The FAA has released a report claiming to be 3,000 people short of the number of air traffic controllers it currently needs. They claim the shortage is due to a current bottleneck in the system borne from the fact there is only one training facility in the country equipped to train air traffic controllers.
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Excerpt from news.google.com
Labor Day marked the unofficial end to the busiest summer air travel season on record. Yet the Federal Aviation Administration remains plagued by a decades-long shortage of air traffic controllers — the folks who keep all those planes safely separated from each other.
In May, the FAA said it was short 3,000 controllers. One factor in that? All air traffic controllers have to train at a single FAA academy in Oklahoma City. But a federal effort is aiming to change that.
Walk into the tower simulator at Vaughn College in New York City, and you feel like you’re in a real airport control tower. Except those wrap-around windows are actually computer screens.
“So you can simulate day, night, snow, fires on the airport,” said Sharon DeVivo, the school’s president. “Scenarios that students we hope will never see, but they train on those.”