The Biden Administration wants more funding so they can hire more air traffic controllers after a number of “near-miss incidents.”
There aren’t enough air traffic controllers working for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This has caused a number of problems, such as flights being delayed and changes to the minimum flight standards. People say that in many places, workers are working six days a week and extra hours because there aren’t enough managers.
These days, the FAA wants $43 million so they can start hiring and teaching thousands more air traffic controllers. “We need more air traffic controllers, so we’re hiring as many as we can,” Mike Whitaker, who runs the FAA, said.
There are FAA buildings with broken roofs, broken equipment, or old radar that doesn’t work. The heat or air conditioning doesn’t work. The government wants to spend a billion dollars to deal with these problems.
More staff needs to be hired right away, and buildings need to be fixed up. A lot of bad things have happened recently in the world of plane safety, like Boeing planes with broken parts, planes catching fire during takeoff, and most recently, technical mistakes hurting passengers.
Whitaker said that these buildings are old and that many of them have long since reached the end of their useful lives. He said that there is “work to be done” here and that they are ready to start a new budget plan to hire more people and put more controllers in place.
