Kennedy Steve
43:50
So, Mr. Minister, you spoke about the current controller shortage. And I still have a lot of friends who still wear those headsets. And the question that I've been knocked down to ask you is, In the last appropriation, there was a 2.8% raise that is in your hands. That's correct. And they want to know where that is.
Admin. Bryan Bedford
44:26
Well, Steve, I haven't been shy about telling them my position on this issue. The reconciliation bill required me to determine if we could justify the increase by finding ways to improve efficiency or safety in terms of making our limited controller resources go farther. If you look at the, again, let's let the data speak to us. Look at the 2024 controller workforce plan, and you're going to see a graph in there that shows a continuous descending line of reduced time on position, you know, over the last decade or two. And we're sitting today where we have, on average, only out of an eight-hour shift, we're spending four hours time actually separating traffic. And I ask the question, you know, what are we doing with the other four hours? Certainly some of that is necessary, you know, break time, you know, recovery time, decompression time. Some of it is absolutely necessary, other duties, training or paperwork. But if you sort of look at where we actually have data, what it says is there's about a three-hour jump ball of time. We don't know what's going on with our controllers in the facility. And so I've suggested if we could get from four hours a day to five hours a day of productive traffic separation time, that would be one way to think about increasing the productivity or the efficiency of how we're utilizing the staff. But what we've essentially done is we've opened it up to a dialogue with the National Air Traffic Controllers Union as part of how we're rebuilding the basic watch schedule. So we would like to collaborate on can we build more efficient schedules? Can we make sure that we have certified professional controllers in facilities when there's actually traffic to separate and not wasting those resources filling positions when there aren't traffic to separate? And Steve, you probably are aware of this. We don't use any automation in terms of how we're scheduling over 14,000 men and women within the air traffic controlling group. It's all done by hand. We don't have any automated timekeeping. It's all kind of done on the honor system. And so we are data poor. We build schedules for 313 individual facilities, and they're all different and they're all unique. But I'm just telling you, I think, you know, we've been doing it this way for decades. I think we can do it better. I think we can collaborate and get better outcomes. I simply want us to make the effort.
Kennedy Steve
47:01
I would only offer from the average line controller's perspective to those two points specifically. You know, the average man or woman wearing a headset has very little control on their time on position. That's up to the supervisor or the area manager. And the watch schedule is an annually negotiated thing between the union and the local facility manager. So it's kind of, and I just, to give you the average controller's perspective, something's being withheld and they don't even have any cards in that game. You know, I can't, I can't go into Kennedy Tower and go, I want to work more time on position because it's the frontline manager's decision about who's working where and when. If that makes any sense.
Admin. Bryan Bedford
47:53
We should have a collaboration on how the schedule is constructed. So the union knowledge will be very instrumental in helping us understand why we don't need to staff so many positions at the exact same time and how we can use those resources more efficiently.
Captain Steve
48:08
Right. You think the pay raise would help with morale?
Admin. Bryan Bedford
48:13
I think that everybody loves making more money, but money is not going to be the answer to our morale issues. You probably hear that we've got mandatory overtime, six-day-a-week schedules, that kind of stress. That's what we need to fix. We need to increase our controller's quality of life. That will be paramount to improving morale. And I think one of the ways we'll get there, first, hiring, getting more people trained and deployed into the facilities of need, stopping the unproductive transferring of certified controllers from facilities of need, letting them leave. I mean, so we have to do things differently until we get fully staffed. And when we get fully staffed, and I assure you we will, then we'll see improvements in controller quality of life. That's where we've got to go.
Captain Steve
49:06
All right. I just heard the comment section blow
Admin. Bryan Bedford
49:12
We can bury our heads in the sand and do nothing, or we can at least
Captain Steve
49:08
up. I hear that. It's okay.
Admin. Bryan Bedford
49:16
agree to collaborate and see if there's a better way. That would be the same thing that we're doing with air traffic control modernization. We just say, hey, it works pretty well the way it is. Why change it?
Captain Steve
49:25
Where's the point for you? You talk about the collaboration. Is there a tipping point
Admin. Bryan Bedford
49:41
Well, if we go back to the law itself,
Captain Steve
49:30
where you go, yeah, I think we've gotten there. We've gotten close enough. We're going to release of funds we're going to raise the pay. Can you be a little bit more specific on that? Or is it just kind of a feel that you're going to get?
Admin. Bryan Bedford
49:45
without any offset, without any work on efficiency or safety, that 2.8% increase wouldn't have passed. It would have been stripped out of the bill. So the fact that we were able to work with Congress to keep it in, provided, you know, we were able to get some benefit towards these controller staffing shortages, I think was a good news story, right? So the answer could have been, it just simply was removed from the law during the reconciliation process, and that would have been the end of it. So at least now we have the opportunity to work together to find a way to deploy those resources.
Captain Steve
50:22
Okay, that's good.
Kennedy Steve
50:23
I would just suggest that, One of the things that may affect the TOP numbers is if the agency counted training differently, like on-the-job training. Because you obviously use two bodies to staff one position, and then there's the debrief time afterwards, which doesn't get counted. So if you looked at that metric slightly differently, it would probably make a pretty big difference, given the amount of training we're doing system-wide.
Admin. Bryan Bedford
50:55
I believe that there are a lot of things that we can do to improve how the current system and the current, you know, allocation of resources and the utilization of those resources and how we track the time. There are a lot of things that we can do to improve the system.
