In US, attrition rate of new air-traffic controllers is very high

Air-traffic controllers appointed recently are leaving jobs at “dramatically higher rates” in 2008, United States Congress has been told. The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of US Congress responsible for examining matters relating to the receipt and payment of public funds, testified recently before the House Aviation Subcommittee that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) projects that 14% of the new hires will leave their jobs in the fiscal year 2008.

This rate is much higher than the 6% air-traffic controllers who left in 2006 and well above the 9% who left in 2007, according to the Government Accountability Office. And, this rate of attrition is raising concerns about the government’s ability to deal with an increase in retirements, the government watchdog added.

Meanwhile, in anticipation of the exit of at least 15,000 air-traffic controllers over the next 10 years, the Federal Aviation Administration has intensified hiring, and the agency expects to hire 1,877 controllers in 2008 alone, the US media has reported.

Gerald Dillingham, the Government Accountability Office’s director of aviation issues, was quoted by the website usatoday.com as commenting: “The higher attrition rate of air-traffic controllers in training threatens to undermine FAA’s attempts to keep up with growing retirements and wastes money. The FAA will spend $78,000 to train each new controller this year. We don’t have that kind of time or money. That is something that needs to be dealt with immediately. It’s like pouring water in a bucket with a hole in it.”

According to Hank Krakowski, chief of air traffic of the US Federal Aviation Administration, “the agency is keeping pace with the need for new controllers, even taking into account the departure of new hires.” “The FAA, he added, “has aggressively sought new applicants and is hiring more people than it needs to stay ahead of retirements and other controller departures.”

The Federal Aviation Administration is the agency of the United States Department of Transportation with authority to regulate and oversee all aspects of civil aviation in the United States.

Since thousands of air-traffic controllers had been hired within a few years after President Reagan sacked US air-traffic controllers in 1981, a great number is expected to retire in the next 10 years. In addition, retirements have been taking place a rate faster than the Federal Aviation Administration anticipated after the agency began hiring controllers on contract, froze pay, and lowered salaries for new hires.

According to Patrick Forrey, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, one reason why so many air-traffic controller trainees are leaving is the low wages. There is a shortage of fully trained controllers, he said, and warned: “The United States is facing an air-traffic control staffing crisis, and the crisis is real.”

The United States Department of Transportation’s inspector-general has stated that the Federal Aviation Administration “has hired so many new air traffic controllers that it cannot train them efficiently” and that the FAA “has exceeded its own quotas for inexperienced staff at more than 20% of its facilities.”

The inspector-general has charged the FAA with “taking on so many new staff that it had exceeded its own maximum trainee quota at 22% of its 314 air-traffic control facilities.”

The United States Department of Transportation’s inspector-general, according to the news agency Reuters, also found that 52% of controllers were inexperienced at one control tower in New Jersey in December 2007.

A report prepared by the inspector-general found that there is confusion within the FAA over who was responsible for hiring and training employees and errors in its training database.