The United States has the “safest skies in the world,” but the Federal Aviation Administration’s systems are “antiquated” and need updates, and the nation is suffering a shortage of air traffic controllers, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Sunday.
Still, Duffy told “Fox News Sunday” that the skies above the United States are among the safest in the world, even with changes needed.
The Notice to Air Mission, or NOTAM, which is the FAA’s pilot warning system, suffered an outage Saturday night, less than a week after the deadly plane crash in Washington, D.C., that claimed 67 lives.
“The backup system is not up and running as we try to get the primary system online,” said Duffy. “It’s an old, antiquated system. It has to be upgraded. That is in the works, and it’s been in the works for years … this is the second time in two years it’s gone down.”
Meanwhile, reports this week in The New York Times said the air traffic control staffing at Ronald Reagan National Airport was not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic at the facility, citing an internal preliminary FAA safety report.
“I’ll take the FAA at its word that it wasn’t normal,” said Duffy. “There was a consolidation of air traffic controllers an hour before it was supposed to happen, during the time of this crash.”
He added that there have not been enough air traffic controllers in the country for a very long time.
“We are working with the FAA to [learn], how do we surge the best and the brightest to get into the academy, to get trained up, to make sure we don’t have the staffing issues,” said Duffy. “Our air traffic controllers are stressed out, tapped, overworked. That’s no excuse. It’s just the reality of what we have in the system.”
It takes years to train air traffic controllers, he stressed.
“One of the questions we are going to ask is, What happened in the tower? What was going on with the staffing?” said Duffy. “The language used by air traffic controller, was it appropriate?”
The FAA has a mandatory retirement age of 55 for air traffic controllers, which has caused a large amount of turnover, said Duffy.
He added that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the FAA’s training academy experienced small class sizes, and trainees could not get in-person experience working at control towers.
Duffy also said that the FAA must not focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion when trying to hire air traffic controllers.
“If it’s your pilots or if it’s your air traffic controllers, you want the best. You want the brightest protecting yourself and your family. That’s what we’re going to do with the department,” Duffy said.
Concerning the airliner crash, the FAA will also be asking about the position of the U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter that collided with the American Airlines passenger jet, said Duffy.
“Were the pilots wearing night vision goggles?” he asked. “If so, why were they flying a mission at 9 at night through really busy airspace around D.C. as opposed to flying that mission at 1 in the morning where there’s very little traffic?”
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