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Comment by gottorf | Hacker News Reader

> The Federal Aviation Administration said in June that it would start mandatory monthly safety training sessions for air-traffic controllers across the U.S. after a spike in near misses.

> In the first two months of the year, eight incidents involving airliners on or near runways were rated by the FAA as a serious risk of a collision or prompted the NTSB to open an investigation. That’s almost double the annual average for the previous five years.

What's going on in control towers that's causing this? Did hiring standards for ATCs drop all of a sudden, or something like that?

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A few things related to this incident... - The US allows landing clearance to be granted on occupied runways. It also allows landing clearance to planes who aren't next-to-land. This invites this sort of problem and, IIRC, isn't normal (or allowed?) in the EU.

- This particular ATC seems to be overloaded/distracted. She spend a lot of time providing adjusted altitudes to a waiting plane, while leave the SWA jet lined-up without clearance to take-off and a line of other planes on approach (two of which she had issued landing clearance).

Is this happening more often, or are recent events a random fluke? I don't know.

Not sure why this is being upvoted. ICAO doesn't expressly forbid line up and wait clearances with someone on final approach. In fact they're quite common in the EU. They're often conditional though (eg; "BEHIND the landing aircraft".) Pilots can mistake the aircraft being referred to, etc.

In general conditional type clearances have always been somewhat sketchy especially at busy airports where workloads are high.

You're correct, EASA allows conditional clearances ("clear to land after departing plane clears runway"). But the linked event was not a conditional clearance. The approaching jet was cleared to land, meanwhile the ATC got distracted and left the SWA jet on the active runway without clearance to take-off.

IIRC, EASA requires the conditional to be explicit, with the condition named and read back, and both ATC and cleared plane to have visual on the conditional aircraft.

Pick one or several:

* Air traffic controller scabs during Reagan years are all retiring.

* Difficulty attracting and training new air traffic controllers, which takes years to do the training and is a high burnout job.

* Widespread effects of a virus that often causes cognitive damage, fatigue, and/or outright disability in many that's been circulating for almost 4 years.

I've also heard it suggested that there was a lull in traffic during COVID that might have made people lose their edge.

Not to mention how many of them could be suffering long COVID (perhaps without even recognizing it).

I find it odd that you're basically reiterating my third point and yet you're the one getting downvotes, presumably because you actually used the "C" word. The level of denial about mass disablement (temporary, semi-temporary, or permanent) just gets more and more ridiculous.

Downvotes are sometimes given to short comments that don't add anything extra to the thread. That might be the case here as your original comment was quite clear.

Also seems that this is one of the easiest jobs to automate in the future. Keep planes from running into each other. How hard could that be? If a computer can drag a 9-dan Go champion up and down the board, it can do this.

I'm sure I'll be told differently any minute now, but... if I were a young person looking for a career, ATC is going to be very far down the list. Concerns about future automation will become a self-fulling prophecy once no humans are available to do the job.

In the video of the incident linked elsewhere there is a caption that basically says that an automated system is what notified the controller there was an issue and probably why she was able to correct it at the last second.

Ah yes I can't wait until some LLM instructs a plane to go to a runway that doesn't exist, and the pilot can't ask for clarification because the airport fired all the humans because "we don't need them"

Hmm, that doesn't sound like an optimal implementation. Can you think of any other approaches for handling air traffic (no pun intended) besides using AI language models?

Critical staffing shortages at ATC https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/critical-...

It's a tough job that typically requires intense focus and rotation very very very regularly. Like 20mn to 2 hours "on frequency" at a time, depending on the airport and how busy it is. Working people long and hard, they are bound to make mistakes eventually.

Honestly, given that you're seeing labor shortages in just about every industry, I have to imagine that labor shortages probably play a role in ATC being overworked?

Can anyone comment on this? It feels like a more believable explanation given they wouldn't be immune, especially given it's such a high stress job.

They also have a mandatory retirement age (56) and afaik, a lot of the more seasoned ATCs are getting near that age. Article from 2014 that touches on this, and goes into more depth about some reasoning.

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/15/blame-the-faa-for-air-traffi...

Edit: missed the part about the tower controllers specifically, but the below still holds I think.

Partner is a FA, and can confirm that just about every department is understaffed and overworked. Unions can't strike due to Railway Labor Act and the current contracts under negotiations have been going for 2+ years...in which a lot has changed in the industry. There is little light at the end of the tunnel and my fear is that it will take one or more catastrophic incidents before something is actually done.

Here's a report the Dept of Transportation released a couple months ago: https://www.oig.dot.gov/library-item/39530

I haven't read it in full yet, the "What We Found" section seems to focus on training being paused during covid and a general lack of organization-wide tools and visibility around staffing.

I found that from this Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2023/06/26...

The Forbes article suggests the problem began with the 2013 federal budget fight and resulting sequestration, which cut some programs and eliminated others.

> What's going on in control towers that's causing this? Did hiring standards for ATCs drop all of a sudden, or something like that?

There was a fairly major change recently [1]. Before 2014, the FAA used to be biased towards recruits that had been already trained in a program on someone else's dime (military or university). Perhaps their on-the-job training isn't quite good enough to compensate for that change yet.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_traffic_controller#2014_ch...

What does safety training look like for an ATC? Isn’t that their entire job?

It's a decline in hiring standards due to other factors than how high you score on the tests being considered.

Since it’s government they can’t raise wages to attract talent so they keep going lower and lower down in standards until at some point they can’t even find people to meet the required minimum

I was under the impression ATC's made good money, like 6 figures easily?

That could be true and still not be good-money-for-the-work-and-stress.

The mean annual wage is $130,840 according to the BLS. That's two times the national mean of $61,900. There are very few occupations where the mean can compete with Air Traffic Control in terms of take home pay.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes532021.htm

They make good money but the job is super duper stressful and has long hours afaik.

They do make good money, and there's no evidence to support the claim that training or acceptance standards have been diminished at all.

The underlying issue is public roles are heavily budget restricted. If the role pays well, administrators often have to reduce headcount as the trade off.

Median salary in the US is near $130,000.

Starting pay is in the $43-$65,000 range (before location adjustments). In DC, that range is $57-$86,000.

Top of the range, non-management is $104-$161,000 (before location). In DC, that range is $138-$212,000.

Salary spreadsheet can be found here: https://www.faa.gov/jobs/working_here/benefits

That’s not that much money anymore for high stress low quality of life work. UPS driver and railroad worker wages are in the same range And people don’t really want those jobs either

From UPS's website, the average package delivery driver earns $140k in total comp (incl. benefits). The average long-haul driver is $170k.

Some high school friends drive for UPS (local package trucks). It's a solid income, but it's not a walk in the park either. They have quotas to meet. And late Fall through late Winter is a mad-house. That said, I believe they're union and both will be retiring well before me.

https://about.ups.com/us/en/our-company/great-employer.html

There's also the stress it puts on your body. How many UPS drivers do you see that are 50 or older?

Yep, that's what I meant by "it's not a walk in the park" - it's physically demanding labor. My friends are mid-40s, it will be interesting to see when they retire.

One job is sitting in a chair in an air-conditioned room using your brain to track detailed information.

The UPS job is literally done by people in the top decile of physical fitness in the USA who are moving continuously and are so regimented that there's a "proper" way to carry the keys to the truck.

They're not really comparable in many ways.

> there's a "proper" way to carry the keys to the truck

That's a rule developed out of accident analysis, UPS drivers are trained to put the keys in their pocket as the first step of many procedures so that it becomes habit and they don't leave the truck running or create any possibility that someone will start it while the driver is away from the driver's seat.

I was referring to the "hold the keyring on the pinky finger" method but just read that UPS now has key fobs which the driver attaches to the belt, saving 2 seconds per stop...

Slightly unrelated, but my brother is working at UPS now and is making decent income. He went to a coding bootcamp 2 years ago and has had absolutely no luck finding a front end web dev position. I'm just glad he has a stable and well paying job for now, though I hope he finds his way to doing something else that's more sustainable for him, especially since he is beginning to have issues with his back. Maybe his best bet is finding a web dev job (or a dev job in general) within the company itself, since usually inside hires are preferred.

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