The midair collision near Reagan Washington National Airport that killed 67 people has reignited a years-long concern over a national shortage of air traffic controllers and an increase of near-collisions at airports.
In Southern California, airport officials said Friday, Jan, 31, they could not comment on air traffic controller staffing levels and close calls at Los Angeles International Airport, Ontario International Airport or John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, and deferred comment to the Federal Aviation Administration, which manages and oversees air traffic controller operations and staffing.
However, FAA officials were not available to discuss staffing at Southern California airport towers.
According to the FAA’s 2024-2033 Air Traffic Controller Workforce Plan, LAX has 39 certified professional controllers and nine controllers in training. Ontario International has 14 controllers, and John Wayne has 16 controllers and two controllers in training. What constitutes a full complement of controllers at those towers, however, was not disclosed.
Reagan National has 25 certified controllers and three controllers in training, while its tower is authorized to have 28 controllers, the FAA confirmed Friday.
Union reps
Galen Munroe, a spokesperson for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union that represents air traffic controllers at LAX and Ontario International, said his office was fielding hundreds of calls Friday regarding Wednesday night’s collision that sent a passenger jet and a military helicopter into the Potomac River.
Though Munroe declined to discuss the deadly collision, he did say the scarcity of air traffic controllers is of major concern.
“It is an issue and it is topical to what is going on,” he said, adding that the shortage has forced many controllers to work 10 hours a day, six days a week.
Munroe said more than 14,000 certified professional controllers are needed to address the staffing gap. But the length of time it takes to hire and train new controllers, combined with the retirement rate of current controllers, has presented an immediate and dire situation — one that has gone on too long.
“We need to deal with this now!” he said.
Representatives of Unite Here Local 11, the union that represents air traffic controllers at John Wayne Airport, did not respond to multiple requests for comment Friday.
FAA audit
An FAA audit by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General, published in June 2023, found that the agency had made only limited efforts to ensure adequate air traffic controller staffing at 26 “critical” air traffic control facilities nationwide. It also noted that the agency “posed a risk to the continuity of air traffic operations.”
Additionally, the audit said, the COVID-19 pandemic had impacted the FAA’s ability to maintain required staffing levels.
At the time of the audit, the FAA employed about 13,300 air traffic controllers at more than 300 towers across the U.S. Nearly 10,600 were certified professional controllers while the rest, about 26%, were trainees.
The following year, the FAA announced it had exceeded its goal of hiring 1,800 air traffic controllers in 2024, hiring 1,811 — the largest number of hires in nearly a decade, marking “important progress in the FAA’s work to reverse the decades-long air traffic controller staffing level decline,” according to an FAA news release. At the time, the agency reported it had more than 14,000 air traffic controllers, with about 3,400 controllers in various stages of training.
Close calls
The country had seen a steep spike in near-collisions involving commercial airplanes at airports, with five incidents in 2022 and 11 in 2023 in which at least one passenger airplane came close to colliding with another plane or ground vehicle, according to Politico.
In December 2024, a private jet carrying the Gonzaga University men’s basketball team was ordered to stop taxiing along the runway at LAX as it moved toward a Delta Air Lines flight that was taking off. In a video of the incident, an air traffic controller is heard instructing the pilot of Key Lime Air Flight 563, “Stop, stop, stop!” while the Delta jet was taking off.
In February 2023, a Southwest Airlines jet and FedEx cargo plane avoided a collision after coming within 100 feet of each other at an Austin airport.
And on Wednesday night, American Airlines Flight 5342, on approach to Reagan National, was struck midair by an Army Black Hawk helicopter, sending the two aircraft into the Potomac River and killing all 67 aboard in the deadliest U.S. air crash in more than two decades.
General aviation
The air traffic controller shortage also has affected general aviation airports — from Torrance and Santa Monica airports to Chino and French Valley airports. These airfields often depend on the availability of air traffic controllers but have to go without due to their scarcity.
“We always want air traffic controller guidance, but sometimes they can’t accommodate us because they’re too busy. That probably happens about two-thirds of the time. They’re simply overwhelmed,” said Jeff Timko, head flight instructor at Top Flight Aviation in Corona. “They’re a second set of eyes watching you, and if you don’t have them, you’re flying blind.”
In other countries, Timko said, airspace is governed by the International Civil Aviation Organization, which sets a mandate for general aviation pilots to always be in direct and continual communication with air traffic controllers. If a controller is unavailable, flights stay grounded.
“If the controller is too busy, you’re just simply not going,” he said.
But in the U.S., the FAA does not set the same mandate, and general aviation pilots can fly in uncontrolled airspace without an air traffic controller monitoring them, Timko said.
He partly attributed the controller shortage to the number of retirements outpacing the hiring of new controllers.
“An air traffic controller cannot work beyond the age of 56 years old because of burnout and the stress of the job. A lot of those folks are aging out of the system,” Timko said. “And the workload keeps going up and there are more and more airplanes in the sky, and they’re moving faster. It’s an exponentially compounding problem.”