If you’re a manager at an air traffic control tower, you’re probably wondering why the process through which you are supposed to be receiving new hire trainees seems so convoluted.

If your facility is dying for “new bodies,” those new bright-in-the-eye trainees who are ready to put in the hard work necessary to certify at your location, you should know that dozens and perhaps hundreds of them have been wrongfully terminated from the FAA Academy just one or two days before they were supposed to be placed at your facility. In the vast majority of cases, all of those trainees would have made exceptional employees in your tower.

We know you’ve been on dozens of teleconferences with the FAA Onboarding and Placement Team within the last two years. We know you have slots that need to be filled with new hire trainees at your facilities. That’s why we think it’s up to you to start asking questions about what is really going on down in Oklahoma City. It’s time to start asking why classes of 18 students are only graduating 9 or 10 at a time -- if they're lucky. Where are the rest of those trainees going? (Answer: They’re going home. And not to your tower.)

Ultimately, when the FAA Academy haphazardly fires trainees for make believe reasons, the resultant effect is that your openings do not get filled. When openings go unfilled, they are sent to the next placement list for bidding by the next group of graduates. But that next class's bid day is often 2 or 3 weeks away. That’s 2 or 3 more weeks worth of time you could have had a new trainee in your tower. All of this lost time affects your local staffing situation.

What happens if nobody in that next class wants to go to your facility? Worse yet, what if someone does but is terminated because of their "performance" during one evaluation? Well, your opening gets passed on to the next class after that. And the cycle continues.

If you’re in a high cost of living area, or in a city with a poor reputation (whether deserved or not), we wish you good luck depending on the Onboarding and Placement Team to resolve the problem.

“But wait, Mr. Manager,” they'll tell you, “If your tower isn’t selected within the next three classes, we’ll make it a mandatory placement slot by the fourth class.”

Don’t buy this garbage, especially when you’ve gotten calls from trainees at the academy who are interested in going to your tower but then suddenly don’t show up on placement rosters when their class bids for facilities after evaluations. They didn't quit. They didn't disappear off the face of the earth. They were terminated because the evaluation process sucks. That's the reason they weren't on your tower's doorstep last Monday, ready to start the welcome tour your staff specialist put together.

The only time you can ever expect your facility to have a “must fill” opening is if you have been dipping into your overtime budget like there’s no tomorrow, if you’ve had to personally assist your crew work traffic during certain hard-to-staff periods, and/or if you’ve had no choice but to deny vacation, temporary duty assignments, transfers, and the whole host of other benefits this agency normally allows you to approve for your already-certified controllers.

Here’s what you need to start doing:

Step 1: Ask the Right Questions

If you’re a manager who recently received a new-hire from the FAA Academy’s Tower Cab Initial Qualification Training Course, you should be asking them the following questions:

  1. How many trainees were in your class?
  2. How many trainees washed out of your class?
  3. Among all of the washouts, how many would you say did well in training?
  4. How many of the washouts would you say would likely have made good trainees?
  5. Were there ever any problems with the training simulators while you were in training or during your evaluations?
  6. What is your overall opinion of the tower training program?
If you're in the unfortunate position of having no new trainees, then you should start asking these questions of the academy instructors. You likely know many of them, as nearly all are retirees from field facilities like yours. In your internal FAA directory, do a search for academy instructors, and give one of your old pals a call. See what they say.

Step 2: Demand the Right Answers

After gathering this information, the next time you’re on a teleconference with the Onboarding and Placement Team, you should ask them to patch in the Terminal Quality Assurance Branch (AMA-505B), with whom that office works hand-in-hand. These are the guys responsible for arbitrarily downsizing academy class rosters from 18 trainees to 9 or less within a 36 hour period as the trainees go through (and often fail) their final evaluations. You ought to ask them the following questions:

  1. Who are the evaluators at the academy? What are their real-world credentials outside of watching trainees work simulated air traffic?
  2. Why do evaluators who show face only for trainees’ 3 days of evaluations – if trainees are lucky enough to even get that far – get to decide 90% of the trainees’ scores? (These are literal numbers, by the way. Ask your new hire if you’re confused.)
  3. Why don’t evaluators perform any other empirical measures of student progress during the 10-week tower training program besides final evaluations? Why save the only evals for the end of the course after the government has already spent $38,000+ per student?
  4. What type of traffic are you guys having these trainees run during final evaluations? (Remind them that most of you are managing level 4s through 8s and don’t need new hires walking in the door on Day 1 thinking they can work Level 12 traffic.)
  5. How is it possible that during the 7 weeks succeeding classroom training, there are absolutely no empirical measures of student progress performed? Is the FAA Academy familiar with the FAA’s own publication called Fundamentals of Instruction?
  6. If academy instructors are trusted enough to administer skills checks, then why aren’t they trusted to administer final evaluations? If evaluators are the only qualified people in Oklahoma City who can measure trainees' performances, why, then, aren’t evaluators doing all of the skills checks and, afterwards, providing trainees with valuable feedback the trainees can use to later pass final evaluations? (Remind them that in real life, tower supervisors always do skills checks and final evaluations – not OJT instructors.)
  7. When an evaluator issues a failing grade to a trainee who has a history of good performance, and the trainee contests that the evaluation was botched, why aren’t instructors asked to provide feedback about the trainee’s overall performance before the trainee is exterminated – I mean terminated?
  8. Why do you not permit trainees to retake evaluations, especially when it is common knowledge that the simulators are not impeccable training devices?
  9. How do you logically arrive at the conclusion to terminate some trainees after only one evaluation, despite that they usually each have a 16-week paper trail of exceptional performance throughout their employment with the agency?
  10. At what point are you going to evaluate your own performance and question why 50% or more of trainees going into the program are coming out without an FAA badge?
Tower managers: Ultimately the changes that need to be implemented at the FAA Academy are going to be brought about when you complain about the academy's poor performance in failing to send you the trainees you need. If you’ve had one or more openings at your facility that you can’t seem to get filled, or if you’re worried about potential staffing levels when all 6 of your 20+ year veteran CPCs turn in their retirement paperwork next week, you need to start asking some tough questions of these people.