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Comment by dankvectorz | Hacker News Reader

Air traffic controller here: we have a mandatory requirement age of 56.

And you can't even get hired -- by law -- if you're over 30 years old. It's absurd. The FAA is complaining that they don't have enough ATCs, but have done absolutely nothing to broaden the hiring pool.

"We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"

The 30 year maximum age for hiring is there to make sure controllers have enough time working to earn pension benefits before mandatory retirement.

Hiring someone older would be setting them up for a very bad time later in life.

Thats logic doesn't fly for any other profession

It's because no other profession has the combination of (1) forcing people out of a highly trained role so young (with no options to reuse those skills in any other roles - forcing folks to go have to go back to square one and get a new professional education to move anywhere else), along with (2) the peculiarities of a government pension.

Unless you overhaul the way government workers earn retirement, or we decide that it's safe to employ older air traffic controllers, any other choice would be highly exploitative.

Yes that logic applies.

Any federal law enforcement position has this. For example, for the FBI or the secret service, you must enter by 37 and retire by 56.

Shouldn't it be up to the individual to determine whether they want to take that bargain? What about those people who did well enough in their previous careers for retirement not to be a concern and desire a new technical challenge that serves the public?

If you can make an exception to the rules to force them to retire early, you can make an exception to the rules to let them earn pension benefits faster.

> Hiring someone older would be setting them up for a very bad time later in life.

If they spend 20 years there, and get 20 years worth of pension, what's the problem? They can combine it with whatever savings and pensions they had before being hired at 36.

Unless you're saying they don't get any pension, in which case stop screwing people over that way and cut the pension qualification to 5 years or less.

I've heard that the bottleneck is apparently the the number of students that can be admitted to the FAA Academy to be trained, not the number of applicants.

I don't know what the state of the art is, but in the 2010s there was a huge mess where a 'biographical evaluation' test was required of ATC applicants, with the timing such that you took it after the FAA prep courses. The evaluation was thinly veiled racism, utterly uncorrelated with ATC performance, and one of the big outcomes was that anyone taking the prep courses was very likely to get weeded out by the biographical evaluation and thus suffer a total loss of his time and financial investment in the course.

So ,that was another problem they were causing themselves in manning.

Edited to add documentation: https://kaisoapbox.github.io/projects/faa_biographical_asses...

The real reason is that pilots work in shitty conditions and their education is expensive. And skills are not transferable making it all pretty bad deal.

We're discussing ATCs, not pilots. (And pilots are frequently hired after the age of 30.)

That's gotta be a pretty well-studied number.

It isn't. Whether you're forced to retire should be calibrated to the individual's capabilities, not based on a statistical calculation.

Assessments of individuals can be gamed. Hard objective limits cannot.

It's really difficult to game timed and proctored aptitude tests. We've refined these systems pretty well over time. I can't imagine how anyone would game a test like, say, the LSAT unless they had the answers in advance or fraudulently substituted someone to take the test for them. And both cases are pretty easy to detect nowadays.

Why on earth does anyone actually go into that career?

Retiring at 56 with a pension sounds pretty good to me.

From a somewhat low-paying job that has no transferable skills? How big is the pension? If it's not nearly as large as the person's prior paycheck, it doesn't sound like a good deal at all.

You have a really strong union.

You are joking, right? You cannot seriously claim that NATCA is anything but a paper tiger if you knew anything about the history of ATC unionization in the USA. President Regan fired all 11,000 members of the actual strong ATC union, PATCO, and barred them from government jobs for life. NATCA never bothered to negotiate their rights back. Some REALLY strong union.

https://libraries.uta.edu/news-events/blog/1981-patco-strike

They collect pensions in their 50's. I'm not sure what metric you judge a union by, but most people look at things like pay and medical and when they collect pensions.

> I'm not sure what metric you judge a union by

Their ability to collectively bargain effectively. It doesn’t matter how good their current compensation is - they aren’t getting the fair market rate without the ability to bargain as a union. Its an example of government and corporate interests colluding to suppress labor wages.

They make 6 figures with great benefits and retire young. By exactly how much are air traffic controllers being underpaid by market standards?

https://www.faa.gov/jobs/career_fields/aviation_careers

https://www.faa.gov/jobs/working_here/benefits

Median pay is $127,805 and by law the salary is capped at $221,900. Training salary starts at under $67,000 in the Bay Area and is much lower elsewhere. They can't strike and are actively being outsourced. Look up the KSQL controller on youtube to see how well that's going.

They have an incredibly valuable and high stress job, and should be compensated appropriately. We don’t know their actual value, because as stated, they are not allowed to negotiate on even terms thanks to Ronald Reagan and the conservative anti-labor movement.

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