Dear Academy Instructors, RPOs, and Other Concerned Individuals:

You have seen the hard work of hundreds of trainee air traffic control specialists at the FAA Academy. You have seen them uproot their lives to move to the Academy grounds in Oklahoma City. You have seen their passion for the field of air traffic control in classrooms, break rooms, and simulation labs. You have heard how hard they worked to get where they are. You have seen them energized, exhausted, encouraged, defeated, stressed, and under control -- all in the same week. You have written "GREAT JOB" on their training reports, provided them with meaningful encouragement, counseled them in their times of trouble, and seen them develop as competent, proficient trainee controllers.

Yet, time and again, you also have watched how dozens or hundreds of these outstanding students are suddenly terminated from their positions following single, totally subjective, often botched evaluations by a completely separate workgroup from you, a workgroup called "Quality Assurance," or AMA-505, whose bureaucrats claiming to be "air traffic controllers" have the power to deem your trainees unworthy of continuing their employment with the FAA.

You know as well as we do that "QA" is the bane of your existence, just as they are the bane of ours. QA specialists are the government bureaucrats who cause 40, 50, 60, and sometimes as high as 90% of your classes to wash out of the FAA Academy training program, after all of the weeks you spent ensuring they were indeed well qualified trainees.

For those of you who are not addressed as recipients to this letter, here are some FACTS about FAA Academy evaluations:

  1. Control tower simulators manufactured by Adacel are known to have serious deficiencies, and yet they are still relied upon as the sole method of evaluating trainees at the FAA Academy.
  2. Evaluators are known to intervene in simulator malfunctions and not in others, depending on the trainee.
  3. Evaluators are known to talk excessively during evaluations.
  4. Evaluators are known to make up rules when deducting points from trainees.
  5. Trainees can appeal certain point deductions -- but only to the evaluators' supervisor. (Very transparent, right?)
  6. The "point appeal process" involves a supervisor merely interviewing an evaluator despite that other avenues that provide objective reviews are available. (See #7).
  7. Trainees must depend only on hearsay from their evaluators as to "what happened" during their evaluations, despite that audio and visual playback functions are provided by Adacel for this explicit purpose -- but those functions are reserved for evaluators' use only, and trainees cannot review them themselves.
  8. Branch supervisors always side with the evaluators as a matter of policy when a trainee contests a point deduction that was based on a visual observation.
  9. FAA Academy trainees are offered no opportunities for retakes of any of their evaluations -- despite that this was the standard as recently as 2012, when up to two retakes of each evaluation were permitted.
  10. FAA Academy trainees have a measly few options to appeal their terminations because of laws in the United States Code that exempt trainee air traffic control specialists from traditional appeal rights afforded to all other types of federal government employees.

It's no wonder the instructor work group can't stand the "Quality Assurance" work group.

By account of the the FAA Academy's parent organization, the FAA Office of Finance and Management, each tower trainee costs $38,000 to train -- and this cost doesn't include the cost of the 5-week Air Traffic Basics course that precedes tower training, the salary of each trainee, or the per-diem payments made to each trainee.

Why would the FAA Office of Finance and Management spend tens of thousands of dollars per trainee, only to wash them out on their last day of training and not provide them with any opportunities for retesting or retraining? No other government training program is operated in this way. This is gross mismanagement at its finest.

Speak Up.


If you work at the FAA Academy, you know that these this goes on every day, every week, every month, and every year, and that it has since the early 2010s. It is your responsibility as a qualified, conscientious professional who cares deeply about the field, the science, and the art of air traffic control, to speak up about the gross abuses propagated by FAA Academy management on trainee air traffic control specialists, which ultimately constitutes both abuses of U.S. taxpayers and the safety of the flying public. Do not take any of the following steps on government computers or networks.

You should blow the whistle on AMA-513 and AMA-505's gross waste, abuse, and mismanagement of the tower training program at the FAA Academy. You have rights as a whistleblower that protect you from reprisal. And yes, you can remain anonymous. For more information, click here.

Furthermore, you should find your congressional representatives and notify them about these problems. Schedule an in-person appointment. Name names. Bring evidence. Right these wrongs.

Finally, we have an anonymous Tip Line here, which we encourage anyone with knowledge of wrongdoing at the FAA Academy to use. If for whatever reason you are unwilling to blow the whistle through official means, or are unwilling to notify Congress, we have the resources necessary to independently investigate submitted allegations of wrongdoing. Just give us a lead and we will vehemently pursue it.