The National Air Traffic Controllers Association on Thursday used data from the Federal Aviation Administration to accuse the agency of failing to hire enough controllers to replace a large number of retirees.
The union said there were 15,386 controllers in 2003, but that number had dropped to 14,206 by October, an FAA administrator's fact book says.
"We've been pointing out since 1999 that there was a coming problem with retirements," said Doug Church, a spokesman for the national union.
Elizabeth Isham Cory, an FAA spokeswoman in the Chicago area, said the agency's fact book excluded some controllers in its count. She said a more accurate number is 14,618.
"We are very aware of this retirement wave. We are prepared for it," Cory said. Cory said that in fiscal 2006, which ended last September, the FAA hired about 1,100 controllers as about 500 retired.
"We are aligning the staff to where the traffic is," she said.
Craig Boehne, union president at the Minneapolis Enroute Air Traffic Control Center, said, "Although we are hiring new controllers, the new controllers take anywhere between two and four years to get fully certified."
About 300 controllers work at Boehne's facility, located in Farmington, which handles air traffic in a seven-state area.
Veteran controllers, with 15 to 25 years of experience, have been training the new hires, but Boehne said many of the veterans are leaving.
"The FAA is already behind the power curve on staffing," Boehne said. "They waited too long to hire new controllers. There is no fix for that, other than to provide some sort of an incentive to retain the veteran controllers."
Copyright 2005 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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