Aviation Safety

Because of significant hiring during the early 1980s to replace strikers who had been fired, many of the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) more than 17,000 air traffic controllers may become eligible to retire within the next decade, raising concerns that FAA could be left with too few fully trained controllers. This report (1) identifies the key variables that FAA uses to project future controller staffing needs and evaluates their reasonableness, (2) determines whether the agency has identified enough controller candidates to satisfy its short- and long-term staffing needs and evaluates FAA's plans to train new controllers, and (3) identifies impediments that may hinder FAA from staffing air traffic control facilities at specified levels.

GAO noted that: (1) FAA uses two key variables to project future controller staffing needs; (2) while FAA's estimates of air traffic growth are reasonable, GAO's analysis indicated that FAA could be overstating retirements, which account for most controller attrition, for fiscal years (FY) 1999 through 2002; (3) rather than using actual information on controllers' age and service time to project future retirements, FAA bases its estimates on assumptions about when controllers will be eligible to retire; (4) FAA has identified a sufficient number of controller candidates to meet its short-term staffing needs in FY 1997 and 1998; (5) however, beyond FY 1998, it is uncertain whether current sources can provide the controller candidates FAA will need to meet its hiring goals for FY 1999 through 2002; (6) the majority of available candidates are controllers who were fired in 1981 and who FAA officials believe could be eligible to retire within a few years of reemployment; (7) however, FAA has not conducted any analysis to support this position; (8) to help meet its long-term hiring goals, FAA is expanding its collegiate program to include more schools and has reactivated the cooperative education program; (9) beginning in FY 1998, FAA will require that all new controllers receive some training at its Academy; (10) FAA believes that this will reduce on-the-job training time and costs; (11) this revision, however, could increase the federal costs of initial controller training because FAA will pay a portion of training expenses currently being paid by participants in the collegiate program; (12) FAA officials identified several principal impediments that hinder their ability to staff ATC facilities at specified levels; (13) the first is FAA headquarters' practice of generally not providing funds to relocate controllers until the end of the FY, which causes delayed controller moves and continued staffing imbalances; (14) the second impediment is the limited ability of regional officials to recruit controller candidates locally to fill vacancies at ATC facilities; (15) in addition, FAA regional officials also believe that limited hiring of new controllers in recent years has hindered their ability to fill vacancies; (16) partly due to these impediments, as of April 1996, about 53 percent of ATC facilities were not staffed at levels specified by FAA's staffing standards; (17) there are facilities where staffing differences are not justified; (18) FAA has implemented several initiatives to improve its ability to staff the facilities at specified levels; and (19) it is too early, however, to determine the effectiveness of these initiatives.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: Team: Phone: