Air traffic control is essential, but people give it little thought until something goes wrong. In the past three weeks, a trio of on-the-ground near misses occurred at Sydney Airport, framed by near-persistent reports of ground delays holding up flights, and keeping passengers waiting on the tarmac.

That has put the spotlight on Airservices Australia, the government-owned but self-funding air traffic control organisation that is responsible for keeping the skies safe above Australia.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau is investigating the near misses on the tarmac, two on August 9 and one on July 27, and a sense of crisis has emerged.

Transport Minister Catherine King, busy with aviation consumer reform and VietJet’s plans to fly from Western Sydney International, summoned chief executive Rob Sharp this week to explain the delays and the incidents at Sydney Airport.

While the investigations are yet to conclude, no one is denying that staffing has become the No.1 challenge for Airservices: it does not have enough air traffic controllers (ATCs) to comfortably fill its shifts in Sydney.

In the short term, Sharp said Airservices would impose a rostering change for Sydney’s air traffic controls to begin in early September. The change would put staff “on call” so that if there was an absence in the control tower, management would know who was available without having to call around. King said: “I have made my expectations clear that Airservices must carefully manage the situation at Sydney for the rest of August.”

Ground delays at airports, Sydney in particular, have become a feature in recent years. The centrality of Sydney to the nation’s network means that a delay there has an outsized impact for flights to and from Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra and Perth.

The average number of delays that can be blamed on Airservices Australia has fallen nationally, by 13 per cent in fiscal year 2026, but when delays happen in Sydney, they can ripple across the network for hours.

“We have had significant holding, delays and cancellations for ages related directly to ATC,“ one commercial pilot said of the situation at Kingsford Smith. One day last week coming into Sydney, there were no delays identified, and yet “we got 40 minutes airborne holding out of nowhere”.

“Luckily, as all of us do, I had loaded extra fuel simply because it is impossible to predict what will happen into Sydney,” he said. “Lots of extra fuel carried and burnt, which all contributes to emissions.”

The Department of Transport, under which Airservices sits, remains in daily communication with it. Sharp said that for Sydney, “increasing air traffic controller supply remains our top priority”.

Eight new tower controllers have been certified in the past 18 months, Sharp said. Six controllers are training in Sydney tower and a further 15 are expected to start training between now and the end of 2027. But he also said that “from a Sydney-specific [perspective], recruitment has proven challenging for us”.

“Whilst we’re actually recruiting even internationally qualified air traffic controllers, they don’t always pass the tests,” Sharp said.

“The reason is that there’s a high bar in terms of being able to operate within the complexity of Sydney.”

Data requested under a Freedom of Information request shows that while Airservices certified 91 air traffic controller trainees in 2025, 39 other candidates withdrew from training or failed. In 2024, 52 trainees were endorsed, but 32 withdrew or failed. While the total number of controllers is higher than ever, 1073 in July compared with 985 in 2020, the level of experience, which is crucial, varies.

Controllers have to be qualified on specific approaches, runways, control towers, and airport taxiways, and they need training and checking for each one in order to be certified. “If two or three controllers call out sick at Sydney tower, which they have been doing a lot, it’s not as though they can replace them with two or three controllers from Sydney Approach/Departures,” said one former employee, who asked not to be named.

Still, the situation today is better than it was in the immediate aftermath of COVID when, for example, shortages of ATCs meant Airservices had to impose what’s known as Traffic Information Broadcast by Aircraft. In TIBA airspace, the responsibility for planes keeping safely spaced apart moves from air traffic control to the pilots themselves, who must monitor radios and use heightened vigilance.

The recent near misses and public outcry are happening even as the aviation industry mounts a last ditch effort to avoid being, along with airports, the primary targets of aviation consumer reform and regulatory oversight.

On July 28, airlines peak body A4ANZ sent a letter to Airservices requesting a meeting with Sharp, following “significant disruption caused by Airservices’ inability to adequately staff air traffic control services”. In a reply in an August 5 letter, Sharp denied parts of A4ANZ’s claims, saying he didn’t agree with a characterisation of weekly incidents, “and it is not supported by the data”.

“While we acknowledge there have been instances that have been staff-related, the impacts of these have been mischaracterised,” Sharp wrote. “Rather than providing external endorsement for your position, the ABC [news] report to which you refer in your correspondence largely reproduced the media release issued by A4ANZ.”

On the new controllers, Sharp told this masthead: “It’s, basically, ‘how quickly can you get people in?’. We are recruiting. It’s typically two years to train someone in, and then probably another two to three years by the time they actually get time in the tower to build their broader capabilities.”

The problem was “structural”, Sharp said: “It’s not a quick fix, and that’s one of the challenges that we’ve been experiencing in recent days.”

Another challenge is the strain the staff shortages place on existing employees. In figures requested in 2024 during Senate estimates, air traffic controllers were working a monthly average of 1.8 to two overtime shifts a month from March 2022 to February 2024, ranging from 21.5 to 23.6 extra shifts a year – more than a month of working days.

Getting to closer grips with the staffing problem runs headlong into the opacity of the organisation’s operations. Even understanding the lingering impact of the 2021 controller retirement scheme, designed to bring forward a cohort of retirements in response to reduced air traffic because of COVID has been difficult. Airservices planned “to employ, train and develop new people to replace those” who retired before air traffic returned to “pre-pandemic levels”.

In all, 117 controllers exited the floor nationally (140 total employees). This masthead made a Freedom of Information request this year to understand what risk assessment had been undertaken before the retirement scheme was offered. In denying the request, ASA said: “Disclosure could reasonably be expected to prejudice the effectiveness of Airservices’ operational and safety risk management processes.” This would happen by “inhibiting the frank identification, assessment and documentation of risks, controls and vulnerabilities in similar future processes”.

One hurdle Airservices has to face when trying to find new controllers is that directing the safe travel of thousands of lives and billions of dollars of aircraft takes not just extensive training, but a certain temperament.

ATCs need to be able to prioritise information and manage complex sets of data, while remaining calm. As a Melbourne tower ATC staffer told this masthead in 2025, ATCs can take two hours to tell a joke; they start the joke, pausing repeatedly to complete separate tasks, then two hours later resume telling the joke at the same spot they left it in, to finish with the punchline. People nervously tapping their feet as they manage air traffic are not suited to the work.

And questions about the culture of Airservices and its contribution to shortages linger. A former air traffic controller described the organisation as an “old school boys’ club” rife with “internal political favouritism”. A number of sources identified a cadre of former RAAF air traffic controllers within ASA operating as a “boys’ club”.

“There is a culture at Airservices that most employees describe as toxic,” said the former ATC.

One controller said there was a culture of appointing less competent people who posed no threat to their superiors. Internally, there could be gaps in the understanding of “competencies required for intense ATC workload positions”, which means recruited ATCs can’t get through the training. An “influx of poorly selected overseas recruits has only made matters worse”, said the ATC.

That the air safety organisation has had culture difficulties is no secret, even if the specifics remain murky. Reports in 2019 and 2020 found rampant bullying and sexism.

One ATC, who left Airservices more than five years ago, recalled a crony culture in which, if one person got into a management position, he would take another one into management, and then another. This not only deprived Airservices of good conrollers, but it put people unsuited to management into the roles.

He recalled one “amazing” controller who was promoted to a manager with no management skills at all. “As a manager, he was like a child,” using nicknames for people, playing around “with the boys” and then at a moment’s notice “all of a sudden” would talk down to the same employees. Other managers had reputations as “toe-cutters”, the bullying sort who might take issue with a trainee’s specific word choice or pronunciation in the course of their day.

Although, the air traffic controller said, the nature of the work came with such high expectations, it made many people “critical of everything”. Because in air traffic controlling, “if you do anything other than perfection”, that’s not good enough, he said.

A 2020 probe into the culture by corporate consultancy Elizabeth Broderick and Co found high levels of bullying and sexual harassment. The review triggered 36 investigations into possible breaches of the workplace code of conduct.

Airservices said its workforce data did not suggest that its workplace culture had been an impediment to hiring or retaining ATCs. It does, nevertheless, acknowledge workplace culture issues. It now trains new recruits on expected behaviour and conduct. Over 1300 employees have also completed active bystander training, to recognise and respond to harassment and bullying, among other measures to improve its workplace.

Yet, changing an organisation’s culture is difficult, especially one with critical work that requires staffing around the clock. As I was told on a visit to Melbourne’s Airservices facility in 2025, given the nature of shift work, there is no time when the entire staff can be assembled for a speech or team building or a seminar.

Airservices’ own employee engagement index plummeted to 49 per cent in June 2025, continuing a downward trend from 59 per cent the year before. The score reflects employee satisfaction with the statement “I am happy working at Airservices”. The plunge missed Airservices’ 70 per cent target for the reading.

“This shift in sentiment is closely tied to the significant changes we’ve made in response to industry and financial pressures,” it said. While many employees want faster progress, ASA says in its annual report, others were grappling with the implications of change, particularly where it disrupted familiar ways of working. “In some cases, this discomfort reflects the very cultural issues we are working to address.”

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