America's Contract Air Traffic Towers Are 276 Controllers Short

Half of the air traffic control towers in the United States are not staffed by the FAA.▸ They are run by private contractors under the FAA's Federal Contract Tower (FCT) Program -- 266 towers across 46 states and territories, handling 30 percent of all tower operations nationwide in 2024. A March 2026 audit by the Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General found the program 276 controllers short of what it needs, its FAA-run tracking spreadsheet riddled with over 1,000 discrepancies against the contractors' own reports, and no independent check of contractor-billed hours since 2012.

The FCT Program dates to 1982, when the FAA began contracting out air traffic control at lower-activity airports rather than staffing them with federal employees.▸ Today four contractors -- Midwest Air Traffic Control Service, Robinson Aviation, Serco, and Cl2 Aviation -- run 259 of the program's 266 towers, with the remaining 7 operated under interagency agreements with the Army and Air National Guard. In November 2024, FAA awarded 10 new FCT contracts to those four contractors valued at about $1.5 billion over a 7-year term.

That same 2024 contract raised the bar for what counts as fully staffed: each tower's four-controller minimum, which previously included the on-site air traffic manager, now excludes that manager -- a change OIG calculated requires FCT contractors to hire 129 additional controllers just to meet the new floor.▸ Arizona alone has 7 contract towers, some operating inside Phoenix's busy metropolitan airspace⧉ -- ordinary regional traffic, run by a workforce the FAA's own audit says isn't big enough.

Before 2024, FAA staff manually copied approved and actual staffing figures from contractors' Monthly Area Facility Reports into a spreadsheet meant to flag shortfalls.▸ OIG reviewed that spreadsheet for the period July 2021 through May 2024 and found it missing staffing data for one tower for an entire 12-month stretch, missing actual staffing data for every contract tower for the whole month of June 2022, and containing over 1,000 instances where the recorded staffing level didn't match what contractors had actually reported. The cause of most of those mismatches is unknown; the auditors called the likely explanation human error and the data, overall, "neither complete nor reliable."

It gets more basic than a spreadsheet.▸ The FCT Program Office stopped auditing contractor timesheets after December 2012, and as of this report had not resumed the practice or built any other way to verify that hours contractors bill actually match hours worked. That gap has already cost the government money: a 2021 OIG audit found FAA wasn't adequately monitoring contractor compliance with staffing-hour requirements, and FAA has since recovered more than $3.6 million in overpayments tied to that finding.

FAA's March 2026 response commits to validating contractor hours and reclaiming overpayments only for "contracts effective February 1, 2026, onward" -- meaning every hour billed in the 13-plus years before that date stays exactly as unverified as OIG found it.

The FAA has a formal term for a tower that can't provide its published services: ATC-Zero.▸ Between February 1 and May 31, 2025, OIG identified 334 ATC-Zero events caused specifically by staffing -- and 269 of them, roughly 81 percent, ran longer than the contract's 59-minute grace period, triggering a downward price adjustment. FAA estimated those adjustments would total about $175,000 across the four contractors -- a penalty structure, but not a fix: a tower that goes dark for two hours because no controller is available still went dark for two hours.

Even where FCT contractors can find controllers, they struggle to keep them.▸ One contractor told OIG that 35 percent of its controllers left in calendar year 2024 alone, most to accept positions with FAA or the Department of Defense, which offer higher wages and stronger benefits than the firm-fixed-price contracts FCT operators run under. "What's going on with the contract tower situation is the same as what's going on with the FAA, but it's worse⧉," Tim Kiefer, an air traffic management instructor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, told a Phoenix television station in May.

FAA's own attempt to widen the pipeline hasn't reached the contract towers yet.▸ In February 2024 the agency launched the Enhanced Air Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative, letting graduates of 11 approved college programs skip introductory FAA Academy coursework. As of July 2025, all four FCT contractors reported they had not hired a single graduate of that program; one contractor said the graduates it contacted preferred to wait for openings at FAA itself.

Layered on top, the 2024 contract award also restructured the program's geographic contract areas from 7 to 10, forcing 72 of the 266 towers -- 27 percent -- to change operating contractors; 5 of those towers needed a 2-month extension beyond the original deadline to complete the switch, an operational disruption layered directly on top of an existing shortage.