Building the controllers of the next decade: ENAIRE’s Air Traffic Controller recruitment programme

Last year, CANSO and I talked about how ENAIRE gets ready for the busy European summer travel season. One idea came up again and again: capacity is built long before summer arrives. And the most important part of that capacity is people. Technology, airspace design and flow management all matter a great deal, but none of them add a single extra flight without trained air traffic controllers (ATCOs) in the room. This time I want to talk not about one summer, but about ENAIRE’s ongoing long-term work to recruit and train the controllers Spain will need over the next ten years.

Demand that keeps growing

The situation is straightforward. In 2025, ENAIRE managed 2,470,604 flights, an all-time record. That was 4.7% more than in 2024, and almost 15% above the levels we saw before the pandemic. Traffic in Spanish airspace has been growing faster than the European average, with double-digit growth in the years right after the pandemic. We manage 2.2 million square kilometres of airspace from five control centres and 21 control towers, and the European summer peaks are remarkable: each summer we break our all-time daily traffic record on dozens of days.

Demand like this cannot be met with quick fixes. It needs a workforce plan that looks ahead at retirements, at traffic growth, and at how long it takes to train a controller. You cannot close a capacity gap in a single season, because the people you hire today will not be ready to work for two or three years. So the key is to recruit steadily and continuously, staying ahead of demand.

A programme, not a one-off campaign

That is exactly what we have built. At ENAIRE, recruitment is now a regular, ongoing programme rather than an occasional campaign. In November 2025 we launched our most recent call, for 149 new air traffic control positions. That came after the call for 158 positions in late 2024. Taken together, these calls show a clear, year-on-year rhythm. In the two years up to 2025 alone, we created more than 300 new controller positions, and since 2021 the total is over 460.

This is not new for us. Between 2016 and 2022, ENAIRE ran six recruitment calls and brought in 665 professionals, that is more than 38% of our controller workforce renewed in that period. Kept up over a decade, this approach renews the workforce, replaces those who retire and adds the extra capacity that traffic growth demands. It is the difference between reacting to a shortage and preventing one.

From application to the operations room

Hiring the numbers is only the first step, and in many ways the easier one. A controller’s real value comes from training. Safety, capacity and efficiency all rest on having highly skilled professionals in the room, and that level of skill is not bought in a recruitment call, it is built, carefully, over years.

The people who join us either already hold a controller or student controller licence, or they complete an initial specialised training course before they are qualified to control traffic. After that comes unit training at the centre or tower where they will work, often the longest and most demanding stage. Only when a controller is fully qualified on a specific cluster do they add capacity there. Every group that completes this journey is a group that increases what our centres and towers can safely handle. There are no shortcuts, and rightly so: in this profession, the standard cannot be lowered to meet a deadline.

The reason we focus on the long term is that this training pipeline takes a fixed amount of time. The money we put into a 2025 recruitment call becomes real capacity in 2027 and 2028. Planning that far ahead is the only way to make sure that capacity matches traffic, not just next summer season in Europe, but every year.

The challenge: training in an airspace that never goes quiet

Building and maintaining this skill is harder than it sounds, and the difficulty is growing. Training a controller, whether a newcomer or an experienced one keeping their qualifications current, must happen alongside live operations, and competes directly for the same scarce resource: time on position with traffic.

The biggest challenge is that Spanish airspace no longer has real off-peaks. Traffic used to fall away enough in the off-season and during quieter parts of the day to create natural windows for training. With demand now close to 2.5 million flights a year and growing above the European average, those windows have shrunk. The quiet periods that once made it easy to release a controller for instruction, or to put a trainee on position next to a mentor, are far rarer than they were.

At the same time, training is not optional and it never stops. On top of the long initial and unit training for newcomers, every operational controller must complete mandatory annual training, refresher courses, emergency and unusual-situation exercises, simulator sessions and competency checks, etc. to keep their licence and ratings valid. This recurrent training is essential to safety, but it pulls experienced controllers off live positions exactly when traffic is high and when we most need them there. Recruitment, initial training and mandatory yearly training therefore all compete for the same limited hours in the operations room and on the simulators.

This is why workforce planning at ENAIRE is about far more than headcount. We have to recruit ahead of demand, protect enough capacity to train new controllers properly, and at the same time guarantee that every serving controller completes their required annual training, all in an operation that barely slows down. Getting that balance right, year after year, is one of the hardest and most important things we do.

I should be clear that recruitment does not work on its own. New airspace procedures, new technical and operational tools in our air traffic management system, and advanced flow-management tools are all important for getting the most out of the 2026-2031 ENAIRE Capacity Plan presented at EUROCONTROL.

A well-staffed operation with poor equipment will still struggle; a well-equipped operation that is short of staff simply cannot open the sectors. The two must move forward together and that is exactly why workforce planning sits at the heart of how we think about capacity.

Part of a clear strategy

None of this is improvised. Strengthening our controller workforce was already part of our 2025 Flight Plan, and it will get fresh momentum in our current 2030 Strategic Plan. The logic is consistent: give ENAIRE the people it needs to meet steady, post-pandemic demand, while we keep modernising the system around them. Recruitment, training, technology and airspace design are four parts of one capacity strategy and the controller programme is the part that gives the others something to work with.

If I had to leave CANSO’s audience with one message, it is this: the capacity for the next decade is being decided now, in recruitment calls and training schools, not in the operations room during a heatwave in August. ENAIRE’s ATCO recruitment programme is our commitment to staying ahead of that curve: recruiting continuously, training to a high standard, and making sure that as Spanish and European traffic keeps growing, the people to manage it safely are already in place.