On the latest Last Week Tonight,John Oliverlooked into theshortage of air traffic controllersin the US, leading to airport delays and contributing to aviation safety issues. Oliver first noted that large, fatal commercial airline crashes are extremely rare, and that commercial is still by far the safest way to travel. And one major reason for that is air traffic controllers, which Oliver called “the unsung heroes of the sky”.
“Air traffic controllers have to be constantly vigilant,” he explained on Sunday evening. “It’s not like a normal job where you start a task, then check Reddit for a few hours, then go back to it, but then it’s lunch, then you start the task again but you need a coffee, then you get sucked into a conversation with fucking Derek, so you vent to your pal Jeanine about how much Derek sucks, then you go back to work, then you see Jeanine and Derek laughing about something and you think wait are Jeanine and Derek friends? Oh shit! Then it’s 6pm and whatever you had to do really feels more like a tomorrow thing anyway.”
“Unlike that, air traffic controllers actually have to get shit done,” ensuring the safety of about 2 million passengers a day. “But there’s been signs that our system is under extreme strain,” he said, such as the delays at Newark airport last month when some controllers took trauma leave after a terrifying system blackout. In January, a passenger jet and a military helicopter collided near Reagan national airport, killing 67 people. Preliminary reports suggest that there was a shortage of controllers that night, with one person doing both helicopter control and local control combined.
“All of this is bringing into sharp focus just how stressful this job is, and how understaffed most facilities are,” Oliver continued, noting that while ideally there would be more than 14,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) professional controllers, there are currently just under 11,000, with 99% of air traffic control facilities in the US operating below recommended staffing levels. And staffers have been sounding the alarm for a while, both internally and externally – a 2023 report from the New York Times found multiple close calls per week due to controller fatigue.
“Well that’s not great,” said Oliver. “If I had to pick adjectives that I would like to describe air traffic controllers in charge of my flight, ‘well-rested’ would be near the top of the list, along with ‘highly paid’ and possibly even ‘erotically thrilled by the concept of planes landing safely’. As long as we get there in one piece, I don’t really care what the hand under the desk is doing.
“And when you combine all of that with the fact that air traffic control equipment is shockingly outdated and poorly maintained, it’s frankly a miracle our system works as well as it does,” he added. “But we probably shouldn’t be running it on miracles.”
Oliver delved into how we got here – “as with so many things on this show, at least some of the blame lies with Ronald Reagan.” Though he promised to expand staffing levels, benefits and technology for air traffic controllers, whose union backed him, Reagan never followed through, and threatened to fire and prosecute controllers when they went on strike. Reagan ultimately did fire 11,000 controllers when they went on strike and banned them from ever being rehired. “That left some important legacies,” Oliver explained, “including a massive, panicked hiring spree of new controllers, meaning that two decades later there was also a massive wave of retirements. The FAA has never really managed to catch up with hiring since then.”
For one thing, it’s a very difficult job, with strict requirements for eligibility, including no history of heart disease, high or low blood pressure, and psychosis, neurosis or any personality or mental disorder. “And good luck with that!” Oliver exclaimed. “Nowadays we all spend 20 hours a day watching our friends have fun without us, the pope is a Bob, the oceans are plastic, and astronaut Katy Perry is back on tour. There is no such thing as a mentally healthy person any more, just people who don’t have good enough health insurance to get a diagnosis.”
Candidates also have to take the Air Traffic Skills Assessment (ATSA) exam, which is difficult; less than 10% of applicants make it into the training program, which itself weeds out many other aspiring controllers. Of 1,000 applicants, Oliver noted, only about 50 will become controllers “at the end of a grueling, years-long process. That is a 5% success rate! It’s like Squid Game, if the prize of Squid Game was to just keep doing Squid Game as a job” until a mandatory retirement age of 56.
The job is made more difficult by outdated equipment; many air traffic controllers are still working with paper strips, floppy disks and computers based on Windows 95. The FAA has admitted, in some instances, to buying replacement parts off eBay. “That is clearly not where you should be buying critical equipment,” Oliver mused. “The only thing you should be buying from eBay are vintage RadioShack swag and a discarded e-meter from the Church of Scientology.”
The facilities aren’t much better, with some staff reporting elevator malfunctions that force them to climb hundreds of stairs to work, bees and biting flies harassing controllers, and radar systems cooled down by rotary fans.
The issues aren’t new – the Bush administration promised to modernize air traffic control by 2025, “which is, and this is true,now”, Oliver said. “So obviously, that didn’t happen,” in part because the FAA is part of discretionary, not mandatory, federal spending, so it’s vulnerable to getting caught up in federal budget fights.
“It is really hard to plan for any long-term overhaul when the money you need keeps getting pulled out from under you,” he said. “When you take all this together – ageing technologies, crumbling facilities full of people who are understandably burned out – it is just asking for trouble.”
What can be done? Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has called for an increase in controller staffing and pay bumps for trainees. On the downside, Oliver noted, he’s co-signed Trump’s rhetoric about how problems at the FAA were caused by diversity initiatives, “which is both racist and utterly divorced from any of the issues at the agency”.
Duffy also introduced a plan called “Brand New Air Traffic Control System” and called for reform in under three years, “but the devil is in the details here”, said Oliver, as he hasn’t released any specific spending plan or milestones.
“Here is the good news: people across the political spectrum agree that we have a problem here,” Oliver concluded. “The bad news is, there aren’t going to be quick fixes. This is going to require long-term investment.” Which is why Oliver called on Congress to make FAA equipment and facilities mandatory spending instead of discretionary, and to do everything possible to ramp up hiring of controllers. “It is critically important work, and it needs to be properly valued.”