By Courtney Rozen
WASHINGTON, April 17 (Reuters) – A record 8,000-plus people have applied for jobs in the troubled U.S. air traffic control system in the first 13 hours of a recruitment drive focusing on individuals who enjoy playing video games, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Friday.
The Federal Aviation Administration, facing a shortage of air traffic controllers in towers across the U.S., opened applications overnight to fill more positions, Duffy said at the Semafor World Economy gathering in Washington.
After 12 hours, according to Duffy, the FAA had received some 6,000 applications. Posting on X later in the day, he said a total of 8,004 applicants had filed in 13 hours, a rate of 10 every minute, marking the fastest pace ever for applicants seeking jobs as U.S. air traffic controllers.
Duffy said 7,252 of those applicants met basic qualifications, though they would still need to go through a rigorous assessment process.
“We’ve had a flood of young people coming in who want to be air traffic controllers,” Duffy said at the conference, calling the Trump administration’s effort to enlist people who are video game enthusiasts “wildly successful.”
Duffy said his team surveyed a group of current controllers and learned that most of them play video games, prompting the department to recruit from that “community,” he said.
“If you think just what these gamers are doing on the screens, and they’re talking and there’s a lot of things going on. They’re used to that, and that’s actually what you’re doing in a tower,” he said.
The U.S. air traffic control system is stretched thin. Many controllers are working mandatory overtime and six-day weeks, and the FAA’s air traffic control training academy has faced serious problems with retaining students.
The workload for controllers is also growing. Between 2015 and 2024, total flights using the air traffic control system increased by about 10% to 30.8 million, according to the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. government’s auditor.
(Reporting by Courtney Rozen in Washington; Additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Alistair Bell)
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