WASHINGTON – About 400 recently hired support staff employees at the Federal Aviation Administration were fired over the weekend as part of the Trump administration’s mass terminations of federal workers, according to the union representing the employees.
The dismissals come less than three weeks after a midair collision between an American Airlines regional jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter outside Washington killed 67 people and brought new scrutiny to air traffic controllers and their workloads.
Like others across the federal workforce, the terminated FAA employees were probationary workers hired or promoted within the past year.
The terminated FAA employees included workers who assist FAA technicians administratively and logistically, environmental compliance workers, aeronautical information specialists, maintenance workers and mechanics, according to David Spero, national president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, a union that represents about 11,000 FAA and Defense Department employees who support air traffic controllers.
Spero said the notices began arriving at 7 p.m. Friday and continued late into the night.
FAA technicians and aviation safety inspectors were exempt from the firings, as were air traffic controllers, a group represented by a different union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.
Nevertheless, Spero said the loss of the FAA probationary workers will have a profound effect.
“By exempting those people, the goal is to make sure that nothing that is directly impacting aviation safety has an adverse impact,” Spero told USA TODAY. “But when you lose all these other people, these other support people, that creates a huge hole in all those support functions that we need to have to do our jobs on the front line. So without them, your folks are severely handicapped.”
