The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) effort to recruit video game players into air traffic controller jobs has been “wildly successful” so far, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.
“This has been wildly successful, and if you think about what these gamers are doing on screens, they’re talking, and there’s a lot going on,” Duffy said on April 17 during an interview at the Semafor World Economy Summit.
“They’re used to that, and that’s actually what you’re doing in a tower or in a facility,” Duffy told Semafor journalist Shelby Talcott.
“So they’ve become well-suited, from the games they play, to actually have a great career that pays well and allows them to support their families.”
According to Duffy, the FAA received 6,000 applications within seven hours of the hiring window opening on Friday morning. The agency planned to close applications once it reached 8,000, a threshold Duffy predicted could be reached as early as noon that day.
“To reach the next generation of air traffic controllers, we need to adapt,” Duffy said in a statement announcing the campaign.
“This campaign’s innovative communication style and focus on gaming taps into a growing demographic of young adults who have many of the hard skills it takes to be a successful controller.”
A college degree is not required to apply, according to the FAA, which noted that only about 25 percent of current controllers have one. The agency also said that controller exit interviews have identified gaming as a factor influencing workers’ ability to think quickly, stay focused, and manage complexity.
At another point in Friday’s interview, Duffy said administration officials surveyed a group of graduates of the FAA’s air traffic academy and found less than a handful did not identify as gamers.
“We polled 250 random students at our academy, and only three of them were not gamers,” Duffy told Talcott.
“There must be a correlation between gaming and people wanting to become air traffic controllers. So we’ve leaned into that community.”
The campaign is the latest effort by the Trump administration to address staffing shortages in the nation’s air travel system.
Hiring and retaining enough air traffic controllers has been a challenge for the FAA for decades, with thousands of retirements during the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbating the shortfall. More recently, Duffy said the government shutdown that lasted from October through November 2025 prompted 15 to 20 controllers to retire each day as they were required to work without pay.
“This is going to live on in air travel well beyond the time frame that this government opens back up,” Duffy said at the time.
In his fiscal 2027 budget proposal, President Donald Trump requested a $481 million increase to the FAA’s operations account. The funding would support aviation and commercial spaceflight safety, upgrades to the FAA’s aging telecommunications systems, and an air traffic controller hiring surge as part of the administration’s broader push to “supercharge” the controller workforce.
The FAA aims to hire at least 8,900 new air traffic controllers through 2028 after meeting its goal of hiring more than 2,000 in fiscal 2025. It reached that target by streamlining the hiring process, offering cash bonuses, and adding new schools to its collegiate training pipeline for air traffic control.