- Gamers, are you up for the challenge? Start your career as an Air Traffic Controller and help keep millions of people safe every day.
- FAA posted a 1min10sec video on YouTube that begins with an Xbox One logo, then transitions into a montage of scenes that bounce between gaming and air traffic control clips.
- The FAA emphasizes that no college degree is required, with the average salary after three years on the job hovering around $155,000 per year.
The Federal Aviation Administration is targeting gamers in its most recent job advertisement for air traffic controllers. The administration’s annual hiring window opens at 12AM ET on April 17, and considering the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers, it’s calling this a period of “supercharged hiring.”
Federal Aviation Administration’s release read as,
Join the BEST AND BRIGHTEST, the elite squad of 14,000 controllers protecting 2.9 million daily passengers. You are strongly encouraged to apply early; waiting may result in the announcement closing before you’ve had the opportunity to submit your application.
The FAA’s YouTube video draws parallels between gaming and directing air traffic, and notes that the average salary for the role after three years is $155,000.
The FAA is clearly seeking players who are at least old enough to remember the Xbox One and Bjergsen in the LCS, which puts would-be candidates around their early 20s at least.
It’s either that, or the ad editors really just picked videos at random from the pile of stock footage marked gamerz. But I won’t lie, it made me smile to see that Xbox One logo appear out of nowhere. Nostalgia is a hell of a thing.
“To reach the next generation of air traffic controllers, we need to adapt,” US Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said. “This campaign’s innovative communication style and focus on gaming taps into a growing demographic of young adults who have many of the hard skills it takes to be a successful controller.”
This is not the first time the FAA has sought to recruit gamers to fill air traffic controller vacancies. The agency ran a similar campaign in 2021 during the Biden administration.
However, there’s no mention of the actual training process, but this push comes nearly 16 years after a University of Colorado study found that those who used video games for on-the-job training “do their jobs better, have higher skills, and retain information longer than workers learning in less interactive, more passive environments.”
According to the FAA, air traffic controller exit interviews consistently cited gaming as having an influence on a controller’s ability to think quickly, stay focused, and manage complex situations, all of which are important to the job at hand. The agency also notes that around 65% of more than 200 million Americans play video games.
To be mentioned here, last October, thousands of flights within the U.S. suffered delays as around 11,000 air traffic controllers missed paychecks due to government shutdown.
Then, carriers warned that missed paychecks “only increases the stress on these essential workers, many of whom are already working mandatory overtime to keep our skies safe and secure.”
The FAA has been losing more air traffic controllers than it can hire and retain since the 2010s, and this trend only worsened during the pandemic in the 2020s, according to a report released in December by the US Government Accountability Office.
The administration increased hiring every year since 2021, but at the end of 2025 it employed 13,164 air traffic controllers, 6 percent fewer than in 2015, the report said. At the same time, the number of flights in the air traffic control system increased by about 10 percent, to 30.8 million.
FAA”s ATC hiring page spacifies, Applicants must be a US citizen, under 31 (maybe those video editors do know what they’re doing), and be able to speak fluent English. An aptitude test, medical screening and academy training follows, among other steps.
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