City College’s air traffic control department chair joins the Express for a Q&A

Sean Tener is an adjunct professor in the Air Traffic Control Department at Sacramento City College. Also a consultant for air traffic control and aviation programs at NASA and San Jose State and occasionally an FAA Academy teacher, Tener says City College’s program is a great training ground for those interested in air traffic control as a career.

Tener started his career in the 1980s amid a shortage of air traffic controllers. After passing the FAA Academy’s air traffic control program, he trained at a facility north of Los Angeles. He stayed there for years, but when the opportunity came to transfer to the Sacramento area, the NorCal native took up work with a radar facility now a part of Northern California terminal radio approach control (TRACON).

Clear and practical in a way perhaps necessitated by a career in air traffic control, Tener joined the Express to discuss the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative (AT-CTI) at City College, the challenges ATC students face and the aviation industry.

What does an air traffic controller do?

Air traffic controllers basically provide safe, efficient flow of air traffic. We take the planes from the moment they are leaving an airport, during their takeoff, climbing to their cruising altitudes, through their cruise altitudes, back through their descent, back to their destination. We provide the air traffic services that they need to remain safe.

So as controllers, you’re gonna keep aircraft separated from other aircraft. There’s particular minimums that you have to use. … You guys are all probably familiar with the tower at the airport. … The tower is only responsible for the aircraft right around the airport. They have about a 5-mile radius around the airport, and their airspace goes up to about 2,000 feet. So the tower basically… [is] responsible for takeoffs and landings. Here in Sacramento, if you take off from Sacramento [International] Airport, tower controllers are gonna clear you for take off. You’re gonna climb to 2,000 feet, then they’re gonna hand you off to the next facility — that’s the one I retired from, Northern California TRACON; that’s a building out near the Mather Golf Course that houses about 200 controllers. And I would take your flight from the tower controller, and I would climb you to the top of my airspace, which in this area is 19,000 feet.

Then I would hand you off to the third part of the air traffic system, which is an en route center. That’s like where I worked in Los Angeles. The en route center in this area is located in Fremont. It’s called Oakland Center. It’s got about 400 or 500 controllers in that building, and they have about 9,000 square miles of airspace. They go down to south of Fresno, up to the middle of Oregon, cut over the ocean 200 to 300 miles, and east, almost to Vegas. So they would take your flight … up to whatever your cruise altitude was.

Then if you were going cross country, you’d go from center to center to center. Salt Lake Center would be next, then Denver, then Kansas City Center. So you’re landing in Chicago. You’d start your descent somewhere in Kansas City Center. Eventually, get handed off to Chicago. We would then hand you off to O’Hare Tower. …  That’s basically how air traffic control works and what we do as our main service.

What is the most difficult airspace to control out of those three tiers?

Most controllers would tell you approach control is the most difficult, because you’re still at low altitudes and you’re still dealing with aircraft in the climbing and descending configuration. When you have aircraft that are climbing and descending and crossing paths, that creates complexity. The same time you’re doing that, you also have a stream of arrivals coming into a particular airport, and they come from multiple directions.

Let’s just use Sacramento as an example again. I’ve got a stream coming from Salt Lake area, from the Denver area. I’ve got a stream coming in from the Los Angeles area. I’ve got a stream coming from Seattle. I got a stream coming from the Bay Area. They’re all going to the one point. They’re all going to that piece of pavement right there at the airport where they want to land.

So as an approach controller, my job is to take all those aircraft and use radar vectors. I turn them, I climb them, I just slow them down, I speed them up, I do whatever I have to do to get those in a nice, single-file line. So that I can hand that line off to the tower with enough space between each arrival so that the tower can fit in their departures. So if I pack them in there too tight, the tower’s never gonna get a departure off. And you’re gonna be sitting on the runway waiting for your flight to go for 30 minutes. … So approach control has that kind of complexity. Towers are very complex.

What would you say is the biggest challenge to becoming an air traffic controller?

I would say the biggest challenge … would be passing the aptitude test. There’s a standardized test that the FAA gives to every air traffic control applicant. If you’re able to pass the other requirements such as your security background check, your drug test, your psychological exam … — those are all potential things that will take people out of the application process — you have to pass this air traffic aptitude test. It’s called the [Air Traffic Skills Assessment] test. And you have to pass that with a score of either well qualified or best qualified. I’ve seen students take [the ATSA] up to seven times before getting a passing grade. …

What advice would you have for students whose goal is to become an air traffic controller?

I would say that this new pathway that’s been created . . . called an Enhanced Air Traffic Control-CTI — which stands for collegiate training initiative — program, I would say that is probably gonna become the best way to go. … [O]ur program here is set to … take the place of the FAA Academy. The FAA is allowing schools to go out, if they purchased the same equipment they have at the academy, if they have instructors that are qualified to teach on it, to do everything that the academy does, take students through, in this case, an 18-month program. You have performance evaluations at the end, which are administered by FAA evaluators. If you pass … the FAA gives you a list of facilities to choose from, and you’re in. That is gonna be a really nice pathway into the FAA, and into being a controller.

Is there still a shortage [of air traffic controllers]?

Absolutely. [The FAA is] planning to hire 2,000 controllers a year. That’s their goal. They hire 2,000 controllers a year for the next four to five years. …

According to the FAA, they have surpassed hiring goals for air traffic controllers in 2025 already. What are some of the changes, if any, that have been made to the hiring process that would affect that?

The reason they’re surpassed goals, partially, is because of these new enhanced CTI programs. There’s, I think, five colleges that have been approved already. So that’s another stream of new employees that are coming in. They ramped up the academy to full capacity. Full capacity at the academy means that the academy is running Monday through Friday two shifts. They’ve got a day shift and then you got a swing shift. They’re running twice as many students through there as they had been in the past.

What’s beginning to happen and what you’re about to see happen is the process is gonna slow down because there’s a shortage of instructors. Instructors have to have a particular set of qualifications to teach there and do things at the academy. Basically, they have to be people like myself who have been a controller, been certified in a particular thing, either tower, TRACON or en route, they have to want to move to Oklahoma City and work there and … you’re asking someone that’s in their mid-60s, approaching 70, who’s already retired, already has a pretty good pension to relocate to Oklahoma City to work basically from 8 a.m. till midnight, five days a week. It’s hard to find people. So there’s a process happening right now with the instructors that’s where they’re burning some of them out.

What happens if you run out of instructors to teach the next generation?

Oh, they’ll never run out. It’ll just slow down. … There’s always new people coming through. There’s always people retiring that want to continue to do it. I think there’s things that they can do to make the process go faster. There’s part of the training that happens with the academy that for the past decade, they were doing it online. It’s the first part of the training. It’s basic air traffic stuff and some flight information like basic aerodynamics, basic aviation weather. These things … they could and they potentially will go back to teaching that online, which now opens up the entire country for retired controllers who have those qualifications because they can do it from home.

What was the best upgrade to the occupation while you worked?

Believe it or not, there weren’t all that many. I’m gonna assume you’re talking about equipment. The equipment that was used when I first started,some of it was still being used when I retired.

There were some decent upgrades in the radar system. … We had lots of computer upgrades. When I first began working there … everything you [said] as a controller [was] recorded and they keep it for 45 days in case something happens and they can pull the tapes and listen. [We] used to have these big reels of tapes … and … you’d have to change them out all the time. Obviously, that all went to digital. That was a big deal for storage purposes.

What are the most stressful situations that you’ve encountered on the job?

Most stressful situations that I had while I was working, probably the emergency situations that I had to deal with over the years, and every controller will deal with multiple emergency situations during their career. If you’re doing this for 30-some years, you’re gonna have emergencies. The first time I had really good training. The controllers that trained me were the ones that stayed after that strike. And they had the kind of can-do mentality. We’re gonna get this done. We’re gonna make it work. So I had really good training to help me learn how to deal with those emergencies. It’s not the kind of training that’s done today, but it was effective for me. So with emergencies, you are told, as a trainee, if your aircraft has an emergency, one of the first things you’re gonna do is notify your supervisor. Because the supervisor’s gonna take all the information you get and pass it on to the next facility if they need emergency equipment standing by — fire engines, whatever needs to be out there. Supervisors are gonna handle that.

Is the U.S. air traffic control system based on outdated technology, underfunded and understaffed?

Outdated technology, yes. The systems that are available in some of the nations in Europe are quite a ways ahead of us in user friendliness, in speed at which they work and the reliability …  that the system doesn’t crash. The trouble with technology over the years is that one administration will start a project, spend billions of dollars on it. But these are long-term projects. … The next administration comes in, they say, I don’t want that. So we end up with the same thing we’ve always had because nothing quite ever gets done. So technology is outdated for that reason. Understaffed, yes. They are understaffed because, if you do the math, I told you guys that [President] Reagan fired all the controllers in ’81. So between, like, ’82 and ’95, the entire new workforce was rehired. The controllers have to retire at age 56. They just change that. They push it back a little bit. You can go to I think it’s 61 now. But for my entire life as a controller, age 56 was when they kicked you out. So if you do the math, the guys they hired in the ’90s when they were [in their] early twenties, they’ve all gotten to that age: 56. So the entire workforce retired basically all at once. All over the period of about eight years, the entire workforce was, like, gone.

The FAA did not prepare for that in the couple decades proceeding because they were fully staffed and everybody was happy. Everyone was in their prime. They didn’t preemptively hire anyone. So they are faced with a staffing shortage now because of that, and there’s a lot of controllers that are working six day weeks; a lot of overtime.

Some of them like it because the money is phenomenal. Some of them are making over $350,000 a year as controllers. But they’re working hard for that. And then that is understaffed. That’s why the push to hire all the new controllers.

[In terms of] underfunded, I think right now with this current administration, they have made aviation a big priority. It seems like it’s bipartisan. Both sides of the aisle seem to be on board with throwing money in aviation. So I think the money is out there. And, I think you’re starting to see it get spent on a lot of different things that will eventually, you know, pay big dividends.

This Q&A has been edited for length, clarity and flow. Additional reporting by Will Tomlin and Ben Frisbey. Editing by Tamera Coston.