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The U.S. needs more air traffic controllers, thousands. The crash in January outside of Washington, D.C., of a jet and a military helicopter and the communications outages at Newark's airport brought more attention to the problem. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has promised to supercharge the hiring process, but training and certifying air traffic controllers can take years. NPR's Joel Rose visited one school that's trying to get them on the job faster.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Long before they're allowed to talk to real pilots, air traffic control students start with simulators, where giant video screens stand in for the windows of an airport control tower.
HAILEE WILLIAMSON: Delta 68 Heavy, Academy Tower, make short to runway 2-8, right. Runway 2-8 right. Clear to land.
ROSE: Twenty-year-old Hailee Williamson calmly guides a virtual plane for a landing. This simulator is set up to mimic the airport in Oklahoma City, where the Federal Aviation Administration's academy trains future air traffic controllers. But this is not the academy. It's more than a thousand miles away in Daytona Beach, Florida, on the campus of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, where students can train on a range of simulators just like the ones the FAA uses.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEEPING)
ROSE: Suddenly, two circles on the radar scope flash red and the computer starts beeping. That's the collision avoidance system, as Williamson explains.
WILLIAMSON: That signal is like, hey, they might collide; you need to do something about it. And when you're doing your evaluations, you hate to hear that sound because that's the sound of Professor Rinkinen deducting points (laughter) off of your evaluation. So we try not to hear that sound as much as possible.
ROSE: The FAA needs all the air traffic controllers it can get. The U.S. is more than 3,000 certified controllers short of full staffing, and the agency's academy in Oklahoma City has limited capacity. This is where colleges and technical schools come in. Embry-Riddle is one of a half dozen schools that now offer an accelerated training program that mirrors the classes at the FAA Academy.
MICHAEL MCCORMICK: That shortens that hiring process from years down to weeks or months.
ROSE: Michael McCormick worked at the FAA for over 30 years. Now he runs the air traffic management program at Embry-Riddle. Until recently, he says it would take one to two years for Embry-Riddle graduates to get hired as controllers because they would have to spend a few months at the FAA Academy first and then wait for their medical and background checks. But these accelerated programs allow students to start those checks before graduation. And if they pass their exams, they can skip the academy altogether.
MCCORMICK: Now we can start that process while they're a student, early in their academic career. They can then be directly hired to an air traffic control facility.
ROSE: The first class of four students graduated from Embry-Riddle's accelerated training program last month, including Kyra Hanson, from Bloomington, Indiana. Hanson says she knew absolutely nothing about air traffic control before she took an aptitude test that suggested she would be good at it.
KYRA HANSON: I was like a lot of people and thought it was the people at the airport with the glow sticks that help move the plane. So I looked it up, and I was, like, oh, this is, like, kind of cool.
ROSE: The more Hanson learned about the job, the more she liked it. She knows there is a shortage of air traffic controllers and that at many facilities, they are forced to work mandatory overtime and six-day weeks. But Hanson isn't worried.
HANSON: I'm open to the challenge. You know, I don't mind doing the work or the overtime. As someone just getting out of college, it's like, what else do I have going on, you know? Working six days a week doesn't freak me out 'cause I don't really know what I'd be missing.
ROSE: These aspiring controllers don't seem intimidated by the stresses of the job either. On the contrary, Hailee Williamson says she's impressed by how relaxed the staff seem at the facilities she's visited.
WILLIAMSON: You expect that when you walk in that the stress level is going to be high. And you walk in, and these controllers are having conversations and laughing and controlling these airplanes. Once you get into it and you see the community of people that you have, it's really not as stressful as I think a lot of people make it out to be.
ROSE: This accelerated program means students like Williamson can hopefully join the community of air traffic controllers a year early. That alone won't end the shortage, but it's better than arriving late.
Joel Rose, NPR News, Daytona Beach, Florida. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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