Labor Day marked the unofficial end to the busiest summer air travel season on record. Yet the Federal Aviation Administration remains plagued by a decades-long shortage of air traffic controllers — the folks who keep all those planes safely separated from each other.
In May, the FAA said it was short 3,000 controllers. One factor in that? All air traffic controllers have to train at a single FAA academy in Oklahoma City. But a federal effort is aiming to change that.
Walk into the tower simulator at Vaughn College in New York City, and you feel like you’re in a real airport control tower. Except those wrap-around windows are actually computer screens.
“So you can simulate day, night, snow, fires on the airport,” said Sharon DeVivo, the school’s president. “Scenarios that students we hope will never see, but they train on those.”
Vaughn is one of several schools seeking federal approval for its graduates to go straight to work for the FAA. The program aims to decentralize the training for air traffic controllers, so students and instructors won’t all have to relocate to the FAA academy in Oklahoma City.
“Given that there is only one location, they only have so many simulators. They only have so many staff that can put students through,” said Nathan Iseminger, a professor of aviation at the University of North Dakota.
The FAA said it will select colleges to participate in the new program starting in the next school year.
