The FAA Is Ending the Early Shove, the Air Traffic Habit Nobody Talked About

A long standing habit inside air traffic control has just stopped being tolerated, and the way it ended matters for anyone working in a safety critical job. Inc. reported that the US Federal Aviation Administration is attempting to fire two air traffic controllers at New York's LaGuardia Airport after both left work early, a move officials say may have contributed to the Air Canada fire truck collision on 22 March in which both pilots were killed. The practice has a name inside the profession, the early shove, and until now it was widely understood as normal. At Metaintro, we cover moments like this because an informal workplace norm becoming a dismissable offence is one of the fastest ways a career can change without any warning.

What is an early shove?

It is an industry term for controllers leaving before the end of their scheduled shift after completing their assigned duties, according to controllers who spoke to Reuters. Not skipping work, and not walking away mid task. Finishing what you were assigned and going home before the clock says you may.

The important detail is that this was not treated as misconduct by the people doing it. As Margaret Wallace, assistant professor of aviation management at the Florida Institute of Technology, told Inc., leaving a little early when traffic is slow and the end of a shift is approaching is not particularly unusual, and in this case it is likely the controllers believed they would not be assigned to another position before their shifts ended. She added a detail that carries most of the weight in the story, which is that a supervisor would have made the decision to let them leave.

That is the shape of a great many workplace norms. Not written down, not formally approved, tolerated by the person who could have stopped it, and therefore reasonably understood by everyone involved as permitted.

Why has it become a firing offence now?

Because the classification changed. According to CBS, the FAA is treating the conduct as timecard fraud, which gives the agency reasonable grounds for dismissal. That reframing is the entire mechanism. The same act, described as leaving early with a supervisor's knowledge, is a scheduling matter. Described as timecard fraud, it is a dismissable integrity issue.

The trigger was the March collision at LaGuardia that killed both pilots. When an accident causes a review, practices that were previously invisible get examined against the written rule rather than against local custom, and the written rule almost always wins. An FAA spokesperson told Inc. the agency is committed to holding employees accountable and will not compromise the safety or efficiency of the National Airspace System.

It is worth being careful here. What has been established publicly is that officials say the early departures may have contributed to the collision. That is a stated position in an ongoing matter, not a finding, and two people died, which is reason enough to avoid speculating past what has actually been reported.

How thin is air traffic staffing to begin with?

Thin enough that the context matters. USAFacts reported that the FAA controls air traffic at 290 terminals and that as of September 2024, over 40 percent of them were understaffed. In 2023 the agency set an 85 percent staffing goal for terminal air control facilities, and one hundred and eighteen fell short of that target in 2024.

The distribution is uneven. Of those falling short, eighty six sat between 75 percent and 84.9 percent of target, while the remaining 32 were staffed at 74.9 percent or less. Meanwhile 172 facilities met or exceeded the goal, and 85 had staffing above 100 percent, partly because of intentional overstaffing of new hires to absorb expected attrition over the following two or three years. In 2024 the FAA employed 14,264 air traffic controllers in total. The most understaffed facility that year was Grand Forks Tower in North Dakota at 53.3 percent of target, followed by Rochester Tower in Minnesota at 56.5 percent and Columbus Tower in Georgia at 58.3 percent.

Those figures describe September 2024, so they are a baseline rather than today's position, but the structural causes have not changed quickly. The FAA attributes the shortfall to the pandemic interrupting training, to a training process that takes two to three years combined with limited on the job training at facilities that are already understaffed, and to annual losses of controllers and trainees through promotions and transfers, retirement, academy attrition, resignations, firings and deaths. The March incident has since prompted a larger push from the FAA to increase staffing numbers to prevent future accidents. That push is visible in the FAA air traffic hiring boost and in the incentives now being used to recruit controllers, and the operational consequences in how FAA cuts delay flights.

Why does an informal norm become dangerous?

Because it is invisible until it is tested. A practice that a supervisor permits, that colleagues all understand, and that nobody has written down does not appear in any system. It is not in the schedule, not in the risk assessment, and not in the staffing model that decides whether a facility is covered.

That is the real lesson for careers well beyond aviation. The gap between what your organisation formally requires and what your workplace actually tolerates is a liability that sits entirely with you. Custom is defended by everybody until something goes wrong, at which point it is defended by nobody, and the written rule is the only thing that was ever load bearing. In this case the reported detail that a supervisor would have made the decision to let the controllers leave does not appear to have protected the two individuals now facing dismissal.

The staffing picture makes it more understandable rather than less. Facilities running below target rely on flexibility to function, and informal accommodations are often how a stretched team keeps working at all. Norms like this usually grow in exactly those conditions, which is why they tend to be widespread precisely where the formal system is under most strain.

What does this mean for your career?

Five things, and they generalise well past air traffic control.

Get informal permissions in writing, especially anything touching hours or pay. The distance between leaving early with approval and timecard fraud is documentation. A short message confirming a supervisor released you costs nothing at the time and is the only evidence that exists later.

Understand that verbal approval from a supervisor may not travel upward. The reported account here includes a supervisor making the decision, and the dismissal process is proceeding regardless. Local authorisation and organisational policy are different things, and only one of them is enforceable in your favour. The same asymmetry runs through pay disputes, which is why the overtime rule changes for salaried workers matter more than most people assume.

Recognise that safety critical roles carry different rules about custom. In aviation, healthcare, rail, energy and similar fields, a practice that is harmless on almost every shift is judged by the one where it is not. If your work has that shape, treat every informal shortcut as something that will eventually be reviewed after an incident rather than during a normal week.

Watch what an incident does to enforcement. Reviews change what gets examined, and long tolerated practices are usually the first casualties. If you work in a sector that has recently had a serious event, that is the moment to tighten your own compliance rather than to assume continuity.

Finally, know that the hiring picture is a separate question from the disciplinary one. Aviation is actively recruiting, and the training pipeline is long at two to three years, which means demand for qualified people is not going away. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median annual wage for air traffic controllers at 148,080 dollars in May 2025, with about 2,100 openings projected each year over the decade even though employment itself is only expected to grow 2 percent from 2025 to 2035. Most of those openings come from replacing people who leave, which is exactly the churn the staffing shortfall describes. Routes into the field are opening at the same time, with new flight schools opening as aviation careers take off and aviation mechanics landing jobs before they graduate. The wider federal picture matters too, from what federal pay is actually rising by and what government jobs pay in benefits to skills over degrees changing government hiring and federal workers losing civil service protections.

Does this pattern show up outside aviation?

Constantly, and usually in the same shape. Any workplace where formal policy and daily practice have drifted apart carries the same exposure. The details differ, the mechanism does not.

Healthcare has its own versions, from handover timing to documentation practices that everyone completes retrospectively. Construction and logistics have theirs around hours and rest breaks, which is why enforcement actions in those sectors so often turn on records rather than on conduct, as in the case where the Labor Department recovered back wages for construction workers over overtime. Hospitality and retail carry it in scheduling, which is the entire reason fair workweek laws exist. In each case the practice is defensible while it works and indefensible the moment it is examined.

Aviation simply makes the stakes legible faster than most industries, because incidents are investigated formally and publicly. The same industry has shown repeatedly that scheduling and hours are the pressure point, from Air Canada pilots striking over their contract to airport workers striking at Charlotte over Thanksgiving. Those are disputes about the formal terms. What happened at LaGuardia is a dispute about the informal ones, and informal terms have no negotiating body behind them.

Controllers are not without representation in this. NATCA, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, is a labour union and aviation safety organisation representing nearly 20,000 air traffic controllers, engineers and other aviation professionals, and a disciplinary policy applied to a long tolerated practice is exactly the kind of change a union exists to contest. Federal aviation oversight also runs through the Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General, which audits FAA staffing and operations independently of the agency itself, and through the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates the incidents that tend to force these policies into the open. If you work in a facility where the early shove was normal, both are worth knowing about before an individual case becomes a test case.

There is a cultural dimension worth naming too. Norms like the early shove persist partly because raising them is awkward, since the person who would have to formalise the practice is often the same supervisor quietly permitting it. Organisations that make it genuinely safe to ask whether something is actually allowed tend to surface these gaps before an investigator does, which is the practical value of a speak up culture built on psychological safety. Where that is missing, the gap simply persists until an incident closes it, and the cost lands on whoever happened to be on shift. For anyone weighing an aviation career against this backdrop, the flight attendant career guide and the benefits of the job cover adjacent roles with similarly structured shift rules, and how airlines use behavioural interviews shows how heavily the sector screens for exactly this kind of judgement.

What should employers take from this?

That tolerated practice is a governance failure long before it is a disciplinary one. If a norm is widespread enough for an academic to describe it as not particularly unusual, the organisation has effectively been operating two rulebooks, and the workforce has been carrying the risk of the difference.

There are two honest ways to resolve that, and only two. Enforce the written rule consistently from the start, or change the written rule to match what the organisation actually wants and can staff. What does not work is leaving the gap open and closing it retroactively after an incident, because that transfers the entire consequence to individuals who were doing what their supervisors permitted.

Staffing is the uncomfortable half of this. Where over 40 percent of terminals were understaffed against target, flexibility is not a perk, it is the mechanism keeping a rota viable. Removing informal accommodation without fixing the underlying shortfall does not produce a safer operation, it produces the same shortfall with less give in it. The formal side of getting hours policy right sits in the overtime rules that decide when hourly tasks are legally compensable and in Labor Department guidance on overtime and bonus pay.

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People Also Asked

Q: What exactly is an early shove in air traffic control?

A: It is an industry term for controllers leaving before the end of their scheduled shift once their assigned duties are complete, described by controllers who spoke to Reuters. An aviation management academic told Inc. that leaving a little early when traffic is slow and a shift is ending is not particularly unusual, and that a supervisor would have made the decision to let the controllers leave.

Q: Why is the FAA treating this as fraud rather than a scheduling issue?

A: Because of how the conduct has been classified. According to CBS, the FAA is considering the action to be timecard fraud, which gives the agency reasonable grounds for firing. The review followed the LaGuardia collision on 22 March in which both pilots were killed, and officials say the early departures may have contributed to it.

Q: How short staffed is US air traffic control?

A: As of September 2024, over 40 percent of the 290 FAA controlled terminals were understaffed against the agency's own 85 percent staffing goal, with one hundred and eighteen facilities falling short and 32 of those staffed at 74.9 percent of target or less. The FAA employed 14,264 controllers in 2024, and attributes the gap partly to a training process that takes two to three years.

Know your rights before an informal norm becomes a formal problem. Metaintro tracks how hours, scheduling and enforcement rules are shifting across regulated industries, so you can see what your employer can actually hold you to. Create your free Metaintro profile to follow the roles and rules in your field.