On this day in 1981, Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers who ignored his order for them to return to work. He also banned them from federal service for life. (This ban was later rescinded by President Bill Clinton in 1993.) In the wake of the strike and mass firings the FAA was faced with the task of hiring and training enough controllers to replace those that had been fired, a hard problem to fix as at the time it took three years in normal conditions to train a new controller. The FAA had initially claimed that staffing levels would be restored within two years; however, it would take closer to ten years before the overall staffing levels returned to normal.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Aug 2013 20:49:00 +0000
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