--Eric https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/opinion/flight-delays-faa-government-shutdown.html Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinionBinyamin Appelbaum
Why Is Your Flight Always Delayed? Blame Government Shutdowns. ...In the early 2010s, every federal agency was preparing for a large cohort of baby boomers to walk into retirement. The F.A.A.’s challenge was particularly acute because it had hired many of its controllers around the same time, as replacements for the strikers fired by President Ronald Reagan https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/06/us/us-begins-sending-dismissals-to-controllers-and-jails-five-up-slightly-in-3d-day.html in August 1981. But the National Academies found that the F.A.A. consistently hired fewer workers than the numbers its internal models showed that it would need. The agency fell short in nine of the 10 years between 2013 and 2023. Over that period, it ended up hiring fewer than two-thirds of the workers it estimated it would need. The funding disruptions began in 2011, when Republicans who had just taken control of Congress insisted that they wouldn’t raise the federal debt ceiling to meet the government’s existing obligations until the Obama administration agreed to reduce future spending. Under the resulting deal, the F.A.A. was forced to impose a hiring freeze through much of 2013 and 2014. When Republicans seeking further spending cuts forced a government shutdown for 16 days in the fall of 2013, the agency closed its training academy and sent recruits back to their homes. As a result of the disruptions, during those two years, the F.A.A. started training about half the number of controllers it needed. The agency hasn’t been able to make up for those shortfalls. One issue is that it has needed the full capacity of its training academy just to meet its existing annual goals. In 2016 and 2017, the two years the agency hit its hiring targets, it was basically treading water. The second issue is that the hits kept coming. Three shutdowns in 2018 and 2019 once again disrupted recruiting and forced the academy to close. The impact wasn’t immediate. It takes an average of five years to train controllers to work in the most important facilities. But even before Covid once again shut down the F.A.A.’s training process, the staffing shortages were taking a toll. In recent years, the government has urged airlines to reduce summer flight schedules at some of the nation’s most popular airports because they can’t handle the volume. United Airlines, for example, cut about 10 percent of its scheduled flights in and out of Newark because arriving flights were experiencing average delays of two hours. Even with fewer flights, the agency is stretched to the limits of its capacity. The National Academies found the F.A.A. increasingly relies on mandatory overtime shifts and six-day workweeks to cover staffing shortages. The overtime budget has increased by 300 percent since 2013. The reliance on overworked controllers is particularly dangerous because the F.A.A. relies on outdated technologies that it has struggled to upgrade or replace. As in so many other areas, the United States has fallen behind other nations that use more modern technologies to guide more airplanes safely through crowded parts of the sky. ...
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