'That's insane': Air traffic controller flags big problem that is not going away

An air traffic control supervisor credited for stopping two planes from colliding head-on near the troubled Newark airport told the co-hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that a lack of manpower is still making flying unsafe.

During his appearance on the MSNBC morning show, Jonathan Stewart explained that it is no longer uncommon that three air traffic controllers are being pressed into service doing a job that requires 14.

Under questioning, Stewart went into great detail about his job as a supervisor at Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON), and admitted that it is "insane" that the problems are increasing.

Admitting that he is in no way speaking for the FAA, he told the hosts, "I've said before, the way I tried to run my operation as an operational supervisor was I would do an hour on and an hour off, and that was based on the volume of traffic, the complexity, a lot of other things."

"You know: how tired is the controller, how far along in the shift is he? So on and so forth. But yes, your eyes start to get tired. I'm 45, not 25, so yeah, your eyes start to get tired, you start to truncate call signs and reverse call signs. For example, Delta is DAL, United is UAL, so that you start to look like a D, that D starts to look like a U. That's one of the signs that, you know, you're starting to get mental fatigue and that for me is a warning sign. I'm like, 'Okay, I need to get out of here, I need a break,' and that's going to be different every single time you plug in, depending on, you know, how tired I am, what I have going on at home –– like there's so many things involved in that."

"So it's important that the supervisor that's in charge, operational supervisor is cognizant of the ability and the mental acuity of the people that he's working with, right?" he elaborated. "So if I know that so-and-so is having a bad day, he's tired, I'm probably not going to put him in a busy position. The issue arises when you don't have anybody and now you have no choice, right? So you you want to do the right thing, but you can't because you have three people and you need 14. So, I mean, I don't even know what to say to that. That's just, that's insane."

He went on to note that the pandemic, which occurred during Donald Trump's first term, has been a major factor in the personnel shortage.

"It made it way worse because during the pandemic, we stopped training, people that were eligible to retire, just retired because what are you going to do, like sit around and, I don't know, make half a paycheck?" he recalled. "The same thing happened with the airlines too, to be fair. So you have a lack of experience on both sides of the microphone right now, which is a recipe for not good things –– let's leave it at that."

You can watch below or at the link here.

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