The Federal Aviation Administration’s Approach for Determining Future Air Traffic Controller Staffing Needs (2014) / Chapter Skim
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. In response to long-standing debates about appropriate controller staffing, Section 608 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 1
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However, the relationship between controller staffing levels and aviation safety is not well understood. Various FAA organizations gather data related to safety; examples include data on incidents violating various safety criteria without causing accidents, records of actual operations, and voluntary controller reports from the Air Traffic Safety Action Program.
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Recommendation 1 FAA should explore the relationships between controller staffing and safety by • Analyzing the wide range of data that can identify relationships between staffing and safety, including accident and incident reports, voluntary reports by controllers from the Air Traffic Safety Action Program, and other databases that, if properly integrated, can relate safety to staffing concerns (e.g., records of actual shifts worked) ; and • Involving the controller workforce in staffing decisions, particularly as knowledge concerning relevant safety issues emerges.
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Thus, the current committee cannot assess with confidence whether FAA's staffing model for en route facilities is on track to meet the recommendations of the 2010 report. The current committee had a broader charter than the authors of the 2010 report: to examine the entire staffing process as opposed to only the en route staffing model.
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For the third step, the hiring of new controllers and the transfer of current controllers from one facility to another are FAA's primary mechanisms for adjusting staffing levels. The annual hiring plan for each facility is developed by FAA's Office of Labor Analysis and its Air Traffic Organization on the basis of staffing targets (derived from the staffing ranges)
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Stakeholders include but are not limited to the following: • The controller workforce, which needs to engage with FAA in the col laborative development of improved staffing plans and their execu tion to ensure overall cost-effectiveness; and • Congress, which needs to make informed decisions about future budgets for controller staffing. {3-3, 4-2, 4-3} COST-EFFECTIVE AND SAFE SCHEDULING Work schedules determine how many controllers report to a facility at any given time, when they take breaks, and how long a recuperative period they have between work shifts.
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The actual controller schedules may not reflect key assumptions in the staff planning, may not be the most cost-effective, and may not incorporate best practices in fatigue risk management. FAA is contracting with the same vendor used by air navigation service providers in other countries to implement a new scheduling tool, but the timeline of its implementation at all facilities is not fixed.3 The following are among the potential benefits of sophisticated scheduling software: • It would provide a consistent basis for establishing work schedules that minimize or mitigate the safety risks associated with controller fatigue.
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Congressional concerns about the cost-effectiveness of FAA's staffing models are driven, in part, by the growing cost of the ATC staff and the growing reliance of the FAA Operations budget on general revenues over the past decade. In a time of fiscal austerity and stalemate in Congress with regard to deficit budgets and taxes, continuing to depend on the General Fund makes FAA Operations vulnerable to budget cuts.
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At some larger facilities, changes in staffing levels may affect the throughput of busy airspace and could result in direct costs or benefits to aircraft operators. In contrast, at smaller facilities, staffing levels may depend on minimum staffing requirements that are not driven by traffic levels but instead by the hours when the facility is required to provide service.
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2010. Special Report 301: Air Traffic Controller Staffing in the En Route Domain: A Review of the Federal Aviation Administration's Task Load Model.
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