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Worker shortages have cancelled one flight every three days on average in the last year, Airservices Australia has told a Senate hearing.

The government agency’s deputy CEO, Peter Curran , said Australia’s airports recorded 2,536 cancellations over the year to 31 August, of which 121 were attributed to Airservices. Sydney accounted for 103 of those.

Just this morning, the troubled airport recorded 14 inbound cancellations and more outbound cancellations, after some overnight staff were unavailable, Curran said. Airservices and airlines manage the shortage by delaying or cancelling flights.

Curran said Sydney had grown and now needed a team of 41 air traffic controllers, spread across the roster. It has 49 employed but eight are unavailable at the moment. Curran said:

double quotation mark When we have a bit of short-term sickness or unavailability, like we had last night, it makes it very difficult to recover.

Curran said retired staff had been asked to come back to work but some of them were “simply not interested”. He said there were about 1,100 air traffic controllers working across Australia and 91 would join in the coming year.

With more recruitment, Curran said Airservices would be able to enough on-call staff to cover two absences a day by March 2027.

double quotation mark It’s not an ironclad model, but it certainly reduces the likelihood of the sorts of issues that we’re having today.