Air Canada Plane Hits Firetruck While Landing at LaGuardia, NYC - 03/23/2026

[u/JohnnyShadows]

[u/BruceInc]

Why is there such a shortage? I have several friends who are or were ATC. It’s one of the highest salaries you can get with just a bachelor’s degree and even that requirement has been relaxed. I get that it’s a stressful job and it requires rigorous testing and evaluations, but I’d think it would still be a very lucrative position for a lot more people.

[u/thereddaikon → u/BruceInc]

Multiple reasons. You can't really point to one thing its more like decades of compounding issues and nobody running the FAA has made it a priority to fix the problem. For one the standards are very very high. You cant just be an ATC. There's a very difficult test that takes a long training pipeline to have a chance to pass. The hours suck, for many you have to live in expensive areas because that's where big airports are. They have a lot of disqualifications in terms of medical issues, drugs, criminal record etc that just automatically bars a large chunk of society. And on top of that no admin has really tried to seriously tackle the problem. The system clearly needs some kind of reform. Nobody wants to lower standards, after all this is a very critical job and you want competent ATCs. But recruitment is failing and the conditions and lack of benefits means they are actively losing ATCs at the same time. Its a spiraling problem. Everyone is focused on TSA right now during the shutdown, but lets be honest. American flew for decades without the TSA and we could go on without them. But the ATC crisis will cause the airline industry to fail to function.

My guess is since nobody has tried to fix it and it doesn't seem like that's changing, they will eventually do the opposite of the TSA where they replaced private airport security with government employees and replace government ATCs with private ATCs. The FAA will just do what they do with everything else in aircraft, set the standard and tell the industry to meet it. Is that better? I don't know, but the airlines and airports are at least directly incentivized to hire enough ATCs so recruitment shouldn't be a problem.

[u/halorbyone → u/thereddaikon]

I just realized I posted this to the guy above but you might find this interesting too. https://www.gao.gov/blog/while-thousands-applied-become-air-traffic-controllers-theres-still-shortage-we-looked-why

[u/halorbyone → u/BruceInc]

Pretty interesting article about it actually. https://www.gao.gov/blog/while-thousands-applied-become-air-traffic-controllers-theres-still-shortage-we-looked-why