The longest government shutdown in U.S. history ended last Wednesday, but many federal workers, including air traffic controllers, are still waiting to receive full backpay. The government shutdown left roughly 13,000 air traffic controllers without pay for 43 days, leading many to take on second jobs. Many say the shortages during the government shutdown only amplified current issues caused by a long-term staffing shortage. Lyle Clingman, a retired air traffic controller from Eugene, joins us to share more about the long-term staffing shortage as well as the repercussions air traffic controllers faced during the recent government shutdown.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The longest government shutdown in U.S. history ended on Wednesday. One of its knock-on effects was to shine a light on existing cracks in the federal bureaucracy. Roughly 13,000 air traffic controllers had to work without pay for 43 days. Many had to take second jobs to get by, but the system of air traffic control was already stretched thin, and the refunding of the government simply takes us back to a strained status quo. Lyle Clingman, who lives in Lane County, worked as an air traffic controller for more than 30 years. He joins us now to talk about the long-term staffing shortage, as well as the challenges that Oregon controllers faced during this recent shutdown. Lyle, welcome to the show.
Lyle Clingman: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: What was your own path to becoming an air traffic controller?
Clingman: I went to college for a year after high school and couldn’t decide what I wanted to do with my life, so I went into the army and became an army air traffic controller. I spent four years doing that, and got out about a year before the strike in ’81. I had been trying to get on with the FAA for almost a year when the strike came, and the strike occurred on the 3rd of August. I was in the tower in San Jose, California, working as a controller on the 27th.
Miller: And then never left.
Clingman: And never did. I worked at San Jose for 2 1⁄2 years, transferred to San Francisco. At the time, San Jose was the 9th busiest airport in the world and San Francisco was the 6th. Then in ’91, I was fortunate enough to come back home to Oregon and work at Eugene for 22 years.
Miller: Did you like the busyness of it?
Clingman: I loved it. I loved working at San Francisco. It just made sense to me from the minute I walked into the facility, and controllers thrive on the busy traffic. People say, “Well, isn’t it stressful?” and so much of life is stressful, and ATC always has the potential to become very stressful, but the adrenaline fix is addictive.
Miller: And that’s what kept you going for decades.
Clingman: Yeah, but it’s also a young person’s game. We have mandatory retirement at 56. I worked up until the time I turned 56 and basically, it’s out the door you go at the end of the month when you turn 56. There are just no exceptions other than if you’re in management, not working traffic. But for the controllers working day to day, when you turn 56, you’re out of a job.
Miller: I want to talk more about that in a little bit, but I’m curious about the day-to-day realities of the job. I mean, what is the actual work of air traffic control like? What are you doing when you’re sitting there?
Clingman: Before we get to the “what you do” part, let me say this about the job, and it’s part of what builds the stress into the job. You work a weird schedule at a 24-hour facility. Let’s say, for example, your days off are Tuesday/Wednesday, ‘cause everybody has different days off to spread the workforce around.
On Thursday, you would work a swing shift, say 4 to midnight. On Friday, you’d work 1:30 to 9:30 or 2 to 10, something like that. On Saturday, you’d work 8 to 4. Sunday, 8 to 4. Then Monday you’d work what we would call a mid-shift. You would come in Sunday night at 11 or 12 and work overnight, get off Monday morning at 7 or 8 in the morning. So by the time you’ve finished that work week, you’ve gained almost a day. You’ve compressed five shifts into a little over four days.
Miller: It strikes me that it’s just as mentally discombobulating in terms of time, as some of the travelers at airports who have just done weird things with time zones and crossing oceans, except you’re not traveling, you’re just doing really weird things with your shifts over the course of every single week.
Clingman: Yes, every week, forever. When you add in where you work a swing shift back to a day shift, or from the day shift back to the mid-shift, you’ve got to throw in commute time, too. So you may have eight or nine or 10 hours off between shifts, but when I was working in San Francisco, we lived in South San Jose. I allowed 1 ½ hours each way for the commute. That’s three of those eight hours gone to travel. The best I could do between shifts would be five hours of sleep. That’s assuming that I got in bed when I got home, got up and got in the car and left.
Miller: Lived no life, besides sleeping, when you weren’t driving to work or working, which is physically impossible.
Clingman: That is a big stressor in the work life. But as far as what are we doing, my experience is primarily in the tower. Eugene is what we call an up-and-down facility where it has both a tower and a radar approach control downstairs. Then there’s a third type of facility called a center, and they are the high altitude, primarily. They overlay all of the towers and approach controls through the country.
For the towers, there’s a variety of positions: flight data, clearance delivery, ground control, local control. Then some facilities have specialized positions. We had what we call the gate hold at San Francisco, or there might be a coordinator position to help spot things. During the course of the day, you’d rotate from one position to another.
You’d come up and maybe you’d work ground control to start the day and you work for an hour and a half on the ground, you could take a break for 15, 20 minutes, come back and you might be working flight data, or you might be working local. Then after that, you take a break, go to lunch, come back and do the same thing again.
Local control controls the airplanes taking off and landing, and then within probably about five or six miles of the airport. Ground control taxies them to and from the runways, and then flight data and clearance delivery do flight plans, reclearances for instrument aircraft, that sort of thing.
Miller: I want to turn to a National Academy of Sciences panel that put out a report just this past June with some pretty scary numbers. They found that there has been a 13% drop in controllers in the last 15 years, because for about a decade now, the FAA has only hired about 2/3 of the controllers called for in its own staffing model. And they also found that the levels below staffing targets seems to be worse at the country’s biggest and busiest airports. What kinds of effects has this been leading to even before the recent shutdown?
Clingman: It’s really hard to fill those spots. The agency hires a bunch of people and they have to go to Oklahoma City for training, and only a percentage of those – it’s a long time since I’ve paid attention to those numbers – but traditionally it’s been around ⅓ to ½ of those people are successful at the academy in Oklahoma. Then they’re sent to the facilities and they have to go through training at that facility. That takes another ten months to four years, depending on the facility. It’s a very long process, and a percentage of those people in that group don’t make it through that training.
It’s a very long process for the people that are successful, and then only a rather small percentage of those people are successful. And in the meantime, the people that were hired 20 years ago are saying, “You know, I’m tired of working six-day weeks, I’m tired of working 60 hours a week,” and as soon as they’re eligible, they’re retiring.
Miller: Even before the mandatory retirement age of 56.
Clingman: Yeah, controllers are eligible to retire after 25 years at any age, or 20 years of controlling and age 50. So conceivably, if you got hired when you’re 20 years old, you would be eligible to retire when you’re 45. It’s not beyond imagination that you could pursue a second career even, if you retired and went and found something in the private sector to do.
They’re having a problem with people just saying, “I don’t want to do this work schedule anymore, too many hours.” Australia has become a very popular place to quit the FAA and look for a job as a controller.
Miller: Why? What makes Australia an attractive place?
Clingman: Apparently they need people, and I don’t know why, but one of the guys I know that’s still working told me that we’re almost 4,000 controllers short of what we are supposed to have, and in the last 12 months we’ve seen a net gain nationwide of 15 controllers.
Miller: The administration has announced various plans to increase ATC staffing, including increased incentives to attract new controllers, ways to streamline training, ways to have training happen not just in Oklahoma City but in other places, in colleges, for example. Also incentives to retain existing controllers so people won’t leave early like you were talking about. What do you think of these plans?
Clingman: I’ll believe they’ll happen when I actually see it happening as far as any financial incentives, because that costs money and the government traditionally has not been very enthusiastic about investing that type of money. As far as having schools do training, they’ve been doing that. They have three primary sources, three sources that they hire.
They do off the street hiring, they’ll advertise vacancies, and they’ll hire people with no ATC experience. Then they’ll advertise vacancies for people with experience as a controller, which is primarily for ex-military controllers, ‘cause that’s the other source for people to gain experience, really. The third source is a group of college programs, I think it’s UND, University of North Dakota, and there’s a school down in … Embry-Riddle runs a program, and I think there’s one down in Prescott too, I’m not sure about that. They call ‘em CTI – Controller Training Initiative, I believe is what it stands for – schools, and they hire people that have completed the CTI program.
Of the three groups, the people who are successful, military controllers, you probably have the best success rate with. For CTI and for off the street, it’s hit-and-miss. The skills that you need to be a controller are hard. You can’t teach somebody to do it, really. It’s either you can look at it and say, “Oh, this makes sense. I can do this,” or you just never figure it out.
Miller: What did you hear from friends or former colleagues who still work as controllers about what this latest shutdown was like for them?
Clingman: For the guys that have been there for a while, that are making good money, it wasn’t as bad as for the people that are in training. The people in training don’t make very good money, you’re talking $50,000 a year, and they don’t have the resources to put away money to survive a month without a paycheck.
I know that here in Eugene, there was one controller that went to their landlord and tried to work out a deal, “Can I wait and pay you when I get paid?” And the landlord said, “No.” So they applied for a loan to pay their rent with and got turned down because they’re not getting paid. They ended up having to go to friends and family to piece together a bunch of loans from different people and use that to pay their rent. They had one controller that was driving for DoorDash when they weren’t working, because they had to pay.
Miller: NPR had a report last week where they talked to controllers who did not want to be identified by name for fear of reprisals, but they said that some of them did not get their overtime checks from the 2018/2019 shutdown until just a few weeks before the most recent one, meaning almost seven years later. How would you describe air traffic controller morale right now?
Clingman: It’s not good. Talking to the people that I know that are still working, morale is terrible. Most facilities are working 60-hour weeks and have been for several years. They’re scheduling people for overtime on their days off, and by law they can’t work more than 60 hours in a week. You can’t work more than 10 hours in a day, you can’t work more than 6 days in a row.
Say you have this week and next week off for vacation and you’re planning on going to Florida for two weeks. On your two days off in the middle of those two weeks, they schedule you for overtime on one of those two days. So much for your trip to Florida. You can imagine how happy that makes people when they can’t plan to do anything more than five days at a time because their employer is gonna put them back to work on their days off.
It’s not a happy place right now, and they don’t see any relief in sight. They look down the pipe and they say, “OK, we’re gonna hire another 2,500 people.” Well, OK, six months from now we’ll get two of those here at our facility because 1,200 of them are gonna not make it through the training. Then three years from now, one of those people will be certified, and the other one will not make it through the program.
Miller: With all of this in mind, how do you think about the safety of commercial air travel right now?
Clingman: I think it’s safe. The people working traffic are very conscientious. They are very dedicated to what they do. They’re not happy about how things are. They love the work. They love what they do. You have to, to put up with the schedule, the management, the lack of resources. But you can only stretch the rubber band so far. Eventually it doesn’t stretch anymore and it breaks. So I wouldn’t hesitate to fly. I don’t like flying just on principle, I never have.
Miller: Are you serious?
Clingman: Being crammed into a tiny seat in an aluminum tube just seems like such an uncivilized way to travel to me, but, if I needed to go to, say, Washington, D.C., I’m gonna go get on an airplane and fly. I’m not even gonna think twice about it.
Miller: Lyle, thanks very much for your time. I appreciate it.
Clingman: Great, have a great afternoon.
Miller: You too. That’s Lyle Clingman. He’s a retired air traffic controller. He spent 36 years as an air traffic controller in California, then in Eugene.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
