This Wednesday, the FAA announced it was starting a pilot program that allows students of two schools to bypass requirements to receive extra training at the FAA Air Traffic Controller Academy, and instead jumpstart their career right after graduation. 

Individuals graduating from two Oklahoma schools—Tulsa Community College and the University of Oklahoma—will be trained on a curriculum that “ensure[s] graduates have the necessary skills to begin immediate facility training,” notes the FAA. The cut-around comes in handy considering that the FAA’s training program is backlogged.

The FAA has been wringing its hands about a potentially disastrous dearth of air traffic controllers for some time now. The job involves high stakes, and having a deficit of said employees fuels a number of near misses of airplane collisions, as close calls involving crashes happen on average multiple times a week per a 2023 New York Times investigation.

In April, Congress took note of said narrowly avoided crashes and passed a $105 billion bill to address the underlying issues that plague the airline industry. The Senate approved the act in May. The bill is set to increase the number of traffic controllers, funneling $67 billion into hiring and retention efforts and requiring the FAA to address staffing gaps. The FAA also is also required to update its technology system.

“The FAA is working to hire and train more air traffic controllers, in order to reverse the decades-long decline in our workforce and ensure the safety of the flying public,” FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker said in a statement regarding the new program. And the FAA is looking to grow the program, encouraging Interested schools to submit to year-round open applications.

Whitaker called the staffing woes “years in the making” in 2023. The FAA has pointed to the complex hiring process and long hours as factors in this crunch, notes Bloomberg. 

Back in the early 1980s, the former union for air traffic controllers was protesting these same lengthy days as well as paltry pay. The president at the time, Ronald Reagan, gutted the workforce, fired the more than 11,000 striking workers, and banned them from getting rehired as part of an aggressive policy that was only overturned 12 years later. It left a lasting legacy on the workforce and organized labor in general. And the FAA specifically was faced with a carnage that spelled out long-term hiring woes as it had to recruit an entirely new pool of employees.

Fast-forward two decades later, and the FAA has just barely exceeded its yearly goal of hiring 1,800 traffic controllers by 2024. It represents “the largest number of hires in nearly a decade,” and it “marks important progress in the FAA’s work to reverse the decades-long air traffic controller staffing level decline,” writes the FAA in a statement released in September. Noting that it “will continue to take aggressive action” to increase its workforce, the FAA has goals to hire 2,000 more controllers in 2025.