FAA History Lesson -- October 25, 2007

From the Update to FAA Historical Chronology 1997-2012 (A .pdf file)

"FAA announced that 23 schools were now participating in the agency’s air traffic Collegiate Training Initiative (CTI) program, part of a broader effort by the agency to recruit, train, and hire controllers. CTI schools were accredited to offer a non-engineering aviation degree in aviation programs. To the original 14 CTI institutions, FAA added nine schools: Arizona State University; Community College of Baltimore County (Maryland); Florida Community College-Jacksonville; Green River Community College (Washington); Lewis University (Illinois); Kent State University (Ohio); the Metropolitan State College of Denver (Colorado); Middle Georgia College, and the University of Oklahoma. These nine schools joined fourteen others that renewed their commitment to the program, which was first established in 1990 at Minneapolis Community and Technical College."

To this day, I still look at this program as a scam. I realize that some people will be upset by that, but it's the way I feel. I went to Oklahoma City right after the PATCO strike in 1981 and was paid a good salary to learn air traffic control. The washout rate was well over 50%. (65% if I remember correctly.) To send people to college for a "degree" for which there is (effectively) only one employer and a washout rate of over 50% is crazy. And it saddles the FAA with people that shouldn't be controllers and people that should be controllers with a lot of student loan debt.

I am not the only one that holds this opinion. Some have expressed it with better nuance.

Don Brown
October 25, 2013