By Anita Hamilton

Recent chaos at Newark airport underscores just how tough it is to solve the nationwide shortage of air-traffic controllers that has been decades in the making.

A brief outage during which controllers lost contact with flights in and out of the nation's 12th busiest airport last week preceded widespread delays and cancellations that began this past weekend. Some controllers subsequently took a leave of absence after the incident. United Airlines said it was pulling 10% of its flights to the hub, citing a shortage of controllers and technology failures.

If much of this sounds familiar, it is. In 2023, JetBlue Airways also cut 10% of its summer flights at New York City airports because of a controller staffing shortage. Despite warnings about travel disruptions and safety risks posed by such shortages, little progress has been made in closing the 3,000-person gap between actual and targeted staffing of roughly 13,000 controllers.

To fix the problem, the Federal Aviation Administration is ramping up hiring and offering incentives to experienced controllers to keep them on the job. Retirement-eligible controllers who choose to stay will get bonus pay of 20% on top of their basic pay. Training academy graduates and those who work in hard-to-staff or high-cost areas will also get bonuses, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association labor union that represents them.

Fully-certified controllers currently earn $160,000 a year on average, according to the FAA.

It isn't enough to hire more new controllers because it takes up to three years for them to become fully certified, and around 40% of trainees don't make the cut. That high failure rate, along with attrition from retirements, has kept staffing levels more than 25% below where they should be.

The shortage has roots in the early 1980s when President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 air-traffic controllers who went on strike. Those workers were eventually replaced, but because so many new hires were made in a short period, they also became retirement-eligible around the same time. (Controllers receive full pension benefits after 25 years of service.) Subsequent budget shortfalls and training pauses during the coronavirus pandemic have slowed the pipeline of new workers.

In addition to increasing staff, a new air-traffic control system is being built to replace the current "frail" system, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Monday night. "We are going to radically transform the way air-traffic control looks," he added. "We're going to fix it."

The new air-traffic control system will be unveiled on Thursday.

Write to Anita Hamilton at anita.hamilton@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 06, 2025 17:13 ET (21:13 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.