Miles O’Brien:
They have been behind the power curve on this for years now.
This is a direct outgrowth of the pandemic, during which time a lot of air traffic controllers retired or there was attrition. And, coincidentally, during that same time, a lot of cockpits changed too, fewer gray hairs. Many pilots retired as well.
So the system has still been trying to recover from all of that. But air traffic control, in particular, the FAA recently over the past year, I think, has hired about 1,800 individuals. They’re still 3,000 short, I believe. But you don’t hire them right off the street and put them in the tower cab at Reagan National Airport.
It takes quite some time to train these individuals to make them safe for duty. Having looked at this accident so far, there’s nothing I see here that points to air traffic control failure, however, Geoff. The warning was issued by the tower when it saw on the radar a potential collision.
The helicopter, which was under visual flight rules, supposed to avoid traffic, acknowledged that the traffic was there. So, right now, I don’t see an air traffic control problem in this specific instance, but, writ large, this is a big problem.