Could a talent shortage at the FAA lead to more trouble for the airline industry?

Earlier this month, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Aviation Subcommittee held a hearing on maintaining a steady flow of workers for the U.S. air traffic control system. One of those to testify: David Spero, national president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists. His message? Congress needs to engage with the Federal Aviation Administration to address the severe staffing shortages. Federal News Network Executive producer Eric White spoke to Mr. Spero on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript:

Eric White  Mr. Spero, thank you for taking the time.

Dave Spero  Eric, thanks for having me.

Eric White  Absolutely. So why don’t you just kind of lay out for me what your original pitch to Congress was when you had a chat with them. This is obviously something that may have been overlooked when it comes to maintaining the air traffic control system, which is the world’s largest and most complex air traffic control system, as you mentioned. Where are we at right now?

Dave Spero  Well, thanks. So first, let me just say PASS represents about 11,000 FAA employees and a handful in the DoD. We represent folks who are in the aviation safety organization and in the air traffic organization. So we represent the bulk of our workforce as the inspectors in the aviation safety world and the technicians in ATO, along with several other bargaining units and other folks that provide support positions and mission work for FAA. So, effectively, what I was telling Congress is that the FAA really has not been hiring up to the levels that they need to be doing to make sure that our workforces are able to complete their jobs and move forward in a safe environment. So, with the aviation safety inspectors, I told Congress, look, the staffing model that they currently have is inadequate. And we’re not able to nail down exactly how many inspectors we need and where we need them in various locations across the country. In the air traffic organization, which we spent a lot of time on, I told them, look, the technician workforce has no workforce plan. You have no idea how many folks you need and where you need them right now. And they’ve been working on something else called a tech ops staffing model to determine how many technicians they need across the country to certify repair, restore air traffic control electronics equipment. They don’t have any idea, they’ve been working on it for a decade or more. And so our complaint was that they’ve not been taking this seriously enough. Now, I will say that since then, they’ve decided that they’re going to hire about twice the number of technicians that they have. We also told them that in the technical workforce, you don’t plan ahead, you don’t decide in advance of someone retiring, who has 35 or 40 years of experience, that you’re going to bring on their replacement a couple, three years in advance, to give them the mentorship and the training, before that person takes all of their skills and knowledge and abilities out the door and will never see it again. So that’s kind of a synopsis of what I told him.

Eric White  Yeah, and, you know, how have things been progressing as they have been, you know, how have they been getting by if there has been no workforce plan in place, as you mentioned? Because for as big of an organization as the FAA is, and the nation’s air traffic control, and plane inspections, and everything you mentioned, what has been keeping them afloat, then, when they do lose, you know, said workforce, or workers who have been there for 30, 40 years and have all that experience and haven’t been showing that to anybody?

Dave Spero  So, there’s a bit of a brain drain that goes on, right, you have to play catch up when people leave. And the hiring process is a bit of a game of whack-a-mole, where’s the biggest problem, let’s go over there and fix it. And they’re chasing staffing, as opposed to getting out in front of it. So, our folks are professionals. They do everything they can to make sure that aviation safety is of the utmost importance. Our technical workforce in the ATO, they’re out there every day trying to figure out different ways to make sure that the equipment is working, that we can certify that equipment, that air traffic controllers have been available to them. But there’s a lot of challenges for them. And the last thing you need is to not have enough people there to help you do it.

Eric White  We’re speaking with Dave Spero. He is the president of PASS. That’s the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists. And so what is at risk here, other than those working in those workforces, obviously, being stretched too thin and burning themselves out? But you know, there’s got to be risks, I imagine, to safety and things of that measure when it comes to dealing with these kinds of things. And, you know, that probably would get more ears perking than anything, right?

Dave Spero  Right. So, anytime you do something that’s not planned for or you don’t have enough people or resources or follow different procedures, you introduce risk into the system. And once you introduce that risk, it’s hard to find it again. It’s kind of like baking something into a cake. Once that ingredient is in there, you’re not really certain what the outcome is going to be. And, so, the ground stops that we’ve had at Chicago O’Hare. Those are due directly to not having enough technical workforce available with the right skill set to be able to fix problems when they arise. And I told that to Congress, we don’t have the right people in the right places at the right times, because the FAA does not have a workforce plan and an adequate staffing model in the ATO. In aviation safety, that has a whole other impact. These folks are responsible for creating policy for overseeing regulations when it comes to air carrier in general aviation. They educate the public, they investigate accidents and incidents, when that workforce is stretched, then that goes unregulated. There’s nobody really there. You’re allowing the fox to watch the henhouse, so to speak. And that’s not a good thing at any time when it comes to aviation safety.

Eric White  So, you know, yeah, we’ve see in the news regarding weather delays, when the FAA doesn’t have enough air traffic controllers, are we going to start to see some delays due to not having those FAA technicians and safety inspectors, and are they going to be coming under scrutiny for that as well?

Dave Spero  Well, and then that’s what you saw on the two recent ground stops at O’Hare. Back in June, we had a ground stop, because we had a malfunctioning radar that was feeding into the Chicago large terminal radar approach control, which of course feeds out to Midway and O’Hare and to Page and three other towers. And that malfunctioning radar was so wet and a place like that you might have several, maybe eight or 10 different radars feeding in and providing controllers with information. One of these wasn’t functioning well, and it was causing multiple responses where targets shouldn’t have been, on the display for the controllers. So, someone had to shut that down and make sure that that radar wasn’t feeding in anymore, and no one there, they didn’t have a technician available at the time that had the access to the system or the training, to be able to make that happen. Hence, they had to have a ground stop at O’Hare because controllers could not verify the accurate position of the aircrafts, and that clearly is a major problem. And then just a week or two ago, we had a similar problem at Chicago O’Hare where the airport surface detection equipment, that’s the equipment that determines where all the ground traffic is, all the airplanes that are taxiing and arriving and departing, and all the vehicles, where are they? That wasn’t functioning properly. And initially, they had to create a ground stop, because that wasn’t allowing the controllers to know where the movement of the aircraft were. And, you know, there’s been a lot of incidents with that sort of thing across the country. And it’s gotten a lot of attention. Well, in this particular case, it started out like that. And then of course, weather came in and thunderstorms, you know, added on to that, but that probably would have had a ground stop all in of its own. But initially, when a technician was available, he eventually came in, went out there and, within five minutes or so, rectified the problem. But if that were the case, and he were on duty, we wouldn’t have had a problem.

Eric White  So, what would you like to see from Congress? You say, you know, you want them to engage the FAA more? What does that mean to you? Does that just mean really tightening the screws or just, you know, starting to let some more dollars flow their way? What do you think can be done?

Dave Spero  It’s probably a little bit of both, but at the same time, it requires the agency, the FAA to have a workforce plan, which means, what are we going to do with this workforce and ATO over the next 10 years? What are our plans for these folks? Where are we going to put them? What are we going to use them for? As we begin to deploy new technologies, how are we able to utilize this technically skilled group of federal employees to help us implement new technologies over the next 10 years, and maybe even save them a little bit of money? You know, don’t take an investment at first, but at the end, they’re the gift that keeps on giving. And so I would like them to not only ensure the FAA has a workforce plan for technical operations through some sort of legislation, so it’s not just voluntary on their behalf, but also engage the union to make sure that we’re collaborating and what that outcome is.

Eric White  Dave Spero is national president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists. Thank you so much for joining me.

Dave Spero  It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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