Amid air traffic controller shortage, this Colorado college is fast-tracking the next generation

WINDSOR

As a child, Aiden Rowe followed his well-traveled family through countless airports, to the cumulative effect of cultivating an affinity for aviation — though he lacked any specific focus beyond the certainty that he had absolutely no interest in becoming a pilot.

But during a seventh-grade career research project, he discovered a flight-adjacent interest: air traffic control. The concept had instant appeal for the way it lined up with one of his strengths — multitasking — and offered the dual enticements of providing a public service while solving a pressurized, ever-evolving riddle.

“That was something that appealed to me, when it might be a major red flag for others with the high stakes, the mind puzzle aspect of it,” Rowe says. “It was perfect. It’s like the golden egg.”

Today, the 20-year-old from Cañon City stands to end the semester as the first student at Aims Community College to graduate from a newly enhanced air traffic control program. The Federal Aviation Administration recently approved a beefed-up curriculum designed to fast-track candidates into a job so in-demand that the agency estimates it will fill nearly 7,000 positions over the next three years.

Already, Aims was one of only about 30 schools across the country offering an approved basic air traffic curriculum (Metropolitan State University of Denver also offers one within its aviation and aerospace department). But now, Aims’ Windsor campus has also become part of the first wave of institutions cleared to offer the enhanced training that allows graduates to skip the traditional course at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City and move directly to airport tower or en route facilities for the final phase of training.

On the air traffic side, the program helps address a national hiring crisis. On the student side, it offers a cost-effective pathway toward a well-paying career. A two-year associate degree figures to cost from about $13,000 to $17,000 in tuition for in-state students — including lab fees to access the high-tech simulators — to qualify for a job that offers starting annual pay of more than $50,000 as a trainee to an industry median of more than $144,000, according to 2024 Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Despite the demand and the potential return on the education investment, the career option remains “kind of a mystery” to a lot of people, says Patti Phillips, a retired 30-year air traffic controller and faculty lead of the Aims program.

“I’ve had a lot of people call me up and say, ‘I didn’t even know this program existed,’” she says.

Aims has about 37 students enrolled in its standard program that would top out at 50 due to the limitations of the equipment for lab classes. Phillips says she’s working with the FAA to procure waivers for about eight current students to be grandfathered into the enhanced program, so they can finish the curriculum and proceed directly to the next phase of their training. 

In two years at Aims, Rowe has taken about 47 credits of aviation coursework toward the total degree requirement of 65. He crossed off other credits while in high school in Cañon City, where concurrent enrollment classes at a local community college allowed him to get a head start.  

Once the semester ends in May, Rowe will take the FAA’s performance assessments — “three of our scenarios that are basically like skill checks” — and then move on to complete physicals, drug screenings and background checks.

“And once all of that goes smoothly,” he says, “then it’s into a job and into an air traffic center.”

Students who want to pursue the enhanced program must attain a “well qualified” score on the Air Traffic Skills Assessment test. If they fall short on that test, they can still complete the standard program and try to attend the academy. But with limited capacity in Oklahoma City, those students might still have to wait for a spot.

One question Phillips has encountered, often from parents of prospective students, since the addition of the enhanced program is whether the shortcut might shortchange students — and air traffic safety — compared to the longtime standard of attending the FAA Academy. 

“It’s a fantastic question, and I’m glad that people are asking it,” she says. “And the answer is, emphatically, they are not missing anything by not going to the academy, because the (FAA) requirements say we have to teach exactly what they teach.”

FAA opened hiring floodgates

In 1982, shortly after President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, Phillips was working on her bachelor’s degree in aviation management at what then was called Metropolitan State College in Denver. When the FAA “pretty much opened the flood gates for applicants” in the wake of the firings, Phillips says, she took a Civil Service exam that demanded some aviation knowledge but wasn’t geared entirely toward air traffic control.

Her performance on the test earned her a training slot at the FAA Academy. She went on to work 30 years as an air traffic controller at the en route facility in Longmont, guiding aircraft cruising at high altitudes between their origins and destinations.

By the latter part of the 1980s, the aftermath of the strike sparked the idea of expanding the pipeline producing air traffic controllers to include colleges and universities. Prototypes began to appear in the early ’90s at five institutions, and the concept gained momentum over the ensuing decades.

When Aims Community College launched its associate degree program in 2009, the career path still channeled candidates through Oklahoma City. Training at one of those collegiate programs around the country would lead to a candidate taking the Air Traffic Skills Assessment, which then could lead to a training slot at the FAA Academy — though the academy’s limited capacity created a natural bottleneck in the process.

Once offered a training slot, candidates must pass a background check, medical and drug screening as well as a basic psychological test before starting the monthslong program. Candidates with passing grades at the academy — more than 30% washed out of training in 2024 — then proceed to an actual air traffic control facility, where they receive up to four more years of training before becoming certified.

“So Oklahoma City is kind of like the screening process,” Phillips says.

A long-term projected shortage of controllers sent the FAA back to the colleges and universities for part of the solution, amid a steady stream of scheduled retirements and attrition. 

In February of 2024, the FAA asked institutions already offering the standard Collegiate Training Initiative if they’d be interested in ramping up to an “enhanced” program that would essentially replicate the training in Oklahoma City — giving successful graduates the opportunity to head straight for an air traffic facility for the next phase of their training. 

“So it really speeds the process up,” Phillips says. “It makes many more avenues for hiring, not just the academy. It’s like everybody cooperating together to address this critical shortage of air traffic controllers.”

Beefing up simulations

Aims’ curriculum already met many of the new requirements for the enhanced program. It had the radar labs required to run training scenarios, both on the tower side, which controls airspace at and around airports, and the en route side, which handles air traffic between origins and destinations. But the school needed to write the specific simulations offered at the academy and compile documentation confirming that its new offering aligned with Oklahoma City.

For the eight instructors in the school’s program, preparing for the enhanced version proved an intensive process that took more than a year, Phillips says. The FAA sent a team to Aims to certify the program in January.

In early March, the FAA publicly announced that Aims had been cleared to implement the Enhanced Air Traffic – Collegiate Training Initiative (E-CTI). Aims became just the 11th institution in the country to enter the program, and the first in Colorado. (Metropolitan State University of Denver currently offers the standard program.)

The ramped-up attention to hiring has roots in a number of issues dating back to 2013 — and even earlier, according to a report by an independent National Airspace Safety Review Team. (The “open floodgates” at the time Phillips signed on in the early ’80s led to a wave of retirements in 2005-07.) For more than a decade, the politics of gridlock and inadequate funding slowed the FAA’s plans to expand the workforce. Budget cuts in 2013 led to an extended hiring freeze, and when the pipeline seemed poised to recover in 2019, a government shutdown for 35 days delayed hiring — only to be followed by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The FAA’s 2025 workforce plan anticipated hiring 8,900 trainees through 2028. It exceeded its hiring goal of 2,000 in 2025 and hopes to add 2,200, 2,300 and 2,400 air traffic controllers in the next three fiscal years — in part through its efforts to streamline the hiring process and boost starting salaries by nearly 30%. 

But the hiring blitz also comes with its challenges. The FAA plan estimates total attrition of 6,872 controllers through 2028, including academy and training failures that are expected to rise with the influx of candidates. Retirements, which had declined from a high-water mark in 2007, are expected to slowly increase.

Phillips estimates that the attrition rate from Aims’ program runs about 15%. Students arrive at the school from a wide range of backgrounds — military veterans, high school students who have dual-enrolled in community college courses, and lots of people in their early 20s who may have delayed a college education for any number of reasons. 

But age figures prominently into the equation: Applicants for air traffic controller jobs must be under age 31, largely because the position comes with a mandatory retirement age of 56 — a minimum 25-year career window that helps ensure the federal government gets a good return on its considerable investment in trainees. 

Geographically, Phillips sees students from Fort Collins, Loveland, or even as close as Windsor, while others commute from the Denver metro area — or rent housing in nearby Greeley to shorten their commute. Some, attracted by the idea of experiencing college in Colorado, have come from hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

Phillips notes that it’s difficult to pinpoint which individual aptitudes forecast success in the field. She’s had students from every conceivable academic background.

“The only thing that I could point to is a logical thinking pattern and a very high ability to multitask,” she says. “But the students, once they get into the lab classes, that is where it seems to be cemented, and they either really love doing it, or they say it’s not for them. So it’s enthusiasm for the work, once they understand what the work is.”

Learning in a virtual lab

In the dimly lit “tower” room, five bright, big-screen monitors, arranged in a semicircle before a bank of desktop computers, immerse 22-year-old Kristen Smith in a panoramic view of crisscrossing runways. From this simulated seat above a fictional airport, she watches planes taxi, take off and appear as ever-enlarging images making their approach.

On her headset, she communicates with the pilots of these planes — “pilots” who, in reality, are students seated at their own computer stations behind the wall of giant screens, guiding their virtual aircraft. They have long since learned the terminology for these conversations that lend order and safety to the traffic both in the air and on the ground.

Smith began at Aims in the school’s pilot program after first learning to fly at age 18, when she was taking business classes at the local community college in her hometown of Fort Morgan because “I didn’t know what else to do.” She got to know some of the air traffic controllers at the Northern Colorado Regional Airport in Loveland and began to consider shifting her career path.

When a group from her chapter of the Women in Aviation career networking organization toured the tower at Cheyenne Regional Airport in Wyoming, Smith found herself captivated by the sight of a C-130 military transport making practice runs at sunset.

“And that was when I realized there’s a whole different world,” she says, after finishing her turn at the controls in the tower simulator. “And I kind of like it.”

Smith also happened to be struggling with flying — both the financial demands and with air sickness — even as she achieved her private pilot license and instrument rating. She figured that maybe her place in the aviation community was on the ground. Plus, there were practical, lifestyle considerations that made an air traffic control career attractive.

“I like the idea of having a stable job and being able to be home every night, like I have a home life,” Smith says. “And the pilot career path doesn’t really work well for homebodies.” 

Her transition was fairly seamless. General education credits she’d taken at the community college in Fort Morgan transferred to Aims, where she enrolled in the professional pilot degree program. Some of the basics from that curriculum also were required for the air traffic control degree. 

Generally, the first semester of the air traffic control program is basic classroom work, learning the fundamentals of the task, how weather affects aviation, how to speak the language of the job. The next three semesters consist mostly of the labs.

The typical ratio here is one instructor per two students, though one-on-one attention isn’t uncommon. The labs run four and a half hours, two days a week. Of 65 total credits required, 27 come from the labs.

At first, Smith figured she’d just finish the basic air traffic control degree and apply to attend the academy in Oklahoma City. But when Aims won its enhanced certification, she decided to pursue the waiver that would let her go directly to a job for the final years of training.

All that remained were the “labs,” the high-tech simulations in the tower room and, just down the hallway, the en route classroom, where similar scenarios unfold on video screens — except that the scenarios take place in sectors of the vast skies between origin and destination. Graduates of the enhanced program can choose between tower and en route postings, but their preference must line up with the last lab they take, according to FAA rules.

“They want the freshest training that you’ve done to be where you go,” Smith says.

Stories that inspire, terrify, mesmerize

On Sept. 11, 2001, Patti Phillips sat at her workstation in the Longmont en route facility watching the world change on her radar screen.

As news of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon emerged, along with the realization that hijacked commercial airliners had been turned into weapons, Phillips recalls the scramble among air traffic controllers to clear the airspace across the country — to immediately land every plane as quickly as possible at the closest airport.

And it happened, she says, in less than an hour.

For Phillips, that day was unforgettable. For the students at Aims, it’s history, one of many accounts the instructors —  they’ve accrued between 250-300 collective years of experience in air traffic control — share and turn into teachable moments.

“Their stories are both terrifying to hear and mesmerizing to hear,” says 20-year-old Isaac Crabtree, who migrated from Jackson, Wyoming, to pursue an air traffic career. “There’s just so much learning opportunity with them. That’s been a big part of our success as students, hearing the stories and being able to apply them to our classes and our sims.”

For Rowe, the student from Cañon City, the shared experiences provide a necessary reality check that reinforces the simple fact that air traffic control can be both a rewarding and challenging — not to mention stressful — job.

“You hear stories and it’s inspiring” he says, “and also stories of like, oh, that can happen. That’s terrifying, but I think it’s needed. The mix of both amazing stories that are miraculous, and then also the horror side of things that can go wrong — it’s important for prospective air traffic controllers to hear both sides.”

The actual scenarios that find their way into discussions aren’t all distant memories. Students also absorb current air traffic events that make the news, like the tragic 2025 crash of an Army helicopter and an American Airlines flight near Washington, D.C., or the more recent collision on the ground between a fire truck and an Air Canada plane at New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

Phillips broaches these difficult topics primarily in her Air Traffic Operations class, but also during informal discussions. 

“I try to bring into the program that this is the reality of the job,” she says. “Whether you’re at fault or whether it just happens, you definitely face the life and death stuff.”

Rowe acknowledges that he treats news accounts of air traffic-related incidents with a new perspective — mainly, that he now tends to allow both pilot and controllers “more grace” rather than jump to conclusions on incomplete information. 

“This (program) has been able to teach me what those controllers are going through, or what those pilots have gone through,” he says, noting that awareness of real-life accidents has also reminded him of what’s at stake. “One of the crucial things about life in general is just learning from accidents that others have had happen to them, and then applying it to your own life.”

Crabtree also looks on contemporary mishaps with more sympathy and notes a level of stress that’s difficult to imagine — or replicate.

“Because running our sim scenarios in the radar lab,” he says, “that doesn’t completely mirror the real world.”

Rowe describes visiting the Windsor facility and meeting the faculty as like going to a baseball or football game and then getting to actually meet the players — in this case, the retired air traffic controllers who teach the courses.

“And it is just like, affirmation after affirmation, reason after reason why I want to do this,” he says. “Aims does a really good job of that — you either get reassured and affirmed that this is what you want to do, or you learn really quickly that maybe this isn’t what you want to do.”

Crabtree jokes that perhaps his pursuit of aviation was preordained.

His mother works for a major airline in Jackson. His dad has his private pilot’s license. Other family and friends work across the industry as controllers, pilots, flight attendants, or in ground operations and maintenance. There was a revelatory moment during his senior year in high school, when a controller friend of his parents invited him into the tower at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. 

That touched a spark to a long-ingrained interest.

“It was just in my blood,” he says. “It was gonna happen.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.