A4A President & CEO Nicholas E. Calio Urges Immediate Action on Air Traffic Control Staffing, Infrastructure and Funding  

March 04, 2025

Airline Industry Leader Remarks Delivered During the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee Hearing

Nicholas E. Calio holds up a paper strip and floppy discs during the hearing to show the outdated technology air traffic controllers use today.

WASHINGTON, March 4, 2025 –Airlines for America (A4A) President and CEO Nicholas E. Calio today testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure (T&I) Aviation Subcommittee.

Calio stressed that an emergency funding package is needed now to make the fundamental changes and investments necessary to correct the current shortcomings of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), including the air traffic controller (ATC) shortage and the FAA’s woefully outdated ATC technology.

A4A has been sounding alarm bells about the state of the nation’s ATC system for years. Most recently, A4A led a coalition letter of aviation stakeholders with a unified plan of meaningful solutions for Congress and the FAA to consider.  

The key actions Congress and the Administration need to accomplish boils down to getting an emergency funding proposal signed into law that will ensure the FAA has:

• Enough skilled people (controllers and technicians) and more training capacity.
• A plan to ensure they can procure and field modern technology. The other side of this coin requires divesting old and outdated technologies and facilities to ensure efficiencies and savings.
• A long-term fix to the budgeting process that will allow the FAA to plan long-term capital projects, just like AIP (Airport Improvement Program) or surface transportation’s contract authority.

KEY QUOTATIONS FROM CALIO:

14 YEARS LATER: “For over 14 years now, I’ve been saying we are at an inflection point with the NAS, and we all need to act with urgency… we are past the inflection point now. Three days after taking the job as CEO of A4A in January 2011, I was asked to testify before this Committee about the state of ATC. I brought a stack of DOT Inspector General reports and Government Accountability Office reports outlining the shortcomings of the system. Fourteen years later, I hope this Congress and this Administration will agree that it’s not acceptable to just continue to tolerate a chronically understaffed system. Just like it’s not acceptable for controllers and technicians to have to work with paper strips and floppy disks to operate NAS in the United States. I showed this to some people in my office, and they couldn’t tell me what they were because they were under 30.”

SAFETY: “Because safety is our north star, commercial air travel in the United States is the safest mode of transportation in the world. It is literally safer than walking out of your own front door.”

LEADERSHIP: “We need to change, and it’s a question of what we’re going to do to make it different. We value this committee’s leadership. We are encouraged by the dedication of President Trump and Secretary Duffy to take on these difficult challenges. Secretary Duffy has done an awful lot in two months to focus the DOT on these matters that matter most to our safety system.”

BOLD & DECISIVE ACTION: “It is critical that we put the debates of the past and the inherent political inertia behind us to try to actually all join together to get something done. Everybody on this panel signed the letter that this committee has encouraging the action. We want action not political debate. This should not be a partisan or jurisdictional issue.”

COLLEGIATE TRAINING INITIATIVE: “There is a program called the College Training Initiative. We started calling on the Biden Administration to reinstitute that, it was decimated in 2014 for not very good reasons. It was a training pipeline that helped keep the number of controllers current and could help again. The Biden Administration only ended up certifying four schools, two of them in Oklahoma, but there are many more out there like Vaughn College in New York. People can be trained locally and then put into TRACONS and towers in that area.”