The Federal Aviation Administration lifted mandatory flight limits on Monday at 6 a.m. They were put in place to reduce the workload on short-staffed air traffic controllers at 40 large airports during the federal government shutdown.
The reductions affected passengers on thousands of flights and exposed a shortage of air traffic controllers that began more than a decade ago.
There is a need for 3,000 more controllers to work in towers and regional air traffic centers all over the country.
Controllers have been working mandatory overtime and six-day work weeks.
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Even before the shutdown, airlines had been scaling back flights during peak times to avoid delays caused by staffing challenges at major airports. The FAA, at times, will order ground stops when levels of controllers fall too low.
"We have not trained enough people to be air traffic controllers over the past 15 years," said Karen Feigh, aerospace engineering professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who contributed to a report for Congress about the shortage.
Lapses in funding during previous government shutdowns made the problem worse, slowing the long process of teaching new hires at the air traffic control academy in Oklahoma City.
"Training has often been lumped as a non-essential service and so therefore, we stop training people at the training center in Oklahoma," Feigh said. "It makes this huge gap so that people just don't come out in the numbers that we need them to come out."
Over the summer, Scripps News got a behind-the-scenes look at training in Oklahoma and saw the unrelenting focus and multitasking the job demands — all while relying on decades-old systems, including floppy disks.
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A high rate of students fail to make it from the classroom to the control tower.
The FAA also struggles to hire enough trainers to teach the next generation of controllers.
Ever since the deadly collision of an American Airlines flight and an Army helicopter in Washington airspace, the Trump administration has focused on hiring more controllers, announcing new incentives, including bonuses for those willing to stay on the job longer.
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has said retirements accelerated when the government was closed, with 15 to 20 controllers resigning each day.
Feigh says the flight cancellations caused by the shutdown may inspire more action to address the shortage of workers.
"There is not a short-term next 24 months kind of fix, but I do think some strategic changes could have some very lasting impacts and would make the whole system more robust," she said.
