Air Safety Concerns Mount In Australia Amid Surge In Close Calls

Since late July, incidents at Sydney Airport included a passenger jet aborting its takeoff because there was a plane in its path. In a separate close call, an aircraft that was taxiing had to slam on the brakes to avoid colliding with another jet.

Short-staffed control towers have long been a problem globally, but nowhere is the urgency of the matter more on display recently than in Australia. The growing number of incidents is pressing the need for authorities worldwide to crank up hiring and adopt new tools like artificial intelligence.

"Air-traffic control staffing levels are not at the level required," said Andrew Marshall, president of the Australian and International Pilots Association, which represents the flight crew at the nation's flag carrier, Qantas Airways Ltd. "Whilst pilots are the last line of defense in aviation safety, it isn't an appropriate long-term solution."

The problem is there's no quick way to fill the shortfall of air traffic controllers in Australia, largely because it takes years for a new recruit to be fully trained. Meanwhile, flight demand continues to grow.

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That's becoming the case worldwide as the lack of controllers has turned into one of the aviation industry's biggest frustrations. More than 70,000 new controllers will be needed globally by 2034, according to forecasts by aviation training provider CAE Inc.

At Sydney Airport, staffing pressures have spilled over to the point that a whistleblower told authorities that short-handed workers held "grave concerns" about safety. That alarm was sounded in June from an experienced air traffic controller, who drew comparisons with the way controllers near Washington pleaded for changes in the months before a midair collision that killed 67 people in January 2025.

The latest incident emerged on Friday, when authorities said they were investigating an event three days earlier in which two Qantas planes were taxiing toward each other. Both crews reported they had received clearance to proceed.

About a week earlier, a Virgin Australia Holdings Ltd. jet aborted its takeoff when a Qantas plane started to cross the runway. The same morning, a taxiing Jetstar plane almost collided with a Qatar Airways aircraft that was under tow, injuring one member of the cabin crew. A similar incident occurred between two Qantas planes in late July.

These were close calls. An announcement on the Jetstar plane - aired on local media - indicated that the crew spotted the nearby Qatar jet by chance at the last moment. The Virgin Australia aircraft was already applying thrust when it noticed the Qantas plane ahead, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said.

The bureau is investigating all the incidents.

The frequency of the events in Sydney has laid bare the fragility of the workforce.

Workers inside Sydney Airport's control tower often struggle to fill all shifts on the roster, and the ranks are so thin that controllers sometimes work 10 days straight without a break, according to their union.

"There just aren't enough people," said Scott Nugent, president of Civil Air, the controllers' union.

Some days, 20% of rostered shifts are vacant - and that's before anyone calls in sick, Nugent said in an interview. The system relies on people doing large amounts of overtime, and if they can't fill the gaps, flights start getting delayed, he said.

What's more, not enough staff have a sufficient range of skills to carry out different tasks, which makes it harder to plug specific holes in the roster when they pop up at short notice, he said.

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"Recruitment is only one piece of this puzzle," Nugent said.

AI Future

One tool that could help alleviate the crunch is artificial intelligence. AI could be particularly useful for managing routine jobs like aircraft parking, helping avoid runway and taxiing conflicts, as well as coordinating the growing number of drones and unmanned aircraft, said Ugur Turhan, a trained controller who's now an aviation lecturer at UNSW Canberra in Australia.

At Hong Kong airport, for example, an AI-powered system that's fed with data from high-resolution cameras is designed to prevent tragedies such as the one in March at New York City's LaGuardia Airport, where an Air Canada Express jet with 76 people on board smashed into a fire truck shortly after landing, killing both pilots.

Still, AI systems will require years of testing before being effectively deployed, and human controllers will be needed for the foreseeable future, Turhan said.

Meanwhile, the shortage of controllers in Australia has led to an increase in flight delays, disgruntling passengers and airlines. Rob Sharp, chief executive officer at Airservices Australia, a government-owned entity that manages the country's airspace, has issued a public apology. He said the organization is building a larger pool of standby controllers to bolster the Sydney roster and that it's in "full recruitment mode."

"We need to fix this problem," Stephen Beckett, CEO of Airlines for Australia & New Zealand, which represents Qantas, Jetstar and Virgin Australia, said in an interview.

It's a common complaint among airlines around the world. Carriers argue that flight delays caused by shortages in control towers create extra costs from staffing, fuel and passenger compensation.

According to the International Air Transport Association, air traffic controller delays in the US cost carriers almost $11 billion between 2015 and 2025, and the situation is only getting worse. In Europe, delays caused by air-traffic management in the same period cost airlines and passengers €17.5 billion ($20 billion), IATA estimates.

For Airservices, like much of the global industry, the shortage of controllers traces its roots to the Covid pandemic, which caused air travel to grind to a near halt and led thousands of aviation workers to leave the industry or lose their jobs. In 2021 and 2022, about 450 employees took voluntary redundancy, Airservices filings show.

Airservices had just over 1,000 full-time controllers at the end of June 2025, and added 109 more in the following 12 months, filings show.

"They perhaps let too many of the experienced ones go," said Ian Douglas, a senior lecturer at the school of aviation at UNSW in Sydney. "You can't create controllers out of thin air."