New Audit Announcements

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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employs about 13,800 air traffic controllers in more than 300 facilities across the United States. Ensuring adequate staffing and training for controllers is essential to maintain the safety of the National Airspace System, especially at the Nation’s busiest, most complex, and most critical facilities. As we have previously reported, FAA faces challenges with ensuring it has enough fully trained controllers at these critical facilities and with conducting oversight of staffing and training to maintain continuity of air traffic operations. In addition, the Agency now must also respond to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which may impact its ability to maintain the required number of controllers at critical air traffic facilities. Given the importance of maintaining the safety of the NAS, as well as the potential impact of COVID-19 on staffing and training, we are initiating this audit with the following objectives: (1) to assess FAA’s efforts to ensure that critical air traffic control facilities have an adequate number of controllers and (2) to identify the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on FAA’s controller training program.