It was as if I were in a place I’ve never been, Oklahoma City, doing something I’ve never done: clearing airplanes to take off and land.
I was sitting at a flight simulator used to teach would-be air traffic controllers, though not in Oklahoma City, where the Federal Aviation Academy is located. I was in a windowless room at Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology in Queens, trying to keep up with what was happening on a wide wall of video monitors.
“UA 433,” I said into my headset after seeing that combination of letters and numbers on a radar screen above the monitors. I had been told to say “Academy tower” next so that the simulator, playing the role of the pilot, would take me for the controller in the tower there. Then: “Runway 28 right, cleared to land.”
Oops. “It’s United 433,” said Christine West, an instructor at Vaughn and a former controller, who was looking over my shoulder.
I tried again: “United 433,” I began. “Academy tower, runway right, cleared to land.” Uh oh. I was supposed to specify which runway, as I had done the first time.
“It sounds so easy,” she said, “and then it’s not.”
The controllers-in-training at Vaughn will learn the lingo, and a lot more. West said that controllers live in a world of now. And then she said that I had to decide if there was time for a United Parcel Service plane to depart before a commercial jet arrived — on the same runway. It’s the kind of decision that controllers make all day, every day.
Vaughn, which opened more than 90 years ago and has nearly 1,500 students, is stepping into a new role as the federal government shutdown continues. It is training students to be controllers.
As my colleague Karoun Demirjian wrote last week, new controllers used to undergo training at the academy in Oklahoma City. But amid an acute shortage of controllers, the academy has struggled to prepare enough rookies. The agency decided to let Vaughn and eight other colleges or universities to set up their own training programs, teaching the F.A.A.-approved curriculum.
Learning to be an air traffic controller can take as little as a year at Vaughn or as long as four years at some of the other colleges, compared with only three to five months at the F.A.A. academy. And there is tuition at Vaughn, just under $15,000 per semester for the program that prospective controllers enroll in. By contrast, trainees at the academy are paid $22.61 an hour and receive per diem payments to help cover food and housing.
The program at Vaughn has given students like Brandon Jean-Pierre, 23, a second chance. He attended the F.A.A. Academy but did not do well on the final exam. He said instructors there had encouraged him to not to abandon his dream of working in a control tower.
“It was hard to keep up with the pace” at the academy, he told me. “You’re only there for four months, and only one or two weeks out of those four months are you really doing the simulations.”
Steven Fanno, a former air traffic controller who teaches at Vaughn, echoed the advice from Jean-Pierre’s academy instructors. “Just because a student doesn’t make it at the academy doesn’t mean they can’t be a good controller,” Fanno said. “If you listen to most of them, they will pretty much all tell you if they’d had more time, they would have been successful.” All they needed, he said, was “more practice.”
As for the federal shutdown, Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, has indicated that it could threaten plans to train an additional 2,200 students by next fall. On Wednesday, officials said that air traffic in 40 key markets would be reduced by 10 percent by Friday if the government shutdown had not been resolved by then. Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, said that some flight cancellations would be necessary to “alleviate the pressure” on controllers in high-traffic areas.
When I took off my headset, West said I had done well for a newbie. And Jean-Pierre, who grew up in Queens, hopes to end up close to Vaughn — at a certain airport just across the Grand Central Parkway from the school.
“Eventually, I would love to work at LaGuardia,” he said. “It is a difficult job, for sure,” but “better than, you known, an office job or something like that where I’m staring at a computer all day. I get to stare at planes all day. That’s the joy in it for me.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/nyregion/air-traffic-controllers-vaughan-college-queens.html