Duffy says he can offer air traffic controllers chance to stay past mandatory retirement age

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said during an interview that he plans to encourage air traffic controllers to keep working past the mandatory retirement age of 56, which he says would enhance safety.

“I'm going to make an offer to air traffic controllers to let them stay longer. That's my authority. I can offer them the chance to stay longer, past the mandatory retirement age of 56, pay them more, give them a bonus, keep them on the job, make the system safer, alleviate the pressure on the controllers. They will make more money,” Duffy said during his Thursday night appearance on Fox News’s “Hannity.”

Duffy, a former Wisconsin lawmaker, said he hopes the air traffic controllers will accept the offer he plans to make “in the coming days.”

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is still some 3,000 spots short of filling vacant air traffic controller roles at airports. Less than 1-in-10 airports around the country have the appropriate amount of air traffic controllers to satisfy the threshold set by the National Air Traffic Controllers' Association and the FAA, a CBS News analysis of FAA data found.

The issue has come under the spotlight, again, following the midair collision near Washington Reagan National Airport last week. All 67 people were killed after an American Airlines flight crashed into an Army helicopter in the deadliest American air travel incident since November 2001.

Duffy said his department has a plan to get “rid of the bottlenecks" and "get more of the smartest kids into the air traffic control academy.”

“But, Sean, once they graduate, it takes them a year to three years to get trained up in a tower,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity. "So that's going to take time."

Duffy also said the air traffic control system is outdated and needs to be updated — an effort, he says, President Trump supports.

“But it goes to the point that our transportation system, our air traffic control system — we're using World War II technology,” he said. “And it should have been updated 10, 20, 30 years ago."