The FAA says it will throttle traffic over the holiday weekend to mitigate expected staff shortages. The agency got ahead of the inevitable misery with a news conference at Reagan National on Friday and Administrator Mike Whitaker told reporters safety is paramount. “During the Thanksgiving travel period, we will use traffic flow management initiatives to deal with any staffing shortages on that particular day in this airspace, and we expect to have some of those shortages," Whitaker said. "If we are short on staff, we will slow traffic as needed to keep the system safe."
There MUST be a bunch of trainees in the pipeline to help with these issues - right? The EWR approach sectors had a staffing trigger last night. How many trainees does that sector have doing OJT?
The FAA has ALWAYS been behind the staffing curve. When I was in (26 years) they didn’t hire replacements until you were out the door. That means a 2-4 year lead time to hire and train a replacement. By then, more people quit. It is a burnout job, and when you are setup financially, most choose to go. They need to hire a bubble of trainees, but now I fear there won’t be any controllers left to train them. Sigh.