More than 44,000 flights a day operate in U.S. airspace, which makes a shortage of air traffic controllers a real safety hazard.

The job is notoriously stressful and life or death important,

with lots of compulsory overtime and burnout rates to match. But there are people who feel

drawn to such critical and demanding work. So why do so many candidates selected for

federally funded training never earn full certification? From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd.

My guest, Ian Duncan, is a transportation reporter at the Washington Post, and he's been

investigating why so many air traffic control positions remain unfilled. What he learned from

current and former trainees is that, among other things, many believe their instructors

expect them to fail and relish the opportunity to humiliate them when they make mistakes.

His article about this is titled College Hazing or Training. Amid Shortage, Air Traffic Recruits

Washout. Ian, welcome to think.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Let's start with this problem of not enough air traffic controllers. How many people are currently doing this work for the FAA and how many more does the agency

believe it needs to be staffed at full capacity?

Yeah, so the FAA has about 11,000 certified controllers.

The number varies a little bit depending on exactly how you count.

But they have worked with the union that represents these controllers to kind of come up with some numbers for what full staffing would look like.

And they think that they need more than 14,000. And so the figure that we typically work

with is that the shortage is at about 3,000 air traffic controllers that we need to hire and

train to have a kind of a national system that is fully staffed. So something around 25% more

than we currently have.

Yeah, it's a big, big number that they are looking to add.

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