The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has struggled for years to have sufficient air site visitors controllers to deal with shortages, with the US Authorities Accountability Workplace (GAO) saying in January that the variety of folks within the job within the US has declined by round 6 p.c “within the final decade.” Now the Trump administration is rolling out a recruiting marketing campaign focusing on avid gamers forward of the opening of the annual air site visitors management hiring window on April seventeenth.
Even with the marketing campaign, getting certified people by coaching and into the position should be a problem: in line with the Division of Transportation’s Workplace of Inspector Common (OIG), the FAA is dealing with “appreciable challenges with coaching, together with a scarcity of certified instructors, coaching capability limitations, an outdated curriculum, and excessive coaching failure charges.”
An FAA video stuffed with clips of issues like Madden NFL, Fortnite, League of Legends esports, and the Xbox One stinger from commercials guarantees a mean wage of $155,000 per yr after three years and says that “you’ve been coaching for this.”
In a press launch, the FAA says that air site visitors controllers stated in exit interviews that gaming was an affect on “their capability to suppose rapidly, keep targeted, and handle complexity.” The FAA’s web site in regards to the software course of encourages candidates to “stage up” their profession. Nevertheless, the Trump administration isn’t the primary to focus on avid gamers for the position; in line with The New York Instances, the Biden administration launched a “Stage Up” recruiting push in 2021, encouraging avid gamers in addition to girls and members of minority teams to develop into air site visitors controllers.
Getting extra air site visitors controllers has been a spotlight for Sean Duffy, President Trump’s secretary of transportation, and he introduced a plan to “supercharge” hiring shortly after he was sworn in for the job final yr. That marketing campaign closed in March 2025 and “attracted greater than 10,000 purposes,” leading to about 600 trainees coming into the Controller Coaching Academy, the OIG says. And the GAO says that some attrition through the air site visitors controller hiring course of “could also be preventable,” noting that the hiring course of may be “tough to navigate” and that candidates could have already accepted different jobs by the point they get an employment supply.
The Nationwide Air Visitors Controllers Affiliation (NATCA), the union representing air site visitors controllers, “welcomes revolutionary approaches to increasing the candidate pool,” together with “outreach to people with high-level aptitude expertise akin to avid gamers,” in line with an announcement from NATCA president Nick Daniels.
