Air Traffic Control

Federal air traffic control began in 1936, when the Bureau of Air Commerce took over the first airway traffic control centers from airlines. After two airliners collided over the Grand Canyon in 1956, killing 128 people, Congress created the Federal Aviation Agency in 1958 to run a single national system. Today the FAA's Air Traffic Organization handles about 45,000 flights and nearly 3 million airline passengers a day through airport towers, approach control facilities, and 20 en route centers covering the country.

Controllers are federal employees, trained at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, and must retire by 56. When about 13,000 controllers went on strike in August 1981, President Reagan fired more than 11,000 of them, and the workforce took years to rebuild. The FAA had about 13,200 controllers in September 2025, roughly 3,500 fewer fully certified controllers than it says it needs, forcing overtime and six-day weeks at some facilities. Much of the equipment is decades old, and a modernization program called NextGen, begun in the 2000s, fell years behind schedule.

Radar and radio outages at the facility handling Newark airport in the spring of 2025 and the January 2025 midair collision near Washington drew new attention. A July 2025 law provided 12.5 billion dollars for new radar, radios, and facilities, and the FAA sought billions more. During the 43-day government shutdown in the fall of 2025, controllers worked without pay and the FAA ordered airlines to cut flights at 40 busy airports. Some lawmakers and airlines favor moving air traffic control to a nonprofit corporation, as Canada did, while controllers' unions and others prefer keeping it federal with steadier funding.