Here’s What’s Preventing More People in NJ from Becoming Air Traffic Controllers

If you've been following the news lately, especially if you travel, you know the horror stories that have been coming out of Newark Liberty International Airport.

One day, radars went down. Another, radio communication was lost for a bit. Then, on top of that, you add in all of the "normal" stuff that causes delays like routine airport maintenance and weather and what not.

Long story short, flying in and out of Newark Liberty (EWR) can be a gut-wrenching experience.

A Warning From Inside the Newark Liberty Tower

It's been so bad that one unnamed air traffic controller recently told a national news network that, "It's not a safe situation for the flying public."

That comment caught a lot of people by surprise, especially for an airport that handled nearly 49 million passengers last year.

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To put that in perspective, imagine the entire population of New Jersey going through that airport — and then add the entire populations of Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, and Michigan. That's a little over 50 million, but you get my point. That's a lot of people for a not-safe situation.

Even Gov. Phil Murphy made a comment about it: "The flight delays and cancellations over the past few days at Newark have been completely and utterly unacceptable."

Not Enough Air Traffic Controllers

All of these problems are shining a giant spotlight on the FAA not having enough air traffic controllers.

So what needs to be done? The obvious answer is to hire more people for those jobs. That seems pretty simple.

But it's not.

The Tough Road to Becoming an ATC

While doing some digging recently, I found the list of qualifications to become an air traffic controller and one in particular just made no sense.

Sure, it's a high-stress, extremely demanding job. You and I probably can't even begin to image the weight of the responsibilities we put on ATCs, but it seems like things won't be getting better anytime soon.

Now, this is not a position where you want to lower the qualifications just to get more people figuring out where giant commercial jets get to fly. You need sky high (no pun intended) benchmarks to get the right people into these jobs.

Here are some of the FAA's qualifications:

• Be a United States citizen
• Pass medical and security examinations
• Pass FAA air traffic pre-employment tests
• Speak English clearly enough to be understood over communications equipment
• Have one year of progressively responsible work experience, or a Bachelor's degree, or a combination of post-secondary education and work experience that totals one year

So far, that's what you would expect.

And with those guidelines, the FAA says, "Less than 10% of all applicants meet these requirements and are accepted into the training program."

But there's one more qualification -- and this is the one that I have a big problem with.

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The Age Cutoff That Makes No Sense

To become an air traffic controller, you need to be under the age of 31.

Yes, 31.

So someone who is a few years out of college and is probably very ambitious but they want a career change, they can't work in those positions just because they're, say, 32 or 34 years old?

31 seemed like a strange number to me. Why 31? Normally, age-based things say you have to be at least 18 or 21. 31 isn't double those numbers or anything.

It's 31 because as an air traffic controller, you are forced to retire at the age of 56, which would be 25 years of working in that field.

And if you look at some Reddit comments, lots of people in the industry say you really need to be under 30 to work as an ATC because the hiring process isn't exactly fast (shocking, I know).

Air Traffic Controller Rule Needs Reconsideration

Again, I understand this is an extremely stressful job and if you do it for a quarter of a century, you'll probably be mentally fried to a crisp, but we're also in a dangerous situation where we don't have enough people.

And those wearing the headsets at one of the busiest airports in the nation are starting to complain very loudly about the situation.

Do you want people well into their 60s doing this job? Ideally, probably not. But if you at least allowed people to work 25 years up until the age of 60, you'd broaden the pool a bit.