller training failures.”
The agency anticipates that more than 6,900 controllers will leave the workforce by 2028, primarily due to training washouts.
The FAA still has a deficit of approximately 3,500 fully certified controllers. Major hubs, including New York, Atlanta, and Chicago, operate with fewer controllers than recommended, often forcing overtime in a high-stress job.
The watershed effect of a staffing gap at the air traffic control centers responsible for major hubs contributes to widespread flight delays and cancellations at many of the country’s airports.
On its Workforce Plan, the FAA attributes the current staffing shortage to multiple disruptions to the training flow over the past 12 years.
“Hiring and training new air traffic controllers to full CPC is a continuous, multi-year process, and any disruptions can have significant, long-term impacts on future controller staffing levels,” the agency reports. “For more than a decade, several major factors and events slowed the FAA’s hiring plans. In FY 2013, the government-wide discretionary sequester cut agencies’ budgets and forced the FAA to institute a prolonged hiring freeze. Just as controller staffing was on its way to recovery, in FY 2019, the FAA was impacted by a 35-day government shutdown that also resulted in large hiring and training delays. Hiring and training were again substantially disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Controller staffing recovery would benefit from uninterrupted hiring and training activities.”
The FAA has widened its training pipeline. Last week, the agency announced that Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Prescott, Arizona, campus became the ninth school participating in the Enhanced Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative.
“We’re taking aggressive action at the FAA to recruit the best and brightest into our controller workforce by making the training process more efficient than ever. These jobs are critical to keeping our skies safe, and with the expansion of our training capabilities through Enhanced AT-CTI schools, we are bolstering our aviation workforce and ushering in a higher volume of controllers beyond our previous capabilities,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said in the announcement.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford added, “The safety of the National Airspace System is our number one priority, and the Enhanced AT-CTI program will help build the next generation of air traffic controllers.”
As part of the FAA’s ‘supercharge’ air traffic controller recruiting initiative, modern tower simulators are helping to shorten the time required for field training. The agency has also boosted starting pay and offered incentives to attract recruits to hard-to-staff facilities.
Passengers Continue To Feel The Impact Of Systemic Failures
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY – MAY 05: People wait in line for a delayed flight at Newark International Airport on May 05, 2025 in Newark, New Jersey. Delays and cancellations at one of the nation’s busiest airports have persisted for about a week, with these disruptions continuing into Monday morning. Air traffic control outages, runway construction, and an announcement by United Airlines that over 20% of FAA controllers at Newark walked off the job have all contributed to delays and cancellations. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
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For travelers, aircraft controller shortages mean delays, cancellations, and longer flight times. Airlines must slow departure schedules or extend ground holds when ATC facilities cannot safely handle peak traffic volumes.
Systemic strains have hampered air travel at Newark Liberty International Airport. Equipment issues affecting specific radio frequencies in the Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control, which manages approach and departure traffic at Newark, led to a ground stop at Newark on August 28, resulting in flight delays of over two hours.
The airport was already facing flight constraints due to ongoing construction and staffing problems at Philadelphia TRACON.
After suffering significant flight disruptions due to a telecommunications issue in Philadelphia, United Airlines petitioned the FAA for slot controls at Newark this May to help manage traffic.
“Our goal is to relieve the substantial inconvenience to the traveling public from excessive flight delays due to construction, staffing challenges, and recent equipment issues, which magnify as they spread through the National Airspace System,” said Acting FAA Administrator Chris Rocheleau in a statement this May.
The FAA reduced the number of arrivals and departures at the airport to 28 flights per hour during runway construction. After the airport completed the runway work in June, the FAA increased the maximum arrival limit to 34 flights per hour, with the 28-hourly flight rate limited to weekend operations.
In June, the FAA noted some progress from the flight reductions, stating, “the limited arrival rate already paid dividends over the Memorial Day holiday with smooth travel into and out of Newark.”
The agency also met with representatives from United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue Airways, American Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Spirit Airlines, and Allegiant Air, holding “one-on-one meetings” to discuss reducing operations at the airport.
In July, the FAA switched to a new fiber optic communications network between New York and the Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON). “This upgrade significantly enhances resiliency with new fiber optic connections on two separate communications paths, ensuring equipment will continue to operate if one path is disrupted,” the agency stated.
Still, system failures can recur, as they did in August.
Flight Disruptions In Dallas Due To Communications Breakdown
DALLAS, TEXAS – DECEMBER 8, 2018: American Airlines passenger jets parked at their gates on a rainy morning at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport which serves the Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, metroplex area in Texas. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)
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This past Friday, an equipment failure disrupted the telecommunications infrastructure, causing chaos at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and Dallas Love Field. The outage affected Dallas’ TRACON facility, which handles the approach and departure flows for the region’s airports. The FAA imposed a one-hour ground stop at both airports before transitioning to a ground delay as part of the recovery effort.
Nearly 700 flights were delayed at Dallas-Fort Worth with 200 flights cancelled. Passengers traveling through Love Field had around 160 flights delayed.
In a statement, the FAA attributed the disruption to “multiple failures of the TDM data telecommunications service provided by Frontier—a local telecommunications company. This then led to an outage impacting the FAA’s Dallas TRACON facility. Oversight by L3Harris, an FAA contractor, failed to ensure that redundancies in the system functioned properly.”
The agency added: “This is a clear example of the FAA’s outdated infrastructure and underscores the urgent need to modernize our air traffic control systems. It also highlights the critical importance of clearing thousands of state and local permitting obstacles, which will delay modernization efforts by years. Moving from aging, analog systems to more resilient, digital technology is critical to maintaining the reliability and resiliency of the national airspace system.”
Increased Demand Could Cause More Flight Disruptions Over The Next Two Decades
WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 08: U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy speaks at an event unveiling a new U.S. air traffic control system at the Department of Transportation on May 08, 2025 in Washington, DC. Under the new plan the FAA will replace and improve antiquated infrastructure including radar systems, software, hardware and telecommunications networks to improve safety and reduce delays. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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The FAA’s 2025-2045 Aerospace Forecast reports that activity at FAA and contract towers increased by 3.6% last year. Activity at the nation’s 64 large and medium hub airports increased by 4.1% and 3.4% respectively. That moderate increase was enough to cause “congestion and delays.”
The agency projects a significant increase in air traffic over the next twenty years, driven by a combination of commercial growth, increased private aviation activity, and a rise in drone, urban air mobility, and other aircraft and vehicle applications.
The agency’s baseline forecast predicts that system enplanements will grow at an average annual rate of 2.5% over the next two decades, with domestic passengers increasing by 2.4% and international passengers rising by 3.1%, reaching over 1.6 billion annual passengers by 2045.
The FAA suggests that this growth is only sustainable through improvements to infrastructure.
“Should the infrastructure be inadequate and result in even more congestion and delays, it is likely that the forecasts of both demand and operations would not be achieved,” the FAA warns in the forecast.
This May, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy committed to modernizing the nation’s air traffic control system.
“Without the implementation of this initiative, the likely result would be greater congestion and delays at airports, increasing airline passenger dissatisfaction,” the FAA states in its forecast.
For travelers, the FAA meeting its air traffic controller hiring target early this year is positive, but it’s not an immediate solution. Airspace congestion, strained controllers, and intermittent communications faults could mean U.S. airline passengers experience flight disruptions for years to come.
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