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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

https://www.businessinsider.com/becoming-air-traffic-control...

https://libraryonline.erau.edu/online-full-text/faa-aviation...

> All ATC applicants must be 30 or younger on the closing date of the application period to qualify for the position, according to the FAA. This is because the agency has determined through extensive research that the older someone is, the harder is it for them to complete the rigorous training.

Having sat with a controller for an hour while they managed Midwest airspace (ARTCC ZAU) in my younger years, I am somewhat inclined to believe it.

EDIT: Pilots had mandated retirement at 60, which was bumped to 65 in 2007 due to pilot shortages, and there are discussions of pushing it to 67.

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/senators-...

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Not ATC but recently obtained my pilots license at the ripe old age of 41 and trained at the busiest class delta in the US. 30 year old age limit seems pretty restrictive .

Implying flying planes is the same as controlling is kinda wrong.

Are you a pilot or ATC? They’re different, but you build a visual representation of traffic in your brain in both arenas. As a pilot you cannot rely on ATC- you have to fly the plane first and keep yourself safe.

Not the GP but I've been a pilot for about 6 years and have friends who are controllers, and being a controller is entirely different, and pretty difficult.

You can fly VFR without services and you really only have to worry about yourself. There's no equivalent as an ATC. You're often working multiple frequencies on your own. Even if you don't typically do it on your own, if your coworkers gets sick now you are. I've had friends manage two tower frequencies as well as ground due to staffing issues.

Not to mention the fact that when you become a controller it's much like the military where you get assigned a place and you go there. You get preferences of course, but there's only so many suburban airport controllers needed - somebody needs to be in JFK tower and somebody needs to be in the middle of nowhere Montana and they're not flying in for their shift the way pilots can.

I'm inclined to trust the FAA's data that it's just not feasible to dump training resources into someone who statistically is either not going to make it or is going to quit if they don't get their preferred assignment and find out they need to move their family to Utah.

Pilot but trained for ATC in my 20s.

I assure you the mental picture you need to keep in your head as a controller is far more taxing than single pilot operation when you are primarily concerned with your own separation. A controller can be managing a 1 to 2 dozen aircraft, dealing with pop up IFR, flight following, traffic advisories, handoffs, etc. There's a reason you get a mandatory break after 2 hours.

It's not about the mental task. It's about selecting for a demgoraphic group that's more compliant and less likely to take risks. They want to lessen their chances of having egg on their face because they hired some young cowboy who, when faced with some impossible set of bureaucratic constraints decided he'd shirk whichever one of the conflicting restraints they didn't like rather than just take the KPI hit.

The under 30 crowd has a lot more of those types than the over 30 crowd.

This can't be the reasoning because the policy is to select /for/ under-30s, not over-30s.

After Reagan fired all the controllers in the 80s Clinton allowed for them to come back in the 90s. The washout rate of folks coming back was super high from what I recall (part of that is also probably due to increased traffic load).

Who was doing controlling the air space in between those times?

US military filled some of it up (air force and navy are two big training pipelines for controlling).

Then a lot of new hiring afterwards.

According to the Wikipedia:

On August 5, following the PATCO workers' refusal to return to work, the Reagan administration fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order, and banned them from federal service for life. In the wake of the strike and mass firings, the FAA was faced with the difficult task of hiring and training enough controllers to replace those that had been fired. Under normal conditions, it took three years to train new controllers. Until replacements could be trained, the vacant positions were temporarily filled with a mix of non-participating controllers, supervisors, staff personnel, some non-rated personnel, military controllers, and controllers transferred temporarily from other facilities. PATCO was decertified by the Federal Labor Relations Authority on October 22, 1981. The decision was appealed but to no avail, and attempts to use the courts to reverse the firings proved fruitless.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...

that's a very roundabout of sayin that is because older people are much harder to trick into working with disregard to their own health. then again, younger people by virtue of their youth can overwork a lot more than older people (who will also notice they're being overworked)

That smells like illegal age discrimination for any other employer.

Age discrimination is illegal only if it does not materialy impact performance.

Try to get a job in the NBA or any other sports team in your '40s and see what happens.

NBA doesn’t have a public disclaimer saying “only people under the age of 30 have the possibility of joining” though

If you can play basketball like a pro, you’ll get in no matter how old you are.

I guarantee that if some 50-year-old guy tried out and they found he could play better than Michael Jordan in his prime, they'd take him.

Of course, this is extremely unlikely, and he might have a hard time getting in front of the right people to prove himself.

Pro sports doesn't have age limitations that I'm aware of; it's all entirely performance-related. People who can't perform don't get new contracts, regardless of their age, and of course as people get older (and accumulate more sports injuries), they become less competitive.

> as people get older (and accumulate more sports injuries), they become less competitive.

I don't think they wait for you to get injured. Before signing you on, they surely require you to pass some physical examinations first. Old people are unlikely to pass those psychicals regardless of how good they are at basketball, since their bones and joints are relatively weaker and therefore more susceptible to injury. What's the point of hiring the world's greatest basketball player if he'll break a hip the first time he falls? If a player has an unusually high risk of being severely injured, then it doesn't make sense to sign them in the first place. Doing so would be tragic and exploitative.

Anyway, the oldest NBA player ever was 45, and there have only ever been 7 who played past 42. Michael Jordan retired at 40 years and 58 days, and that was notably old. A player at 50 who makes the cut is basically fantasy.

>since their bones and joints are relatively weaker and therefore more susceptible to injury.

Regular 50-year-olds, sure. But if they find some genetic mutant who looks like he's 25 even though he's 60, and passes all the physical tests as well as a 25-year-old, age isn't going to be a factor.

Meanwhile, over in the aviation field, that same genetic mutant would be unable to become a pilot purely because of his age.

Right? Can I do this at my company?

Will customers at your company die if you make a mistake? I do not support age discrimination (roughly around 40), but also want to survive my flights, medical procedures, and anything else where age impacting ability intersects with life safety. A tricky balance for sure.

The military has some rough age bands as well: https://www.usa.gov/military-requirements

Maybe dial back the age restriction with strong workload automation around airspace situational awareness and routing?

Is there documented scientific evidence demonstrating that pilots, surgeons, etc over 40 crash more with statistical significance? 50? 70? I’m sure there is a date when that does happen, but if you are going to be slapping age related restrictions on everyone, you had better come in with guns blazing on your numbers demonstrating that statistically this is bad for society

In short, yes. It's an evidence-based qualification. FAA takes this stuff seriously.

Cool. Makes sense. Where is the evidence that was used to make this determination and the document released by FAA using that evidence to make said determination?

two comments above this one?

The “two comments above this one” you reference didn’t exist when I made the original comment

Its easy to find. This tone suggests that the person's argument is somehow invalid because they reference easy to find documents without linking them. Perhaps this isn't the intent, but it reads to me as combative, which seems unnecessary.

There's lots of room to nitpick the evidence, but the studies are published:

> The relationship between age and job performance for Air Traffic Control Specialists (ATCSs) is an issue that has been revisited many times over the past few decades (Trites, 1961; Trites & Cobb, 1962; Cobb, 1968; VanDeventer & Baxter, 1984). Researchers have consistently found a negative relationship between controller age and performance across studies that have used different ATCS options (enroute, terminal), career stages (age at entry into training,current age on the job), and criterion measures (on-the-job ratings, academy performance) (Trites, 1961;Trites & Cobb, 1962; Cobb, 1968; VanDeventer & Baxter, 1984).

Via https://www.tc.faa.gov/its/worldpac/techrpt/AM99-18.pdf

Thank you! This is the kind of data and study I was looking for. In this rather large thread you are the only one as of the time of this posting actually answering the original question I asked, “why does the rule exist?”

I don’t really see a problem with discrimination like this in this context as long as there is a well published scientific background of studies demonstrating why it makes sense, and there aren’t confounding variables (like a history of discrimination) that would skew the results. In this case it looks legitimate and well studied.

My only beef/complaint otherwise is that these papers should be front and center on the application page explaining why only 30 and unders are accepted.

Haha. Yes.

In one of my jobs I was responsible for a tank of Acrolein which if it vented to atmosphere would kill 150,000 people in New a Orleans.

Can I get some mechanical protections and peer review in there?

Sure. It was kept under conditions where if it was exposed to atmosphere it would immediately auto ignite and explode, obliterating about 10% of the chemical plant.

As a safety precaution.

Explosion was the desirable alternative because the products of combustion were far less harmful.

Will customers at your company die if you make a mistake?

This is pretty true across all sorts of industries.

Like guess where a lot of product recalls come from. Or consider some of the reasons that structures fail.

>Will customers at your company die if you make a mistake?

This is the dumbest distinguishing point you could think of. Have you heard of hospitals?

Many hospitals screen older doctors (or all doctors) for their continued ability to perform.

https://undark.org/2020/06/24/mandatory-screening-older-phys...

Unlike the government, you can be sued.

> Unlike the government, you can be sued.

The government can be sued for age discrimination in employment in violation of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babb_v._Wilkie

> That smells like illegal age discrimination for any other employer.

Sure. But that's the benefit of wearing the crown.

The government also gets to run IQ tests[1] on many prospective employees, which would be illegal in the private sector due to the 4/5ths rule.

---

1. https://www.officialasvab.com/

The private sector basically can't give IQ tests but can give work-related skill tests that are extremely similar IQ tests.

"LeetCode" tests famous on HN are one example.

> The private sector basically can’t give IQ tests

False.

> but can give work-related skill tests that are extremely similar IQ tests.

Legally, the conditions in which the private sector can give work-related skills tests that are extremely similar to IQ tests are when they fulfill the exact same requirements with regard to those tests that they would need to fill with regard to IQ tests to be able to legally give them; if they are functionally very similar, the circumstances in which they will satisfy those conditions will also be very similar.

The fact that the case establishing the rule on disparate impact discrimination involved (among other hiring practices) the use of IQ testing doesn’t mean that the disparate impact rule applies differently to IQ testing than to other “extremely similar” tests.

> Sure. But that’s the benefit of wearing the crown.

Except its not, see, e.g., the Supreme Court decision in Babb v. Wilkie (2020).

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-882_3ebh.pdf

Wikipedia article, for those not vested in legalese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babb_v._Wilkie

> Section 633 of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 permits federal employees to sue over any adverse personnel action that is influenced by age, even if age was not the determinating factor.

It's legal age discrimination because they've determined it to be a BFOQ.

I can buy this defense if they have a reasonable justification for this determination published somewhere publically (via court documents or otherwise). Do they? This isn’t something that we just take their word for it.

You're acting like this is some new development (presumably because you just now learned about it), but it's been this way since forever. If it were legally dodgy, then why hasn't it been challenged in court and torn apart? Because you're the first to be offended by it, or because it isn't dodgy and the FAA are on firm ground? The latter. Age limits for pilots and ATC are textbook examples of BFOQs.

> This isn’t something that we just take their word for it.

If you want to hit the books, knock yourself out. I am perfectly content to take the FAA's word for it, and think you'd be wasting your time.

How is age (regardless of ability) a qualification?

Why can't they give an entrance test?

As you get older, your cognitive throughput is going to decrease.

They want to train you up in the money zone and then give you the boot before you decline past a certain point and cause a disaster.

Right on. At least they give a reasoning. It does feel kind of arbitrary but maybe they had a history of older applicants failing abysmally. It would be nice if that is the case that they would actually make said research public information. If you are going to blanket exclude a group on possibly shaky legal grounds (age is a protected class) you had better have some data and explanation to back it up. Even then with the data it feels more appropriate to say something like “<1% of applicants over 30 succeed, we strongly discourage you from applying”, rather than just saying “sorry, you can’t apply at all because you’re over 30”

Only age 40 or older is a protected class in the US.

https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/discrimination/agedisc

Sure, but that means if I’m age 30-39 and wanting to be an ATC, im not legally protected, but the second I turn age 40, all of my above arguments apply. So basically the same argument as above, but also pointing out that in the context of ATC, there’s this weird situation where people aged 30-39 don’t have as much recourse to argue against something clearly illegal

Why is it clearly illegal for <40?

ATC mandatory retirement age is still 56.

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