ATC Modernization: Money, Politics, and People

Part six, the last in my series on air traffic control. I’m not an ATC professional; this is what I learned from a lot of reading. Sources are at the bottom, and corrections are welcome.

This is the article that got me started on the whole series. After the Potomac River collision in January 2025, the online conversation about air traffic control went from “how does this work?” to “whose fault is this?” in about a day. Some of the claims flying around were well grounded. Many weren’t. I wanted to understand the arguments well enough to tell the difference.

The first five articles covered history and technology. This one covers the parts that are harder to fix: money, politics, and people.

Money

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NextGen has been running since 2003, and it has never had the kind of steady, predictable funding a multi-decade program needs. The FAA’s budget is set year by year through congressional appropriations, and that process brings government shutdowns, stopgap funding bills, and the occasional round of automatic cuts. Every one of those disrupts long-term work.

The cost is significant. In 2017, the Government Accountability Office reported the FAA’s estimate of $20.6 billion in FAA costs through 2030, plus another $15.1 billion that the aviation industry would spend equipping its aircraft.¹ Earlier GAO work had already flagged the usual suspects for delays and overruns on major ATC programs: requirements that grew after work started, software that was harder to build than planned, and not enough input from the people who’d actually use the systems.²

Not everyone thinks NextGen’s problems are just about money. Concentrating flights onto precise GPS-based paths put a lot more aircraft noise over some neighborhoods, and community groups pushed back hard. Maryland’s Montgomery County Quiet Skies Coalition, for one, published a paper in 2018 arguing that Congress needed to step in and fix how NextGen was being rolled out.³

Politics

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Airlines have been some of the loudest critics of the pace of modernization, and in 2016 their frustration turned into legislation. The Aviation Innovation, Reform, and Reauthorization (AIRR) Act proposed moving air traffic control out of the FAA and into a federally chartered, not-for-profit corporation, similar to Canada’s model. Airlines for America, the airline industry’s trade group, supported it. General aviation groups opposed it strongly, worried about user fees and about who would control the new corporation’s board. The bill passed committee but never got a House floor vote. A second version in 2017 met the same fate, and its sponsor eventually gave up on privatization.⁴

The idea hasn’t gone away, and every time the system has a bad stretch, it comes back up.

The Hiring Fight

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This is the most contentious part of the story, and I’ve tried to stick to what’s documented.

For years, one of the main pipelines into controller jobs was the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative (AT-CTI), a set of college programs that prepared students for FAA training. In late 2013, the FAA changed its hiring process. Starting in 2014, applicants from the general public, including CTI graduates, first had to pass a “biographical questionnaire” before taking the cognitive aptitude test. The FAA’s stated goal included building a more diverse workforce. Many CTI graduates who had spent years and real money on aviation degrees failed the questionnaire and were screened out before they ever took the aptitude test.

The backlash was significant. In July 2016, Congress passed the FAA Extension, Safety, and Security Act, which restricted the FAA’s use of the biographical assessment for CTI graduates and experienced applicants.⁵ A class-action lawsuit, Brigida v. U.S. Department of Transportation, now in federal court in Washington, D.C., alleges that the process discriminated against applicants based on race. The certified class covers roughly 1,000 to 1,500 CTI graduates who applied in 2014 and failed the questionnaire. The case was still active in early 2025.⁵⁶

After the Potomac collision, the questionnaire and the broader question of diversity hiring became a central part of the public argument. Within a day of the crash, President Trump publicly suggested that the FAA’s diversity efforts had contributed to it.⁷ Critics of diversity programs argue that any change to hiring standards in a safety-critical job risks lowering the bar. Supporters argue that a broader applicant pool helps the FAA find qualified people, and that hiring practices from a decade earlier had nothing to do with that night’s events.

When I first wrote this article, no investigation had tied the collision to hiring policy, and the loudest claims online were well ahead of the evidence. See the update at the end of this article for what the NTSB ultimately concluded.

Not Enough Controllers

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Whatever you think about how controllers were hired, there’s no real debate that there aren’t enough of them. In 2023, the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General found that 20 of 26 critical air traffic facilities were staffed below 85 percent of the FAA’s target. The New York TRACON was at 54 percent, and Miami’s tower at 66 percent.⁸ As of September 2023, the tower at Reagan National, where the Potomac collision happened, was nearly a third below its targeted staffing level, and controllers there were working up to six days a week and ten hours a day.⁷

On the night of the collision, a single controller in the DCA tower was working both the helicopter position and the local control position for airplanes, two jobs that are normally split between two people.⁷

This didn’t happen overnight. As I mentioned in part one, the 1981 strike forced the FAA to rebuild most of its workforce at once, and a workforce hired in a wave retires in a wave. Training a new controller to full certification takes years, and a good share of trainees don’t make it through. Add a pandemic-era slowdown in training, and you get a shortage that will take a long time to dig out of, regardless of what anyone does with hiring policy.

Short staffing means mandatory overtime, fatigue, combined positions, and less slack when something goes wrong. The job is stressful enough when you’re rested.

How Other Countries Do It

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The US isn’t the only way to run an air traffic control system, and the comparison comes up a lot.

Canada moved its air navigation system out of government in 1996 and into NAV CANADA, a private, non-profit corporation with no shareholders. It’s funded by fees charged to aircraft operators rather than tax dollars.⁹ Supporters point to it as proof that a non-government model can work well and invest steadily in technology; it was an early investor in space-based ADS-B. Critics, particularly in general aviation, point to the fees.

The UK runs a public-private partnership: NATS has been partly owned by private shareholders and partly by the government since 2001.

Australia keeps air traffic control in a government-owned corporation, Airservices Australia, that operates on a commercial basis.

These models are worth studying, but they don’t transfer cleanly. The US system handles far more traffic than any of them, with a much larger general aviation community, and the politics of changing it are very different.

Where I Landed

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After six articles and a lot of reading, here’s my take, for what a non-expert’s take is worth.

Air traffic control in the US is extremely safe and extremely strained at the same time. The technology is old in places, and replacing it has been slower and more expensive than anyone promised. The funding model makes long-term planning hard. And the workforce shortage is real, decades in the making, and the most urgent problem on the list. None of that fits in a social media post, and none of it has a single villain.

The good news is that the problems are well understood. Audit reports, investigations, and testimony have laid them out in detail. What’s been missing is sustained follow-through.

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” — Marcus Aurelius

Thanks for reading the series. If you work in this field and I got something wrong, I’d genuinely like to hear from you.

Update (September 2026): The NTSB adopted its final report on the Potomac River collision in January 2026. The Board found the probable cause was the FAA’s placement of a helicopter route close to a runway approach path, along with the FAA’s failure to regularly review helicopter routes and available data and its failure to act on earlier recommendations to reduce the risk of a midair collision near DCA. Contributing causes included an overreliance on visual separation, errors by the helicopter crew, air traffic controller workload, and the Army’s failure to ensure its pilots understood altimeter error tolerances.¹⁰ The FAA’s hiring practices were not among the causes the Board identified.

References

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