Last week, national media turned an eye to the preponderance of near misses not just at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport but at airports around the country, due to a nationwide air traffic controller staffing backlog leftover from the pandemic. People may be looking to City Council, which controls the Aviation Department that runs the airport, to do something – it is one of the fastest-growing airports in the nation, with its flight volume having increased 30% from pre-pandemic levels, and an 8% increase in departing flights since just last October. “Should we be allowing this level of air traffic, if we have not confirmed that the air and ground safety resources can operate reliably at this level?” asked Eugene Sepulveda, former chair of the Airport Advisory Commission, last week. Unfortunately, the city has very little control over this situation.
When it comes to safety, the city controls only the infrastructure that supports ground operations – staff does daily inspections of the physical pavement, signage, and lighting systems to make sure pilots can see them, and clears snow and ice and any stray animals that wander into the flightpath. Airlines act as tenants to the city-owner airport landlord: They lease baggage claims, gates, and ticket counters. Most importantly, they control their own flight scheduling and make decisions based on market demand. Essentially, they have every incentive to schedule as many flights as possible.
In Europe, the Schipol Airport in Amsterdam has implemented a controversial policy of “slot control,” capping flights as a noise reduction strategy, much to airlines’ chagrin. However, this policy has very little precedent in the very capitalist United States and can be easily manipulated – United Airlines once faced a Department of Justice antitrust investigation for monopolizing slot control at the Newark Airport. At the end of the day, the most significant thing our local airport can do to accommodate increasing flight traffic is expand the airport, which it broke ground on in August. In a statement, airport leadership told the Chronicle, “Only the federal government has the authority to adjust air traffic.” This summer, the Federal Aviation Administration did encourage airlines to surrender 10% of their slots to ease the burden on overworked controllers at Newark, LaGuardia, and JFK airports. Sometimes airlines do the right thing – last summer, United Airlines reduced its schedule due to congestion.
“We need action before lives are lost in a costly disaster.” –U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett
Nationwide, the FAA operates a joint government and industry command center in Washington, D.C., to balance air traffic capacity with demand: They coordinate up to 50,000 flights in the U.S. per day, over a quarter of the world’s scheduled flights. But in these near-miss incidents, the communication broke down at a lower level: the FAA-owned controller tower at the Austin airport, where controllers clear pilots’ requests for takeoff and landing. That tower only has 35 controllers currently – 40% below the target level set by the FAA and the controllers’ union. More than 3 out of 5 shifts at the Austin airport are staffed with fewer people than FAA guidelines call for. The FAA told the Chronicle that “although the FAA generally staffs to traffic counts, it is not a one-to-one relationship.” Throughout the day, they assess the number of controllers at each facility with traffic volume and workload. “When traffic volume is high, controllers will slow the flow of traffic to ensure safe separation between aircraft.”
Still, though the FAA has awarded $10 million in grants to fund aviation classes at high schools this year and plans to hire thousands more controllers next year, issues with scheduling have yet to be solved. A 2018 Department of Transportation investigation found that inefficient scheduling was leading to staffing issues and increased overtime costs and that the FAA was “years away from a standardized controller scheduling tool.” It’s unclear who has ultimate authority over that – the FAA told The New York Times last week that controllers’ schedules are negotiated by their union.
Congress recently passed a bill to improve air travel, amid battles around how stringently the airline industry should be regulated. The bill mandates the FAA adopt a new staffing model to reflect controller workforce needs, but U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett urged more action from the FAA in a press release Monday: He wants to designate the Austin airport as a higher-traffic-level airport, which could bring more resources and better compensation for controllers, and mandate more training, and upgrade airspace levels to triple the amount of protected space around AUS, which would reduce the amount of air traffic close to the airport. “Multiple near-miss incidents at our airport are totally unacceptable,” Doggett said in the release. “We need action before lives are lost in a costly disaster.”
The median annual wage for air traffic controllers was $132,250 in 2022, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The application process can take six months or longer, and training requires a few months in Oklahoma City. Learn more about a career in air traffic control at t.ly/aZTq4.
This article appears in October 20 • 2023.