Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines and a vocal critic of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), has laid out the three things that the Trump administration and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy must do to fix the agency and cut the frequent delays that plague his airline.
Taking to LinkedIn, Kirby wrote a lengthy opinion piece criticizing the Biden administration’s attempts to cut a shortfall in air traffic controllers’ numbers while praising Trump and Duffy for announcing plans to ‘supercharge’ recruitment in the wake of several recent plane crashes.
“The facts are stark. Air traffic delays are overwhelmingly because of air traffic restrictions – often weather. But last year, even on clear, blue-sky days, 68% of United’s delays were for air traffic control restrictions,” Kirby wrote.
“The American traveling public deserves much better. Fortunately, I’m very encouraged that Secretary Duffy and the entire team at the FAA/DOT are expressing a sincere commitment to addressing these challenges.”
Kirby says there are three key things that the FAA has to fix to slash air traffic control delays while keeping the American traveling public safe: hire more staff, significantly upgrade the agency’s antiquated IT systems, and invest in the FAA’s air traffic control facilities.
In 2024, the Biden administration announced that it quickly met its quota for hiring new air traffic controllers, but what the previous administration didn’t boast about was the fact that the number of trainee air traffic controllers being hired wouldn’t close gap in the persistent shortfall in air traffic controllers.
Today, the FAA is “3,000 controllers short of the 13,000 controllers that are needed,” but the agency runs a single training facility and doesn’t have the capacity to suddenly boost the number of people it can put through the training course.
At present, the FAA can start training just 1,800 controllers per year, but Kirby warns that the understandably rigorous standards required of recruits mean that the washout rate is high.
Coupled with the fact that the FAA imposes a mandatory retirement age of 56, the FAA can’t hire and train enough air traffic controllers to keep up with attrition.
By the end of 2024, Kirby says the FAA added just 36 new controllers to the agency’s staffing levels.
Then, there are the FAA’s aging systems that are used to run the nation’s air traffic control infrastructure, especially ‘flight strips’ that provide controllers with information like where an aircraft is heading, the speed they’re traveling, and the instructions they’ve been given.
While Canada has used sophisticated electronic flight strips for the past 25 years, and countries like the UK transitioned to electronic systems in 2018, the US still relies on paper flight strips.
“A 2024 report found that some of the systems are so old that they can’t be maintained because their parts are no longer manufactured or because the technicians who service them have retired,” Kirby warned.
The state of the FAA’s air control facilities isn’t much better. Kirby says a major investment program is long overdue.
The clearly frustrated airline boss writes: “The FAA spends roughly 92% of its facilities and equipment budget to patch together the old existing towers, centers, radars, and other equipment, rather than to upgrade. Ideally, that number should be inverse, with 92% going to upgrade and modernize and 8% for repair.”
Kirby continues: “I’m encouraged that the administration wants to fix the FAA and that there is bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for fixing it. Let’s work together to turn the good intention into action!”
Last November, United lashed out at the FAA over its failure to adequately staff an air traffic control facility that handles its key Newark hub, claiming that more than 343,000 of its passengers at the airport were delayed by air traffic control staffing shortages in November alone.
