If ever a can has been kicked down the road, it is America’s grossly understaffed air traffic control service. And if a shortage of controllers was the only can, rather than the supermarket-sized pyramid of cans that is the country’s national air space challenge, then I would not be so worried. But worried I am.

For four decades, the United States government and aviation stakeholders have tisk-tisked about not having enough controllers, a problem that began in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan fired 11-thousand striking controllers and banned them from ever again working for the federal government.

That it has been a long and so far unsuccessful slog to replace them is no mystery. It is a uniquely specific job requiring nearly as much training as medical school, though a college education is not required. An experienced controller told me the ideal candidate is someone who can consider ideas and concepts that aren’t tangible, demonstrating what is called “fluid intelligence.” They must work well with others, and constantly evaluate situations on a three-dimensional level – all the while working with levels of stress that are often interrupted by periods of excruciating boredom.

So here we are today, with about the same number of controllers as 1981, which is still 30% below what the FAA claims would be sufficient staffing. As they have for years, they routinely work mandatory overtime of 6 or 7-day weeks. They handle three times as many flights as in 1985 “but with roughly the same number of air traffic controllers,” Bill McGee, an experienced and savvy aviation specialist with the American Economic Liberties Project told NPR.

Because their revenues rely on safely moving people from one place to the other, one might have expected responsible airlines to have put some pressure on their government and their regulator to be more effective in hiring controllers and updating the technology on which they rely. But airlines did not do that or at least they didn’t do it with the kind of energy they applied to adding flights, buying airplanes and “growing the pie,” an expression they use to promise they wouldn’t poach passengers from each other, they would all grow together.

And they surely did, as you can see from the passenger growth chart from 1980 to the 2020 pandemic. They encouraged and more and more and more people to travel by air. Lobbying the folks in Washington, DC to be more proactive about fixing the problems with national airspace? Not so much.

Newark Liberty International airport, site of several recent and hair-raising communication losses in April and early May, has been undergoing a multi-billion (with a B) renovation designed to “take the 97-year-old airport into the 21st century and beyond,”  according to a press release from The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. It would have modern terminals, streamlined roadways, more efficient runways, and new rail systems. Everything would be shiny and new except for the program that keeps airplanes from flying into each other.

Training a controller candidate to the point where that person can begin doing the critical work of keeping airplanes safely separated takes, at minimum 3-years. It takes even longer for the FAA and its stakeholders to squabble over critical underpinnings and then move on having accomplished exactly nothing. In 2016, for example, time and money was squandered as a plan was floated then punctured to privatize air traffic control.

Now here we are, a decade later with repeated communications systems failures on April 28th and early May in Newark, and two weeks later in Denver where pilots in command of as many as 20 aircraft were unable to contact the controllers. These are the latest, but a New York Times story in 2023 reported that commercial flights in the United States were encountering a loss of separation or a close call on average, several times a week. There were more than 500 between the fall of 2022 and 2023.

We are at a crisis. Equipment is out of date, critical personnel are overworked and frazzled and every solution takes careful planning, follow through and time. Fixes aren’t fast. I’m baffled at how that leads Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United, the largest user of Newark Airport, to insist there’s nothing to worry about.

“All the flights in and out of Newark are absolutely safe,” he said, and he was soon followed by FAA’s acting administrator Chris Rocheleau. “I can tell you uncategorically that travel into Newark today is safe.”

That’s what they say, but what I hear is the sound of falling cans. Or as Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board said two years ago, “The absence of a fatality or an accident doesn’t mean the presence of safety.” Amen, to that, sister.