Scott Turner used to jump out of airplanes.
A skydiver in his youth, Turner cultivated a passion for air travel early. These days, he’s got his feet firmly planted in San Angelo, where he helped start the only college program for air traffic controllers in Texas, at Angelo State University.
Until recently, anyone who wanted to become an air traffic controller had to attend the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City. Since last year, prospective controllers have other options. Seven colleges across the country have partnered with the FAA, offering the same courses and comprehensive training to students that the FAA Academy does.
Angelo State made a first step toward joining these seven schools in July, when it became part of the FAA’s Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative, Turner said. Turner, who is the director of Angelo State’s commercial aviation program, said students who take air traffic control courses at Angelo State will still have to attend the Academy, but would be able to skip a few weeks of courses.
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By 2027, Angelo State expects to have completed its transition into an enhanced AT-CTI school, meaning it would be an alternative to the Academy for prospective controllers. Programs like these could help ease the country’s air traffic controller shortage by making it possible for more controllers to receive training each year.
The industry has long faced a shortage.
The state of the air traffic control industry
In 2024, there were 13,774 controllers working nationwide — a little over 800 short of the FAA’s stated targets for the year. The FAA is making some progress toward closing this gap: In a statement, the FAA said that it has already met its hiring target for 2025, having hired 2,026 controllers this year. However, more controllers left the industry this year because of the protracted government shutdown, with retirement rates during the shutdown more than triple the usual, according to Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy.
In Dallas-Fort Worth, the FAA’s towers just met staffing targets in 2024, with 496 controllers to the FAA’s target of 490, according to The Dallas Morning News’ analysis. Just one year before, the local towers had surpassed the FAA’s targets by more than 90 controllers.
Turner attributed the national shortage largely to the nature of the training and recruitment process, and the structure of the industry as a whole.
Becoming an air traffic controller is difficult. Prospective controllers must be under 31, pass a litany of security and aptitude exams and pass through the FAA’s air traffic control curriculum. Once they graduate from the Academy, they spend a couple of years as controllers in development at an actual FAA facility. If they are successful, they will be considered certified professional controllers. Median pay for an air traffic controller in 2024 was $144,580, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Last year, more than 700 prospective controllers did not make it through this process, according to the FAA.
Another reason for the shortage, Turner said, is that controllers face a mandatory retirement age of 56. Between 2006 and 2015, thousands of controllers retired as they aged out of the industry; according to a 2019 FAA report, these were primarily members of a cohort of more than 27,000 controllers hired right after a Reagan-era controller strike, which led to mass firings.
Anticipating this exodus of controllers, the FAA explored opportunities for new entry points into the industry in the years leading up to the turn of the century.
In the early 1990s, the FAA developed the AT-CTI program. It was designed to take some pressure off of the Academy as the sole trainer. Today, there are 35 AT-CTI institutions across the country, according to the FAA’s website, including Angelo State.
Federal employees ‘casualties’ of shutdowns
The enhanced AT-CTI program has offered the country more ways to train air traffic controllers. But, the recent government shutdown has revealed the potential uncertainty that comes with the career path.
“Imagine you’re a parent and your son or daughter comes to you and says, ‘Hey, I want to be an air traffic controller,’” Turner said. “And you go, ‘That’s great, because every now and then, they just won’t pay you for a while.’”
The 2025 shutdown lasted 43 days, the longest in American history.
During it, controllers were asked to work without pay. As the shutdown progressed, reports of staffing triggers, issued by FAA facilities when the number of people on staff drops below the average for that shift, trended upward.
“It’s one thing to be stressed and do work when you’re going to get paid,” said Joel Martinez, an aviation management professor at Baylor University. “It’s another thing to be stressed and do that type of work when you don’t know when you’re going to be paid, and you haven’t been paid, and your bills are due, and you have these other stresses.”
In Dallas-Fort Worth, FAA facilities reported 62 staffing triggers during the government shutdown, according to The News’ analysis. Over the same time period last year, these facilities only reported nine staffing triggers.
Facilities’ response to a staffing trigger can range from business as usual to instituting ground stops, which can cause delays.
Government shutdowns are hard on federal workers. And they’ve been getting longer and more frequent, said William Resh, a professor at Georgia State University who studies the effects of shutdowns.
Resh and his colleagues compared the state of various government agencies before and after shutdowns, focusing on the effects of the 2013 and 2018–19 shutdowns. They found that shutdowns reduce worker morale, increase rates of workers leaving their jobs and reduce people’s interest in applying to work for the federal government.
The FAA noted in its 2025 workforce plan that the 2018–29 shutdown “resulted in large hiring and training delays” for its air traffic controllers. The number of fully certified air traffic controllers at North Texas FAA facilities dropped from 384 in 2018 to 376 two years later, according to The News’ analysis.
Duffy wrote on X that before the 2025 shutdown, four controllers used to retire per day. That number “jumped to 15 to 20” during the shutdown.
“The federal government employees are not the target of shutdowns,” Resh said, “but they are the casualties.”
Public perception of air traffic control
The air traffic control industry in particular dominated the conversation during the shutdown.
“There’s such a spotlight on, on pilots and on air traffic control,” Turner said, “like that industry is super high-profile. We talk about it every single travel season.”
In recent years, the industry has become increasingly visible to the public, with interest in the field skyrocketing around shutdowns. During the 2025 shutdown in particular, Martinez said, air traffic controllers seemed to be playing a larger part in the national conversation than in previous shutdowns.
“Because of some of the air traffic safety issues that we’ve seen this past year, you know,” Martinez said, “we had the incident in D.C. with air traffic controllers and we had that tragic accident with American Airlines, I just think there was more attention to air traffic controllers.”
The air traffic control industry holds a lot of power. On average, controllers oversee more than 44,000 flights daily, across 19,000 airports. During the 2025 shutdown, the FAA cut flights by 10% at 40 major airports, including DFW International Airport and Dallas Love Field, to help maintain safety standards, causing reroutes, delays and cancellations.
At DFW and Love Field, more than 100 flights were canceled the Monday after the FAA cut traffic, The News reported.
Optimism for the future
In the month since the shutdown ended, staffing trigger reports at FAA towers across the nation have largely stabilized. Even during Thanksgiving week, one of the busiest travel seasons of the year, only four staffing triggers were reported at Dallas-Fort Worth towers per The News’ analysis, signaling a short term return to normalcy.
In the long run, though, the aviation industry is fast-changing.
In the past decade or so, smaller, turboprop aircraft like the Saab 340 and the ATR 72 have been retired from domestic markets in favor of larger business jets that carry more passengers, Martinez said. This shift, Turner said, has highlighted the need for technological change in air traffic control towers, as flights move a lot quicker than they did years ago.
And, as demand for air travel increases, the air traffic control industry faces increased strain, Turner said. According to the airport’s most recent data, DFW served over 71 million passengers in 2025, a marked increase over the 62 million it saw during the same period in 2019.
Despite this, Turner said he approaches the future of air traffic control with optimism, a trait he cultivated in his skydiving days, and one he says he shares with others in his industry.
“Most pilots I know and most air traffic control people I know, and educators in the field, most of us are pretty positive-minded people,” Turner said. “It’s just another challenge, and pilots and air traffic controllers, they’re good problem solvers.”