An Air Traffic Controller Walks Into a Radio Studio …

 Imagine there is a big government agency that is in charge of regulating a particular industry but is also an employer within that industry, and is essentially a business partner. That would describe the Federal Aviation Administration. Is it possible for the F.A.A. to serve all those functions, including its all-important air traffic control function? Is it possible for it to maintain its high safety standards with an aging infrastructure and with a funding stream that’s tied to Congress? Those are some of the questions we asked on last week’s episode, and this week we’re back at it, with part two — and even more questions. We also wanted to hear from the humans who do the actual work of air traffic control. As you may remember from last week, this series was inspired by a recently retired controller named Kenneth Levin, who sent us an email a few months ago. We wrote back and eventually, we called him up.

Stephen DUBNER: Yeah, it’s Stephen. Is that Kenneth? 

Kenneth LEVIN: It is. This is Ken. 

DUBNER: Hey, Ken. 

LEVIN: Nice to meet you, Stephen.

DUBNER: Nice to meet you, thanks for writing! 

LEVIN: Oh man, you know, — I can’t believe I’m talking to you. I love the podcast, I love what you guys do, and, uh, just can’t believe we’re sitting here, man. It’s a thrill. I think a lot of times people just don’t think about these things or are scared to think about them. But, you know, you give us permission.

 Alright, now I’m blushing. But yeah, permission granted.

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 Kenneth Levin recently retired after 23 years in the air traffic control industry. What does it take to be a controller? It has been described as “playing 3D chess at 250 miles an hour.” Levin came to understand this early on, during his initial training.

LEVIN: You develop the ability to scan. You hear it, every minute of every day. Your trainer’s sitting there going, “You’ve got to scan. You’ve got to scan. You’ve got to scan.” So what are you scanning for? You’re learning your sector. You’re checking the outside to see who’s coming in, and what are they trying to do. Are you going to approve it to just let them come in as they are, or do you need to make a change because they’re in conflict with someone else already in your sector? And then you’re also scanning the inside. There’s no guarantee that anything is going to transpire as you think it should. 

You also have to be a good communicator.

LEVIN: The system that we have, it’s full of — I give you an instruction, and that pilot is going to read it back to me. I have to actually listen to what you say to make sure that what you say is what I said. Your brain is in this rush to be, like, “I want to move on to the next thing. But you have to take the time to make sure that everybody is doing exactly what you instructed them to do.

 Being a controller is a niche job in a specialized sector. So how does someone end up there?

LEVIN: I always thought I was going to be a pilot. I was infatuated with it from my earliest memories. I just loved being around aircraft. I trained from a very early age. I was a certified pilot. Just single-engine. 

DUBNER: This was in Colorado? 

LEVIN: Yep, growing up in Colorado, flying around there, had a fantastic time. I went to college, kept flying sporadically throughout college, and then when I graduated I thought, Okay, now is the time to build hours. 

DUBNER: With the idea of becoming a commercial pilot, that was the goal? 

LEVIN: Correct. So I was, like, looking for jobs where I could just pay the bills to fly. I applied for several jobs, one of which was working at an air traffic control center. It was not being a controller, it was just working on databases in the back rooms. I got offered that job, so I took it, and it was in the Bay Area at Oakland Center. When I came in, I thought, I’m not making much money, but it’s enough to pay rent and to allow me to fly a couple days a week. Well, being in the control center, you’re bumping into air traffic controllers left and right. A lot of them asked me the question, “Why don’t you become a controller?” I never really even thought about that. But I hung out with these guys and I was like, This job actually looks really cool. It’s different than being a pilot. 

DUBNER: What was your impression at that point about the difference between A.T.C.s and pilots? 

LEVIN: Both are very intense positions, where they both have a lot of responsibility. As a pilot, you’re in charge of your aircraft, you’re making sure that all the systems on board are functioning. But as a controller, you’re looking at the grand scheme of things. The thing that stuck out to me was that in A.T.C., you’re going to be home every night. You’re not traveling for work; you’re there. 

DUBNER: How much pressure do you feel when you first get in the chair?

LEVIN: It’s a different kind of pressure. It’s a pressure that, especially at that age, a lot of people are probably not used to. You could say, hey, we want people who like to be put in a clutch situation. We want someone who goes up to bat two outs and two strikes, and they’re like, “Yeah, I want that spot.” But younger people especially, like have they had that experience? Do they even know? Are they even aware that they’re good in the clutch? We want people who can perform under pressure. But the training will teach you how to do that. So it’s not a prerequisite. 

DUBNER: I see. 

LEVIN: What is a prerequisite is the dedication, the desire to learn, the desire to become better, and the awareness that there’s always room to improve. For me, there was an aspect of creativity to it that is just fascinating.

 I don’t know about you, but I never would have thought of air traffic control as a creative activity, but — well, Ken Levin plainly knows better than I do. I asked him to explain how the whole system works. He said the first thing to know is that, in most major airports, there are actually three different types of air traffic controllers, working in three different types of facilities: there’s the air-traffic control tower you see at the airports; then there’s approach control and, finally, an air-control center.

LEVIN: Take a wedding cake, and flip it upside down. A three-tier wedding cake. That top tier that’s now on the bottom, and it’s the smallest. Right in the middle of that is an airport. Let’s say about seven miles or something, maybe five miles —every airport’s a little bit different — and going up thousand feet aboveground, so that first tier encompasses the airport. They’re trying to keep the runways safe and efficient. Like, one aircraft’s departing — as soon as that aircraft’s wheels up, they’ll taxi another aircraft out or allow another aircraft to land. 

 These air-traffic controllers are positioned in the towers at the airport. They interact with each pilot for just a small fraction of their flight.

LEVIN: The second tier of the wedding cake, it expands out further. That second tier might go out 80 miles, 100 miles, and then it drops down and surrounds the tower. That segment is what’s known as the “approach control.” That’s doing this traffic from, you know, maybe surface to 20,000 feet, and still in close proximity to the airport. They’re really in the transition phase. They’re lining all these planes up on final. They’re sequencing all these planes to get them at the right spacing, to get them efficiently into the airport in a safe manner. And then on departure, it’s the same thing. The tower gets them off the runway, gets them airborne and then switches them over to approach control. Approach control takes them from a couple hundred feet, a thousand feet, and they get them going on their way pointed towards their destination, and climb them up to 19, 20,000 feet. And then you get to that top tier, which would be the rest of the airspace, and that’s the center. The center is en route control. You’re basically taking control of the planes from 20,000 feet on up, all the way up to cruise, whether that’s 33,000 feet, 39, 41, however high they want to go. 

 For most of his career, Levin worked in this last type of facility, the biggest tier of the wedding cake. This was at Oakland Center, in Fremont, California. It is one of 22 en route centers in the U.S. So what does that look like?

LEVIN: You sit down, you got a couple of planes, you see four or five departures off the Bay Area flashing at you, trying to climb up to altitude, you got a couple other aircraft coming at you from Los Angeles Center. Some are going up to Seattle, some are going to be landing at Oakland, some are landing at San Jose. You have this picture where you’re seeing something start to develop, and you have an idea. You say, I’m going to unwind this whole situation by separating these aircraft and sequencing these aircraft. You have this creative design in your head, you execute that plan, you watch your thought process unfold. As you see things start to transpire, you might make adjustments, you might change your plan, but you’re going to be the one that brings that plan into the world and makes it real. It’s very creative, it’s very fast-paced, and it’s always changing. What happened today is going to be different tomorrow. What happened right now is going to be different in two hours. The winds change, the way pilots fly is slightly different. There’s never going to be the exact same thing.

DUBNER: When do you develop those plans, in the moment? 

LEVIN: Yeah. You have eight or nine planes in your sector — some are coming in, some are leaving. All of a sudden there’s a new plane coming at you from a different sector, they’re asking to head into your sector, and they’re in conflict with one of your aircraft. So the plan you had needs to change, right? Either you need to do something with that aircraft that’s coming in, or you can change the trajectory of one of your aircraft that you have. But then you’re always like, I might need to amend this to accommodate something else. Like, maybe these guys coming at a certain direction, you thought were going to be going 530 knots are only doing 480. You’re like, Wow, I expected these guys to be going 50 knots faster, and they’re not. 

DUBNER: Now, why would you not know that ahead of time? 

LEVIN: Some plane could just be flying slow because they got off early and, you know, their gate’s occupied at their next airport, or whatever. 

DUBNER: What about weather — wind changes? 

LEVIN: Yeah, winds could change. As you sit down in the day, you see the way the planes are flying, you see the way that the winds are working, so you can get a feel for like what angle’s going to be the fast angle, what angle is going to be flying into the wind. So you get the grasp of those things. But there’s always an anomaly. Like some aircraft is flying, really slow because of the gate time or some other reason. And you might have to be a little inquisitive about why that’s happening. Can you speed them up? Do they mind if you speed them up?

DUBNER: Just so I’m clear, the pilot would be aware of some gate conflict potentially that you wouldn’t.

LEVIN: Yeah, they’re in contact with their company throughout the flight, so they know what they need to do. But we don’t — until we ask. And so you just have multiple ways of thinking. And as you’re pushing through your plan, if things aren’t going as you expected them to, you’re going to have to make adjustments. You’re going to have to recognize that plan A is not going as expected. Now, can you force it to work? Maybe. You know, maybe it’s not that far off and it’s just going to take some minor adjustments. But there’s times where you look at it and you go, Man, this plan just is not working and I’m going to have to do something different. So you go into plan B, or plan C.

DUBNER: And do you tell any of your colleagues, or is this just you on your own? 

LEVIN: It could involve other people, it could just be you. Because if you’re just inside your own jurisdiction, then you’re good.

DUBNER: And are you starting to stress a little bit? Do you think your blood pressure is rising a little bit or no?

LEVIN: No. Again, this is what we’re trained to do. Is there some unknown stress there in the background? There’s a little bit where you’re like, I’m going to have to do a little extra work. But this is what we do, right? You’ve got to make sure that aircraft are at the altitude that they’re supposed to be at. You’ve got to make sure they’re flying at the speed you expect them to fly at. And if anything is happening that doesn’t add up to what you or expect them to do, you need to be on it. As a human, we don’t spend a lot of our time thinking like controllers do in these multiple dimensions, with moving pieces of the puzzle. It’s a new thought process. It’s a new way of using your brain. It’s different. 

What Levin is describing here is what most of us would call multitasking. And most people are not good at multitasking. Last year, we published an episode called “Multitasking Doesn’t Work. So Why Do We Keep Trying?” One of the people we interviewed was, at the time, a product manager at Slack. (If you don’t know Slack, it’s a workplace communications platform that almost forces you to multitask.) Her name is Olivia Grace. The weird thing is that earlier in her career, Grace tried to become an air traffic controller. And here’s how she remembered the first round of testing:

Olivia GRACE: You’re sat at a computer, and they’re like, “Hey, the main screen is going to show you simple math.” And they made it clear that there’s going to be multiple tasks. So they’re not just judging you on the speed at which you do simple maths — they’re judging you on the speed and accuracy with which you do simple maths whilst also judging you on the speed and accuracy with which you do other tasks. You start it — two plus two is four, three times three is nine. Yeah, I’m doing it, and it’s going great. And then they’re like, “Okay, every time this light is red, push the other button.” You’re like, “Okay, two plus two is four, light is red, push the button. Two plus two is four, light is red, push the button.” And then they’re like, “Okay, the last one, and this is the most important one, is there’s a third area of the screen where two dots are going to fly across a square.” The two dots are effectively planes. If they are going to collide, push the button. If they are not going to collide, do not push the button. If you get it wrong and they do collide — very bad, very bad.

Another guest in that episode was a research psychologist named David Strayer, who has done a lot of multitasking experiments. He has abundant evidence that most people are bad at multitasking; in fact, he says we’re not actually multitasking even when we think we are.

David STRAYER: What we’re really doing is switching our attention between task one and task two and task one and task two. When you’re doing task one, you’re not paying attention to task two, and there’s a switch cost involved in switching the mental architecture from one task to the next.

But Strayer, during his years of research, found that a select few people really are what he calls supertaskers.

STRAYER: We didn’t believe they existed early on. When we found the very first supertasker, I thought there must be something wrong. We must have actually miscoded the data. 

And how rare are these supertaskers?

STRAYER: When I tell people about the supertasker research, I begin by saying, in a classroom of, say, 100, “How many of you think you’re good at multitasking? How many of you think you’re a supertasker?” Maybe half the class raises their hand. Then when we actually test them, only about two, two-and-a-half percent are in that category.

So, does an air traffic controller like Kenneth Levin necessarily lie on the supertasker end of the spectrum? I asked David Strayer if had any data; he said he’s never directly tested air traffic controllers. But, he said, “given the extensive selection, training, and washout that air traffic controllers go through, I would be surprised if the frequency of supertaskers isn’t much higher” than the base rate in the general population of around two-and-a-half percent. The reality is that a controller does have to seamlessly juggle dozens of variables, with lives on the line. Levin says this ability goes back to the training process.

LEVIN: A lot of people have no idea what goes on to train an air traffic controller. They think you go to this facility in Oklahoma for three months, you get out, and next thing you know, you’re just talking to planes. That’s not the case at all. The training could take anywhere from three to five years. You train at the academy for several months. When you graduate from the academy, you get sent to a local facility, you’re going to train there in a classroom for another several months, and then they’re finally going to send you down to the floor while you’ll do on-the-job training, where a seasoned veteran is sitting behind you, coaching you through how to do it and letting you get your feet wet and make mistakes.

DUBNER: Did you love it the minute you started really working toward becoming an air traffic controller? 

LEVIN: Absolutely not. To the young people out there who are thinking about becoming controllers, I want to tell you something. It is an amazing job. You work with some of the finest people, the teamwork is amazing. But first couple years of training, and learning to think like a controller, and then learning to not apply that kind of thought process to the rest of your life, it’s very difficult.

DUBNER: You don’t want to be bossing around your family and friends, you’re saying?

LEVIN: Yeah, make sure to keep your marriage intact. Your family, I think they probably have it harder than you do as a controller in training.

DUBNER: How much of that is intentional as a weeding-out process? Like, what ratio of trainees get through eventually? 

LEVIN: No. Don’t take this the wrong way. It’s a huge challenge. But a lot of people are up for the challenge. All those challenges that you face become some of your most memorable moments.

It turns out that roughly a quarter of the trainees who enter the F.A.A. academy in Oklahoma don’t make it through the program. Even for the ones who do graduate, about 20 percent of them won’t get certified as a controller at the first facility they’re sent to. At Oakland Center, where Levin spent most of his career, the failure rate for first-time hires is 45 percent. This is all another way of saying that it is a challenging job. Which makes it hard to fill staffing shortages. We talked a bit about these shortages in last week’s episode: the U.S. has around 14,000 air traffic controllers right now; some estimates show that’s about 3,000 short of what’s needed. The job also has age requirements. You have to be younger than 31 when you enter the workforce; throughout your career, you have to pass rigorous physical and mental health checks; and at age 56, there’s mandatory retirement. Ken Levin is 50.

LEVIN: So, I retired just a couple months ago. The last day of March was my last day in my career. I retired because it worked for me. Every controller knows that the end of the road is 56. When you turn 56, you’re going to be done. 

DUBNER: My first thought, Ken, was that, Well, we’re talking about raising retirement age everywhere else, especially for Social Security benefits — why not for A.T.C.s, especially when there’s been a shortage? What is it about the job that past 56 is going to make it very hard to do?

LEVIN: Air traffic controllers, the job that they are doing day in and day out — the attention to detail, the stress, the cognitive abilities that are required to make these things happen in a safe and efficient manner — there’s a select few people out there who can go well past the norm. Everybody’s unique. Everybody’s physiology and cognitive abilities are different, and the way they work is different. But for me, that time between my mid-30s to young 40s, it was the sweet spot. There will be months on end where you are just crushing it. You can just see things further out, you can see the way the winds are working, how the planes are moving, and it’s easy to make good calls. But all of a sudden — who knows what happens, but something transpires. 

DUBNER: You get in a slump? 

LEVIN: Yeah, and you are not hot anymore. It’s like you were batting like, you know a thousand, and now all of a sudden you’re like just slow. You go through these moments throughout your career where you have to muddle through, and you have to do what it takes. There’s times when you’re going to add a little extra protection in. You’re saying, Hey, I’m not having the best day. I’m going to use a little more space than I would on my normal day just because I might not make the best call here. 

DUBNER: Ok, but it’s generally agreed that there’s a shortage of controllers. You have any thoughts on that? 

LEVIN: Well, I’m just an air traffic controller — I was just an air traffic controller. There has been a push to hire. That needs to continue. This is a critique I would have, is that we’re not fast. We like to take things slowly and incrementally. And in air traffic, that’s a huge benefit. But at the same point, you have to be able to wear a couple different hats, and there’s certain times where you need to be able to adjust on the fly. Like, take an airport that’s just exploded. I mean, Vegas has always been busy, but it’s become incredibly busy. Even if you took a seasoned controller and moved them to Vegas, it’s still going to take at least a year, if not two, to train that controller up and get them ready to go.

DUBNER: Why is that? What do they have to learn? 

LEVIN: Every airport is different. Somewhere like Denver or Dallas, these airports were built on these huge swaths of land, the runways are spread out, and they’re designed to operate a huge number of aircraft efficiently. Then you go somewhere like the East Coast — San Francisco is similar. A lot of these older airports were designed a long time ago, and they don’t have the space to spread these runways out. So you have intersecting runways, you have crossing paths. And then there’s geography. Some have mountains in the way, some have other airports in the vicinity. You’re not speaking a different language, but maybe it’s like you’re speaking a different dialect. The core is the same, you’re using the same rules, you’re using the same principles — but the angles, the spacing between aircraft is different. You’re going to have to learn all those delicate balances. 

DUBNER: What about your tools and technology, Ken? I mean, we’ve all seen the pictures by now a little desk fan cooling an old radar system, paper flight strips radios that aren’t working. Did you have that kind of experience, or did you find that most of your tech and tools were in good working order?

LEVIN: A huge part of the reason that I wanted to come on the show, Stephen, was, I hear this stuff out in public. I hear people talking about air traffic on the news or on some other podcast.

DUBNER: Some inferior podcast you, meant to say.

LEVIN: I mean, spoiler alert here, the flying public should feel safe. The system that we have is acceptable. I started in 1997. It’s grown, it’s gotten better, it’s continually evolved, and we’re at the point where it needs to evolve more — but it’s not unsafe. We have the ability to do our job. Now, the place where people might get hung up is, to keep things safe, we might have to introduce a little bit of delay because we’re going to take action to make sure that things stay inside the framework of safety.

DUBNER: I’m just curious, what’s it feel like to be responsible for all those people in the air? 

LEVIN: Ok, that’s very difficult to put into words, but what I will say is, every day of my career that I worked for the F.A.A., it was an absolute honor and privilege to show up at work. It’s such a unique place to go into. There’s no phones, everybody’s very focused. There’s so much positive energy into getting the job done. It’s amazing, all the trust that the public puts in us. The fact that they count on us to get them or their loved ones home safely each and every day, most controllers take a lot of pride in that. It’s not like you sit there and when you’re working traffic you’re thinking, Oh, you know, here’s this plane with 240 people on it. That’s not going through your head. What’s going through your head is, I’m going to do what I was taught to do. I’m going to execute. I’m going to stay ahead of the game. 

DUBNER: Let me ask you one kind of small, narrow question. Is a plane, a plane? In other words, is a business jet, and a triple-seven, and whatever else might be in there, are they essentially equivalent? 

LEVIN: They get treated equivalently. You’re basically on a first-come-first-serve basis.

DUBNER: The position of some people is that the business jets, they kind of free-ride off the system. Because the way the payments go to the trust fund, they’re paying a lot less. I know this isn’t your end of the business, but I’m just curious what you think about that. I mean, this country has a lot of aviation — all different kinds, all different routes. I’m curious if that’s complicated for you as a controller. 

LEVIN: At the end of the day, it adds complexity to the system. Is that a problem? Absolutely not. That’s what we love to do. Controllers are creative people. We find solutions that work. Challenges are not a bad thing. Having a little bit of stress allows people to grow and become better at what they do. As far as the financial aspect to it, I’ve never really thought about it in detail. I’ll leave that to the experts to determine what the right thing to do is.

 Okay, so let’s hear from some experts. One important thing to know is that about 85 percent of the relevant funding here comes from the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which lives inside the Treasury Department, not the F.A.A. The trust fund was set up in 1970, and it’s funded by taxes on passenger tickets, cargo, and aviation fuel. Last week, we heard from Dorothy Robyn, a transportation scholar who spent time in two presidential administrations. She thinks the system needs serious reform. One big reason is that commercial flights pay a lot more in taxes and fees than private planes, even though some private planes — like corporate jets — may consume just as many air-traffic-control resources as a commercial flight. The current system, she says, subsidizes private aviation by around $1 billion a year, and this makes them reluctant to change things.

Dorothy ROBYN: The National Business Aviation Association, they perceive that they have something to lose because they pay almost nothing to use the current system.

Robyn would like to see air traffic control set up as a corporate entity with government input but disconnected from the funding and borrowing hurdles it now faces. Canada has a similar system that she admires. The U.S. has flirted with this model before. The first attempt at corporatization was in the mid 1990s, during the Clinton administration; it was considered again during the first Trump administration. Robyn worked on the first effort and testified in favor of the second. She says the corporate jet lobby, as well as the lobby representing smaller private planes, opposed the reform.

ROBYN: Their standard argument is that size matters — that, yes, you can do this in Canada where it’s a small, fairly straightforward, simple aviation system, but in the United States where it’s really big and complicated, you need government to run it. That’s kind of the reverse of what I would argue, but that’s the standard argument. 

 Robyn said we should speak with one of the groups that she thinks has been stalling reform. So we made that call:

Ed BOLEN: Ed Bolen, I’m the president and C.E.O. of the National Business Aviation Association.

And the National Business Aviation Association does what exactly?

BOLEN: The National Business Aviation Association represents thousands of companies all over the United States of all different sizes — small, medium, and large — that rely on general aviation aircraft, private aircraft, to get where they need to be, when they need to be there, for a business purpose. 

DUBNER: Give me an example, what kind of firms are we talking about? 

BOLEN: Oftentimes, general aviation aircraft are flying to or from communities with little or no commercial airline service. So if someone, for example, was going to fly from Salina, Kansas, to Des Moines, Iowa, that would be an example where a construction company, maybe a medical company, a manufacturer may be bringing people to another area for a sales call or bringing people in to discuss a project. So you see all of these companies all over the United States using general aviation aircraft to be efficient to turn travel time into productive work time, to move products that may be too big to fit in an overhead bin, or too sensitive to go in a cargo hold. Maybe trying to hit three cities in one day as opposed to one city in three days. 

DUBNER: Now you didn’t happen to choose Kansas as a starting point because you’re from Kansas, did you? 

BOLEN: I might have. 

DUBNER: When a lot of people, and I would probably raise my hand here myself, see the name of your organization, the National Business Aviation Association, I might think not so much of those small businesses — the physicians, construction firms, and so on — I might think of corporate jets. How much of your membership is comprised of corporate jets, and how do you define a corporate jet, etc.? 

BOLEN: Eighty-five percent of the business aviation companies in the United States are small and mid-sized companies. But there are Fortune 500 companies, for example, that are relying on general aviation aircraft, a business aircraft, to get where they need to be safely, securely, flexibly. And so a number of the best companies — whether you look at that as earnings per share, most admired brands, best places to work — through the years companies that utilize and leverage business aviation outperform those companies that do not.

DUBNER: Can you help me draw that pie a little bit? What share of all flights, let’s say — or maybe contributing revenue, contributing to the trust fund — are coming from the business travel or the corporate travel?

BOLEN: Contributions from all general aviation aircraft are contributing to the Airport and Airways Trust Fund. They do it through a fuel tax. There are two different primary types of general aviation aircraft: those that are powered by piston engines — they use what is known as Avgas — and then there are turbine-powered aircraft and that includes turboprops and turbojets. They burn jet fuel. And there is a different, higher fuel tax associated with those operations.

DUBNER: How would you describe the role of A.T.C. and the role of the F.A.A. for general aviation versus commercial aviation? Is it a similar relationship or is it quite different?

BOLEN: Most pilots begin in general aviation, most maintenance technicians begin in general aviation, most controllers begin at some of the less capacity-constrained airports. Safety technology, sustainability technology, is also incubated in general aviation. Composite technologies have come from general aviation aircraft. Winglets came from general aviation aircraft. G.P.S. was adopted early by the general aviation community. It’s both the foundation of aviation and it is a technology incubator that often proves its way into the commercial airline service.

DUBNER: Critics say that business travel — corporate jets — contribute just two percent or so of the F.A.A.’s trust fund revenue while they make up around sixteen percent of flights. And then they’ll say, “Well, to an air traffic controller, a flight is a flight is a fight,” whether it’s carrying, you know, 5 people or 300 people. What’s your response to that? 

BOLEN: What we have found is when the issue has come up, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate have rejected that. They recognize that the costs inherent in the system are driven by the commercial airlines. The idea that we’re all equal with every movement ignores the fact that certain groups drive in more cost. The hub-and-spoke system is what drives the cost in our air transportation system. So it would be a little bit like saying, well, everybody went out to dinner, one person had an appetizer, a salad, they got dessert, a couple of sides. I had a salad and everybody wants to, “Hey, let’s pay the same thing, it’s just dinner.” 

 Coming up after the break: how legitimate is Ed Bolen’s check-splitting claim?

John STRONG: There’s been lots of work over the years which have discussed whether or not they pay their fair share. 

I’m Stephen Dubner; this is Freakonomics Radio. By the way, we will soon be celebrating the 20^th anniversary of our book Freakonomics and the 15^th anniversary of Freakonomics Radio, which means I’ll be doing a few live events. If you’re interested, go to freakonomics.com/liveshows. Maybe I’ll see you there. We’ll be right back.

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 John Strong is an economist in the business school at William & Mary. He’s been studying the airline industry for a few decades now, and he has a good grip on the sometimes-uneasy alliance between the commercial airline industry and what’s called general aviation.

STRONG: One thing we have to keep in mind is a lot of general aviation is kind of low-level, doesn’t really affect the nation’s busiest airports, and it’s kind of out there on its own. It’s crop dusters in Kansas, right? What’s true is that business aviation increasingly has had improved performance characteristics. So if you look at Teterboro or White Plains, the busiest business aviation airports are operating corporate jets which are of similar capabilities to commercial aviation. And increasingly, I think, business aviation has realized that the air traffic control system is slowing and making their operations less efficient as well. And so they have come a long way. In the last year, the airline industry associations and the business aviation have sort of been on the same page. So I think the idea that general and business aviation has been the problem about why we haven’t done that is less true now than it’s ever been. 

DUBNER: Yeah, because they understand that if they don’t contribute to the system, the system will continue to deteriorate, and they’re sharing the system.

STRONG: Right, and if you look at the rest of the world — for example, if look at Canada, or if you look at Australia, or if you look at Europe, the way that air traffic control is funded, there’s a charge for taking off, there’s a charge for flying through the airspace, there’s a charge for approach, and then for landing, and those charges go to the airlines, to the general aviation aircraft or to business aircraft. And it’s based on the activities that you used in the system. So it is actually closer to a true user fee system.

DUBNER: Are you saying that I get charged the same if I’m landing a Cessna as I am a 747?

STRONG: No, the formulas are generally based on size and weight and the time in the system like flying through the airspace. So a 747 is going to pay more than a 737, will pay more than a Cessna 172. But what it does is it says that the user of the system is actually the aircraft, and we charge the aircraft. What the airlines do in the rest of the world is they pass those through in the form of the ticket prices that passengers pay rather than a separate tax on the ticket that we do here.

DUBNER: Do you like that specific, a la carte charging system? 

STRONG: I think that the system in the rest of the world is much more of a direct user fee. The idea of charging ticket taxes or cargo waybill taxes is really an indirect, sort of secondary system. It doesn’t really reflect the true cost of using the system in the same way. 

 This brings us back to the argument made by Dorthy Robyn and others that the F.A.A. should be reorganized, removed at least in part from its government home. I went back to Ed Bolen of the National Business Aviation Association to try to understand his objections to this idea.

DUBNER: Ed, there’s been ongoing debate for years about different models for A.T.C. governance — keeping it within the F.A.A. versus corporatization or privatization like many other countries have done. Tell me why you feel corporatization is not the right way to do that, why is it better to keep A.T.C. within F.A.A.? 

BOLEN: Well let’s just look at some of the other countries. You’ll see a couple of things, including airlines attacking some of the A.T.C. providers for mismanagement. You see controllers and pilots talking about the shortage of air traffic controllers. You see significant delays. We see in some countries — I think Canada is a prime example — where the safety audit that was done by a U.N. body: Canada had an A rating in 2005; 20 years later, they scored something like 65 out of 100. So if you’re looking at safety, including the ability of the regulator to affect changes in the operating environment, if you are looking at controller training, if you’re looking at the quality of the management, these are outcomes that we are seeing. The studies have shown that they’re not able to invest in times of an economic crisis, so they don’t have the resiliency. There’s no other country in the world that has as many diverse aircraft in operations as the United States. And there’s no country in that world that has a safer system.  

Polly TROTTENBERG: Yeah, I got to tell you, Stephen, I don’t know that there is a “villain” in a system like this. 

 That is Polly Trottenberg. During the Biden administration, she was the number two official at the Department of Transportation, including a brief stint as acting administrator of the F.A.A.

TROTTENBERG: There are a lot of different players, a lot of different political pressures. The infrastructure that you don’t see every day that isn’t fun and sexy, we tend politically to under-invest in it. Nobody ever wants to pay more. That’s, sort of, the human condition.

DUBNER: Some people argue that corporatizing the system — giving it more borrowing capacity and so on — is a better way to go. The Canadian system, NAV Canada, is often held up as a good example. Do you like that model, or no?

TROTTENBERG: There’s been a lot written over the years about how NAV Canada does things better. Now, NAV Canada is struggling with some of the things that we are too, including not so easy to keep staffed up on air traffic controllers. There’s a lot of different models around there, and I think in any given moment you can point to one and say, it’s doing better or it’s not doing better. But I think for us right now in the U.S. context, I’m not for doing big disruptive things, and that seems to be a pretty broad consensus on both sides of the aisle in the aviation stakeholder world, as well.

DUBNER: So, you’re not advocating for any kind of teardown. You’re advocating for what sounds like smart, targeted reform. Am I paraphrasing you essentially correctly? 

TROTTENBERG: I think that’s correct. In American politics, and we’re watching this play out a little bit, big teardowns don’t always produce good results. This is a safety-critical 24/7 system. And you want to continually improve it. You want to proceed very carefully and thoughtfully. It’s always been a challenge here in the U.S. and particularly I think in our complex politics at the moment, to take basically big revolutionary changes in the way we’re operating things. I don’t know in the F.A.A. that anyone thinks we should at this point. There’s pretty big consensus though, we need to do a much better job on the investment front. One thing I’m very happy and want to make sure I say good things about, is in the most recent bill that Congress passed, they did include $12.5 billion to start really to chip away at the F.A.A.’s facilities, equipment, technology. 

 That $12.5 billion in federal funding is part of what President Trump called his One Big Beautiful Bill. This is a much bigger and more focused boost than the F.A.A. has received in the past. As part of overall infrastructure spending, $12.5 billion isn’t very much, but it’s being pitched as a much-needed down payment on a very expensive plan to modernize air traffic control. Here, again, is Ed Bolen, of the National Business Aviation Association.

BOLEN: We’ve got $12.5 billion. We’ve got a brand new F.A.A. administrator, a very seasoned and accomplished deputy administrator. In my opinion, probably not since 1970 when we created the Airport and Airways Trust Fund, has there been this much public, private, congressional, industry support for enhancing our air transportation system. 

 The new F.A.A. administrator is Bryan Bedford, the longtime C.E.O. of Republic Airways. He reports to Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation. We asked both Duffy and Bedford for interviews, and their teams did express interest, but we weren’t able to make it happen for this series. Maybe we’ll get to them in the future. In the meantime, here is Ed Bolen’s position on the state of things.

BOLEN: We all know that on January 29^th, we had a commercial accident that took place over the Potomac River, in the shadow of our nation’s capital. It was the first major commercial airline accident in 15 years, and it was horrific, tragic, and it broke our hearts. But it also steeled our resolve to build a brand new air traffic control system, and not be distracted by other issues that have come up in the past. We also have seen that the President of the United States, the Secretary of Transportation, Congress, and the general public is saying this is a national imperative. The Secretary of Transportation came forward on May 8th, proposed a plan to build a brand new air traffic control system that is unique, not something we’ve seen before in terms of its scope, its specificity, its accountability, its funding requirements, and importantly, a deadline. We now have a four-year deadline. 

DUBNER: When I look at the plan, let me run past you some of what look to be the key components. The first one I see is, “Replacing antiquated telecommunications with new fiber, wireless, and satellite technologies at over 4,600 sites, including 25,000 new radios and 475 new voice switches.” So how antiquated is the system, and how systemic, how widespread will the upgrade be? 

BOLEN: The goal is to replace the entire telecom infrastructure. For a lot of the world, the copper wires have subsequently been replaced with fiber optics, cellular networks, and so forth. But the F.A.A. system has been built one on top of the other. Through the years, while we have bought some very advanced technology, it still has to be kind of dumbed-down, moving only as fast as the slowest boat because we haven’t done this kind of huge refresh and had an all-new system. 

DUBNER: I see another component of the plan is replacing over 600 radars that have gone past their life cycle. Describe that for me.

BOLEN: So, the radars have been in use for a long time. They’re used by both the Department of Defense and our air navigation system. Most of them were built in the 70s or 80s. Newer radars have a lot more capability, and much less cost to maintain them 

DUBNER: Some people have told us that radar should not be the foundation of the system anymore at all, it should be satellite navigation. What’s your view on that?

BOLEN: The foundation of our system today is what’s known as G.P.S. or satellite navigation with ground enhancements to it. But radar continues to be an essential part. It is partly a redundant system. What happens if G.P.S. fails? It is also used by the military, so there will always be some type of minimal system, a reduced level of radar, but we have to keep radar.

DUBNER: Another part of the new plan is building six new air traffic control centers, for the first time since the 1960s. Where will those new control centers be, why are they needed? 

BOLEN: When we talk about a brand new air traffic control system, we’re talking about people, we’re talking about facilities, and we’re talking about equipment. When we get to facilities, we’re talking about buildings that were built in the 1960s, the 1970s, and so as you can expect from older buildings, they’re not designed for modern communications. They’re not designed for some of the realities that we have. In some cases, there are leaky roofs. Some cases, it’s not enough room for large-scale cooling systems. Moving from analog to digital in every aspect of air transportation is going to open up a lot of opportunities. But we’ve got to have the people, and we have to have the facilities to support that equipment, and that technology. 

DUBNER: As I’ve heard it described in the past, a lot of the regulators, if not the commercial airlines themselves, have seen your organization as an opponent to the kind of reform they want — but that now, especially now that this new $12.5 billion has been made available for a new air traffic control system, I’m told that your group and the commercial airliners and the regulators are more on the same page. Is that an accurate characterization? 

BOLEN: I don’t think there’s been any question for many, many years that everybody in the air transportation system wants the U.S. to have the largest, the safest, the most efficient air transportation system in the world, with the most diverse aircraft and aircraft operations. That has never been the issue. The question has been, how best do we get there? At times, commercial airlines, business aviation, a lot of business organizations, some conservative think tanks, a lot of small town mayors and city council people, have been very concerned about effectively giving the system to a group of unelected officials and creating a kind of a monopoly. What we have seen since January 29th is a unified aviation industry. Airlines, labor, business aviation, all of general aviation, we’ve all united in a coalition known as Modern Skies. There’s a unanimity of purpose and resolve. We’ve got a deadline, we’ve got the leadership, and we’ve got the first kickstart of money. 

 The entire U.S. aerospace industry generates about $1.25 trillion in economic activity, which represents five percent of G.D.P. So how far will that $12.5 billion go? That’s coming up, after the break. I’m Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio.

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I went back to the economist John Strong to ask him about the new $12.5 billion in funding that the Federal Aviation Administration will be receiving, and how that may affect air traffic controllers.

STRONG: The controller’s job is a job that, it’s always been stressful. It will continue to be stressful. We have to make sure that we manage the operating environment for the team as best we can. 

 Strong recently co-authored a report for the National Academies of Sciences called “The Air Traffic Controller Workforce Imperative.”

STRONG: The $12.5 billion that’s in the bill is really useful because it provides incremental funds for capital investment, especially in some of the older centers and in the equipment. It’s a down payment toward important modernization of the facilities and equipment. It’s a down payment on things that we should be doing, but it’s only a down-payment. It has identified some key problems. It’s put resources to them, but we have to continue to do that. This is an important first step, but it only gets us maybe a third of the way there and it’s probably over a 10-year period. 

 I also went back to Polly Trottenberg, the former Department of Transportation official who was briefly acting head of the F.A.A.

TROTTENBERG: It’s one thing to be handed a big sum of money. You have to be ready to spend it. You need the people in place who know what they’re doing. Some of these systems are the most technologically advanced systems in the world. You need people who have that level of technological sophistication, who can help figure out how to design the contracts and the systems and hire folks. You need to have really good management in place to manage a sum of money like that. That is going to be very key to seeing if we succeed here. 

DUBNER: Based on everything you’ve been telling me, one thing that would really help is stability in leadership at the F.A.A., especially the administrator, him- or herself. When I look at the record, in the past 20 years, there have been 11 F.A.A. administrators, including yourself as an acting commissioner, and this is a position that’s supposed to have five-year terms. So A, how does this massively high turnover happen? And B, how does this massively high turnover contribute to the problems?

TROTTENBERG: You’re right. I think stable leadership is an important part, particularly if you’re going to do long-term capital projects. F.A.A. administrator right now is a very challenging job. The expectations are someone who has deep industry experience, deep knowledge of all the aviation technologies, but someone also who can run one of the largest, most complicated federal bureaucracies, experience a lot of political demands on both sides of the aisle. In recent years, not a lot of folks have been able to do it for the full five years. We just got a new F.A.A. administrator confirmed, Bryan Bedford. I hope he’ll really flourish in the job and be able to stay for a number of years and bring the agency stability. I would just add one thing though — no one person has it all. You need a strong team. You need a whole leadership team to manage all the elements of that agency. 

I also went back to Ed Bastian, the C.E.O. of Delta, the world’s biggest airline by revenue. He’s been in that job for nearly a decade. I asked what he thinks about the new F.A.A. funding.

Ed BASTIAN: It’s going to get through some of the most critical infrastructure needs, whether that’s the telecom systems, some of the oldest facilities that need to be updated and rebuilt or moved, some of the basic technologies to be deployed. This has immediate payback. It’s payback to customers of their time. It’s payback to us in fuel savings. It’s payback to the environment and sustainability. It’s allowing more flying to occur, which will help keep prices lower with the more supply you allocate to a market. It’s a win on every dimension you have. The challenge is, it’s a long investment cycle. I know the government would like to do it in three or four years, and that would be great. The reality is that it’s probably going to take closer to 5 to 10 years to get everything where you need it to be. The amount of attention you bring a 10-year project to D.C. and get people to rally support in Congress, it’s hard.

DUBNER: Let’s take a step back, though, and go to how the F.A.A. has historically been funded. It seems as though the U.S. is one of the very few wealthy countries where air traffic control and aviation oversight are purely governmental, right? 

BASTIAN: There’s various forms, but yeah I think we’re certainly the example of where it doesn’t work. We pay currently, as an airline industry, a significant amount into the trust fund, or the F.A.A. user charges, airport infrastructure, and customer service charges. The tax on an airline ticket averages over 20 percent. That’s more than tobacco, that’s more than alcohol, that’s more than buying a gun. It’s not that question that we’re not paying in for the operating cost. The question comes back to what’s the government going to do to raise the capital, this is our capital cost, to rebuild the system? Hopefully this process will work, but historically we’ve looked at privatization as being a good use of capital, where you would separate, bifurcate the actual funding and the capital allocation from the governance process in terms of the actual management of the F.A.A. 

DUBNER: So let’s say we were talking five years from now, Ed, and there had been significant reform in the F.A.A., especially with air traffic control. What would you say would have been the specific improvements that were made? 

BASTIAN: I’d say the reliability and the quality of the communication infrastructure between the towers and our individuals managing flights, our pilots in the cockpit — those technologies, that communication technology will be secure, and it will be reliable. The fact that you’d be able to then hire and recruit individuals into those roles would be better. I think you would have the ability to probably start seeing some tangible reductions in flying time. That’s only going to be good for all parties concerned. I think we all agree, including the F.A.A. and I think including the leaders in D.C., that that’s a start. But it’s going take a considerable amount of additional funding to get us to where we need to be. Now, that said, $12 billion is more than the F.A.A. has been allocated in years. So let’s get it going.

LEVIN: Throwing money into modernization, this bill with billions of dollars being added to the system, I think it’s fantastic. 

 And that, again, is the recently retired air traffic controller Kenneth Levin.

LEVIN: We always need to evolve. We’ve got facilities that are degrading, equipment that’s degrading, and it needs to be modernized, so we need to put money at it. What bothers me is, when we talk about these things, people will say, “Hey, like, this system’s not working.” It might not be working as it was expected to, but controllers know how to work with that. Is the passenger going to feel it in the delay and not getting home on time? Sure. But they’re going to get home safely. 

DUBNER: It sounds like the system that you’ve been in, it sounds like you’re a huge fan of it.

LEVIN: I am a big fan. We’ve come up with something good. You have to be willing to make adjustments. I just think you have to be able to look at yourself seriously and ask yourself the serious questions about what needs to be done to drive things.

DUBNER: It’s hard though, when you’re good at something and, like — you see this all the time, I think one of the most instructive lessons is to see how few companies make it more than 50 years in the Dow or, you know, top of the S&P The life cycle even of a very successful company is pretty short. It’s hard to get good at something, but it’s also really hard to stay good.

LEVIN: In air traffic we’ve been doing this for decades on end. How do you keep your workforce engaged, and involved, and relevant, and able to expand, to evolve, to grow, and to change with the times, right? I think aviation has cracked the code in certain aspects of it. 

DUBNER: When you say that “aviation cracked the code,” are you referring to how safe commercial air travel is? I think it’s one of the great underappreciated accomplishments of the modern era. It’s bonkers if you think about it! 

LEVIN: More than half the reason that I reached out is because aviation is amazing. I mean, I’m biased. I’ve been involved in it my entire life, but in 2024 there was something like 314 aviation-related deaths in the year of ‘24, worldwide. It’s just a feat. One aspect that makes aviation so amazing is, when there’s a mistake, we dig into it and we learn from it. That’s pilots, that’s engine mechanics, it’s all of us, it’s controllers. When we see something difficult transpire, as painful as it may be, we have to know that we will be better on the other side because of it.

So what have we learned over these past two episodes? I’d say it boils down to this: aviation in the U.S. is incredibly safe despite an aging regulatory and safety framework; we learned that corporatization, or privatization, of the F.A.A. is unlikely, at least at the moment; and that the $12.5 billion coming to the F.A.A. will help a lot, but that it won’t fix everything. I also learned it’s really worthwhile to read the emails that our listeners send in. I’ve interviewed a lot of people in a lot of occupations over the years, and I can’t think of many people who have acquitted their own occupation as well as Ken Levin. This makes me feel pretty good about the state of air traffic control. Maybe I’m a fool for extrapolating. Maybe there are a bunch of other air traffic controllers out there who don’t have anywhere near the same level of accountability that Ken has. But I kind of doubt it. Thanks to him and to everyone who spoke with us for these episodes. I’d love to hear what you think. Our email is radio@freakonomics.com.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Theo Jacobs and edited by Ellen Frankman; it was mixed by Eleanor Osborne, with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Aboagye, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmin Klinger, Morgan Levey, Sarah Lilley, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; and our composer is Luis Guerra.