WASHINGTON — The National Transportation Safety Board has hired a record number of employees this year, which it says is leading to a significant decrease in the time needed to complete investigations.
The agency said it will have 433 employees on staff at the end of the current fiscal year, up from a previous high of 397 in August 2019. The NTSB hired 57 new employees last year and is on track to add 70 this year. The agency’s Office of Aviation Safety’s air traffic control division is fully staffed for the first time in seven years, and the number of investigators in the Office of Rail, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Investigations has been increased by nearly 50%. The increased staffing has helped reduce the number of pending investigations more than two years old from a high of 442 in February 2022 to zero by the end of this week.
“My vision for the NTSB is an agency where everything we do — from our investigations to our advocacy to our internal processes and procedures — advances our critical safety mission,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said in a press release. “The first step was to right-size our agency’s workforce, which had been stagnant for decades, because it is our people who will ensure the NTSB is a ‘mission-first’ agency for years to come.”
It would be nice if the NTSB investigators conducting questioning of persons involved in accidents are sufficiently knowledgeable with nuanced work procedures and practices as well as semantics unique to crafts to permit asking detailed questions not just in the language of the craft but in the nuances of job work routines and historic policies and practices to assure full understanding of work practices and allied instructions unique to the craft in question.
With all of the derail and collision events with railroads as of late, its no wonder they had to add staff.