Over 90% of U.S. airport towers are understaffed, data shows
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For this kind of staff, it is not just a matter of "training", it is way more demanding.
There is no choice but to do the alternative: modify and modernise all our critical systems piecemeal over decades while they are running, covered by the business cliche "We are building the plane, while flying it."
We all naively desire (especially politicians) the software concept of the big rewrite, the version 2, project phoenix, Second-System Syndrome. With development experience we learn both the psychological pull of the concept and we learn why it is so hard to do successfully. It always seems so simple how to fix societal systems we have no experience with.
Successful systems slowly improve, slowly introduce and prove new ideas, slowly accrete changes: we accept the costs of vestigial path-dependent aspects and technical debt.
One of the incredible learning experiences of developing software systems is that it is a huge melting pot of different techniques that are iterated quickly (fast parallel evolution and proving) and the knowledge diffuses between people and teams and organisations. The waterfall model is rarely used! I believe we are now seeing those skills and techniques be applied to other system domains - especially high growth businesses.
They had 1 tower with 1 operator and no redundancy at a fairly busy airport, which is definitely concerning.
in this case it seems like it could definitely have been solved by tech. both aircraft were traveling at predictable paths and opertating nominally.
You could argue that helicopters, being very nimble craft, should have ADS-B receivers and provide display and sound their own collision warnings to their pilots. That's perfectly possible, I just don't think it's mandated
Doing something to distribute information differently could result in redundancy such that if the commercial craft have a 1-3 mile ADS-B view around them, they can check that ATC isn't giving them bad instructions and that others are following directions.
Why couldn't it be? We need fewer ATC than we need pilots, by a long shot. The actual requested new hires for ATC is in the range of 2k (with 1k expected to stay on staff).
With roughly a 120k salary, and assuming all 2k stay on-board that's what, an additional $200mil needed to fully fund?
Meanwhile, the airline industry had a $30b net profit, so it doesn't look like this is even something that'd bankrupt the industry if we taxed them to cover the costs of ATC. It's a 1% tax that's needed.
Even with a super duper fancy modernized system, we'd still want towers staffed sufficiently. Having just 1 person there is a problem even if everything is super modernized. When an issue comes up that the system can't or isn't handling well that's 1 person to make all the calls. Hopefully 2 things aren't happening and hopefully they don't need or want a second opinion.
As for hiring competent people, the DC metro has 6.3 million people. I find it really hard to believe there's not 3 more in the area that could handle being an ATC operator.
And it's not like we don't already have 99% of the existing buildings, infrastructure, and computers already setup. It's literally just the personnel that's lacking.
They might be capable, but why would they want to?
"Why couldn't it be?"
Things like coordination and communication in high traffic environments don't scale well. Finding efficiencies in the procedures and systems can eliminate potential miscommunication and missed handoffs.
"And it's not like we don't already have 99% of the existing buildings, infrastructure, and computers already setup. It's literally just the personnel that's lacking."
Actually only some airports have been upgraded while others are waiting. Do you think another person would have prevented this incident? From the recordings and facts so far, it doesn't seem like it.
Already exists, it's called TCAS
https://www.twz.com/news-features/heres-what-air-traffic-col...
So there's already tracking on a map that's available to the pilots. During landing, pilots are looking outside and not glued to their instruments.
The real issue is trying to cram too much aircraft in such a small space and time.
They accept public comments so all of the armchair aviation experts on HN should probably send them an email and explain how they can solve all the problems by connecting ChatGPT to a controller console.
For commerce tech, you switch, see what breaks, switch back and adjust for next try. You may have lost some sales. But probably just inconvenienced people.
When doing travel systems, something breaking is likely a lot of deaths.
There was also a lot of resistance to the idea that every aircraft should broadcast its position, heading, etc. because of privacy concerns. And as long as there are holdouts the tower can't rely on the information being available
Look at the railroad development in EU for example. You have to invent a lot of tech (signaling, communication between trains, interoperability with old systems), build a lot of infrastructure, train a lot of people and roll it out at scale with the goal of zero accidents.
It is just impossible to do quickly.
How realistic is it to have ATC performed by an AI?
Not very. For safety-critical systems, you probably want something deterministic, and doesn't break when faced with novel situations.
Solvers are probably a better solution than ML approaches, but they can't capture every possible constraint, such as airplane that can only make left-handed turns because of equipment failure.
Humans are not deterministic and can break for many reasons. It's not plausible that an AI could handle "route this aircraft for landing without any right turns" ?
Yes. Humans can also self-evaluate about their state, and have culpability. It not surprising that non-humans are held to a different standard.
It's not always that simple, but sometimes it is. Not everyone could do it, but a lot of people could. You just have to pay them to attract them from more lucrative jobs (which includes training them to do it).
Instead they'll pay as little as they can, and occasionally pay to replace an aircraft.
It's really not that simple.
It's a 3-year training process.
There's really nothing that's going to get you adequately staffed in the short term.
Sure, that could solve the problem medium term.
Long-term political will isn’t there, so if the problem can’t be fixed quickly, it’s as if there is no possible solution.
ATC staffing problems did not just appear this week. The FAA is limited by Congress in how to deploy its budget towards recruitment.
Congress passed a bill earlier in 2024 authorizing the FAA to hire at the maximum capacity possible (https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/05/faa-will-soon-be-a...). Action is possible.
We've known since the initial post-COVID travel bump that the FAA was short on controllers - these could have been addressed potentially as early as late 2022.
Infact a 2-3 year timeframe is absolutely short enough to count as "short term". Thats within an election cycle.
Here's an article about the air-controller shortage, from 2014: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/15/blame-the-faa-for-air-traffi...
Here's more! from 2008: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna22917202
Here's a substack post from last year, talking about a legal case spanning back a decade and how, what do you know, DEI is actually involved in this whole fiasco to a tiny degree: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
It's impossible, completely impossible to in good faith blame any one actor on this issue, this goes way too far back.
And while controllers were not fired (we think), apparently most/all of them got an email saying they may be laid off at any time without notice, so they should accept buyouts and quit[1], which might impact absenteeism and commitment.
1. https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-admin-emails-air-traffic-19...
Pay is a huge part of it, so it really is that simple.
Qualified people are choosing not to even apply anymore because the pay is no longer competitive with other high-paying jobs that don't destroy you mentally and physically, or have a complicated hiring process like ATC does.
Funding sadly is probably better handled as a tax on the people rather than the industry simply because ATCs protect more than just commercial crew and passengers, and more than just their home country.
So those pilots. Even their new pilots (First Officers) make more per hour than ATC.
(ATC here, opinions are my own and not that of the FAA.)
Developers can always fix their mistakes. Very, very few would even even possibly result in the loss of life. I'd think pay for controllers should be much higher, but like anything it is subject to economics. If people are willing to do it for $X, then that is what it will pay.
Whereas a field like tech almost requires stimulant use now. Maybe good peak pay, but no job security there anymore though.
Maybe if they apply for ATC they just don't disclose that, but I imagine if they do, it will be scrutinized.
What a "3-year training process" and the fact that accidents come at random does is create a grace period for profiteering. They would neither get a fast enough return on investments in staff, nor see fast enough losses from disasters resulting from staffing neglect, to see any problem with both not investing in staff and with finding savings in neglect.
Problems during the transition period between starting to do the right thing and when you will see the effects of that thing are good problems to have. They go away by themselves.
I can’t agree with that at all. I would never treat a crisis as less urgent because other people in the past did not treat the contributory factors urgently enough.
Lack of urgency in the past is a sunk cost. It’s silly to evaluate urgency today on that basis.
I can't be ATC anymore because I'm too old. I can't even start. That age limit needs to change.
And yes, more pay.
Sure, you'd need to train such foreign candidates in US regulations, but that ought to be a far shorter route. And I'm sure the US could afford to get half of the ATCs from $FOREIGN_COUNTRY with such a proposition. (For countries where a desire to live in the US is common, that is).
While that is totally not done wrt that foreign country: 1. Money+employment conditions could alleviate the problem significantly; 2. something flamebaity.
That's never going to happen. Americans have reached the "drown it in a bathtub" phase of their contempt for government. All of the air traffic controllers will be replaced by ChatGPT agents before more are hired, much less paid a cent more. And if the planes crash, they crash.
Federal workers have just been told to leave:
The US federal government is one of the largest employers in the world (or the largest, depending exactly how you decide to measure), what is relevant to one area isn't necessarily going to be relevant to every area.
That may be less sledgehammer-like when it comes to people whose jobs are obviously critical. But everyone else is on the chopping block, including quite a few whose absence will be noticed when people die.
Also, looking how twitter ia shell of itself and looking at Musk knowing even less about goverment ... it will fail spectacularly.
And after that fail, they will blame women and non-whites hard.
If one wants to complain about the perceived impacts the current administration as a whole will be having... well sure, there's always room for that. I'm talking about why the memo linked above doesn't seem related to the conversation it's in reply to though.
The FAA workers received this memo the morning after the DC crash: I'm sure it wasn't great for morale.
The FAA administrator that got pushed out my Mush was one year into a five year term: I'm not sure why he had to go. (Though he was in charge when the FAA fined SpaceX $600k for safety violations: related?)
Well, they got the e-mail about resigning the day after the DC plane crash, so that probably didn't help morale.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91270064/a-bay-area-airport-near...
Though this crash was probably just the helicopter flying the wrong altitude.
What led you to that belief? Air travel is one of the safest ways to get from here to there, and it’s widely enough used that clearly not very many people think it is too dangerous to use.
The current situation is also because a large clump of controllers were hired after the Reagan administration broke the ATC strike in 1981, and that giant clump of people is now reaching retirement age at the same time.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/21/business/airl... ("Airline Close Calls Happen Far More Often Than Previously Known" (2023))
- "But the most acute challenge, The Times found, is that the nation’s air traffic control facilities are chronically understaffed. While the lack of controllers is no secret — the Biden administration is seeking funding to hire and train more — the shortages are more severe and are leading to more dangerous situations than previously known."
- "As of May, only three of the 313 air traffic facilities nationwide had enough controllers to meet targets set by the F.A.A. and the union representing controllers, The Times found. Many controllers are required to work six-day weeks and a schedule so fatiguing that multiple federal agencies have warned that it can impede controllers’ abilities to do their jobs properly."
...
- "“The staffing shortage is beyond unsustainable. It has now moved into a phase of JUST PLAIN DANGEROUS,” one controller wrote to the F.A.A. last year in a confidential safety report that The Times reviewed."
- "“Controllers are making mistakes left and right. Fatigue is extreme,” the report continued. “The margin for safety has eroded tenfold. Morale is rock bottom. I catch myself taking risks and shortcuts I normally would never take.”"
https://thehill.com/regulation/transportation/4617992-buttig...
The FAA has a $5.20 tax per flight segment per passenger and a 7.5% ticket tax. The budget set by congress limits how much the FAA can spend on air traffic control, and the surplus (there is a surplus) goes into the AATF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_and_Airway_Trust_Fund
This is a direct cost of American austerity.
Air travel is orders of magnitude safer than the alternatives. According to the first result on google:
"In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles"
Even if the current administration's cuts made planes several times dangerous, it'd still be preferable than the alternative. The same applies to the recent panic about 737 MAX.
Moreover, I’m not sure if I give into the framing of your figures. According to google, a plane ride on average goes 500 miles, while an average car trip is 11 miles. I am not sure if I’m doing the math correctly, but I’m pretty sure an average plane ride is thus less safe than an average car trip.
Sure, you can argue that a road trip is less safe than the same flight distance as a plane — and I don’t think I would even disagree with making that the standard — but I think saying flying is safer across the board would require narrowing yourself to a more subjective definition for “safer” than your comment suggests.
During the day the only thing that was keeping those collisions from happening under 1000' was pilots seeing each other. At night the only thing keeping it from happening was luck.
The error is in allowing flightpaths to be so close to each other in distance and time.
That's not an example of why air travel is dangerous, that's an example of why air travel is safe.
No. The RPA4514 had the helicopter insight. Pilots are required to follow TCAS RA regardless of ATC instructions or if insight.
What makes you think they would have collided if TCAS hadn't alerted?
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
The fact that the incident you talk about was reported at all was exceptional.
Commercial airlines have different, far more strict regulations.
Granted, the question was hyperbolic, but you can address that hyperbole directly rather than just giving a canned generic response.
And, if for some reason it turns out that the FAA was doing a terrible job of DEI and somehow was trying to meet quotas, can we agree that we should fix the implementation, not just throw up our hands and say “I guess these jobs are whites-only”?
I'm sure this is true about the FAA, I have no reason to doubt you, but quotas are a very real part of DEI in other sectors and slots do stay open until they find a suitable quota-fitting candidate.
Our DEI training at my current work is "always hire the most qualified person for the job". And that's what it was at my previous job, as well.
I've worked at companies that do exactly this with quotas of a minimum number of underrepresented candidates who must be interviewed before filling the position, even if the positions all end up going to white or asian men.
It can take a very long time to fill a position under those rules.
I don't think this is a bad policy in principle, but an unintended consequence is often understaffing in the short to medium term.
If we’re entering any hypothetical it seems like we could say anything.
Feels like a marketing/PR issue where every complexity or downside is hidden.
There’s no magic solution.
I worked with a good technical support team that worked on some high end equipment, and regardless of education the ability to troubleshoot could be found regardless and … in spite of education.
In my current coding role I find myself saying “I don’t care if he used an html tag wrong, he anticipated a problem with several tickets and avoided them.” Just the will / ability to do that is so valuable.
There are literally people who are innately unable to do this (run mental simulations). I wonder what the percentage is though.
The culture of that factory was amazing.
Also very loyal / hard workers.
In every job I’ve had since then their resumes would have been tossed in the bin by HR, but they were hired in the late 90s when companies were desperate for warm bodies.
I agree those uncommon skills help make someone be a good controller.
Unfortunately I don't think the FAA is testing for that, of course the hiring process tests have changed since I was hired on.
(I hope someone from the FAA is reading this and tells CAMI. I was disappointed when there was no free text response on the survey they gave out a few weeks ago.)
It’s sad.
After going through the hiring process (application, test, drug screen, medical screening), they give you an academy start date and whether you'll be Terminal or En Route.
People who pass the Terminal training at the FAA Academy are given a list of low-level (lower pay) towers to choose from that are seemingly-random. It could be that there's a spot at a tower in your home town, but that spot is reserved for the class that graduates one week after your class, which means you can't go there, you have to take from the list you're given or quit (and some people do quit at this point).
Societies hiring norms are broken.
Everyone spends years at school before (a) being filtered by experts for aptitude, or (b) filtering themselves for fit. It is so sad to see teachers, lawyers, engineers, everyone waste years to discover they don't like a job or the job doesn't like them. The cost to society is percentage points of GDP.
Even worse is that nobody encourages us to quickly test different disciplines and discover unobvious fits. Internship or volunteer is the closest and requires me to do a lot of high-risk heavy lifting. Maybe I'd love being a teacher and maybe I'd be great at it. Who knows?
No, I don't want to be management. No, I don't want to have a hard job. I want to be a NEET basically. If I work I just work and go home anyway and watch YouTube.
I like to think of myself as a good troubleshooter and would probably have made a good police inspector or FAA analyst. I usually have good intuitions and find root causes pretty fast.
But -- I don't think I would survive two minutes as an air controller even if my life depended on it. This is the job I probably feel the least able to do and the one that impresses me the most. Not just the pressure, but the ability to hold so much information in one's head at the same time, and hold a conversation with many different people talking to you from moving objects which you need to understand the exact location of, switching context constantly -- that's crazy.
Kind of like being an instant translator in multiple languages at the same time and if you make but one mistake, hundreds of people die.
And RF really changes your DNA https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E....
There’s a cynical, non actionable POV: “people want immediate gratification” or “it’s all marketing” or “security theatre” or whatever.
Another is: “what design for airline safety gives laypeople the aesthetic experience of safety that also aligns with real safety?”
That’s hard! You can’t just rely on the invisible hand of a market to create that. Someone still needs to go and do it.
I’ve never once read a suggestion for an alternative to the TSA for example. I’m sure people have written whole PhDs about this. Give them a voice. You’re already talking to a very literate audience. Go for it.
https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
Spend a bit of time taking it and it's clear what at least one reason for this shortage is.
We still talk about Reagan's mass-firing of ATC controllers, and that event was in *1981*. The impact is multi-generational and is still very visible.
Edit: Also linking another comment where ATC was literally told they're not in the offer... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42899944
this is not 100% accurate by any definition of the word accurate. It is an interpretation of a letter, and a wrong one in my opinion.
Believe me I'm quite pissed at the media for finally making both sides of the US political spectrum equally uninterested in facts
And the ATC was told they're not included in the offer after the emails were already sent out. Like you trying to reframe it and add more context makes it more stupid, not less.
This is made up. It's a layoff letter like we see at big corps any other week. "We're reorganizing, here's an offer, take it or not, your job might get cut in 9 months."
"Enhanced standards of conduct: The federal workforce should be comprised of employees who are reliable, loyal, trustworthy, and who strive for excellence in their daily work. Employees will be subject to enhanced standards of suitability and conduct as we move forward. Employees who engage in unlawful behavior or other misconduct will be prioritized for appropriate investigation and discipline, including termination."
So, by all means, chase reparations. But don't think you've stumbled on the reason, either.
The test was shut down because it was obvious and egregious: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-.... But the people who designed it didn’t resign.
Additionally, part of the changes that brought along the biographical questionnaire had another major change: they opened up positions to the general public--meaning a candidate didn't need to go through one of the college-affiliated programs anymore. However, that also meant that people had to find their way through the on-boarding process, which at least initially was not well developed and many candidates failed to complete the necessary steps to move the process along.
That we would sacrifice any amount of safety/efficiency in pursuit of other goals is a major problem.
I also apply this thinking to other fed gov programs (eg NSF, DoD, etc)
Edit: in other words, how many lives should we sacrifice in our civilian air travel to achieve equity?
We sacrificed those lives to save money. End of story.
What you’re describing is the motte of DEI. And that’s great. But it often turns into the bailey of “racial preferences or quotas.” Which is illegal.
How do you not know that? Where did you go to high school?
https://thehill.com/regulation/transportation/4617992-buttig...
The same for military recruitment.
Because people here in the field are saying what discourages others from applying is low pay and high stress. Yet you seem to think it’s an outdated hiring practice, so who told you that?
Maybe that has something to do with why recruitment is down. But no, you're probably right it's DEI.
I imagine this was the result of an inappropriate and inadvertently p-hacked analysis of a silly survey of existing employees, along with a large helping of unjustified assumptions.
This is the kind of thing that might be, gradually, mitigated by improved high school math education. We don’t need more calculus to fix this, and we also don’t need more Pandas or R or “data science” or statistics-taught-the-way-it-usually-is. I think students could use a serious education in what data and statistics means, how to ask the right questions, and how to identify cases where the wrong question was answered, even if the answer came from fancy math.
edit: I saw https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-... — wow, apparently a good amount of actual bad intentions may have been involved. Although the people in charge may well have thought that their bad intentions were good intentions. Sigh. One of the worst parts of the current anti-DEI madness is that its proponents are not entirely wrong.
??? From the OP:
"This assessment was implemented in large part due to a push for diversity among ATCs by the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE)."
And from your link:
"In 2012 and 2013, the NBCFAE continued pushing this process, with members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push diversity among ATCs. "
I can't see how anyone would read those two sentences and conclude "this utter nonsense doesn’t appear to be DEI nonsense". Diversity, the D in DEI was specifically the reason why it was implemented.
The correlation of compensation to educated workers probably explains why the US government is staffed by morons that treat the economy like a teething ring.
Uhhh...why not use AI to start controlling the airports and airplanes? Talk about an app that, to me at least, seems an almost trivial use of its abilities and I'm sure that an AI could be trained in a very short period of time that could outperform a roomful of overaged, distracted humans...right?
Yes of course there is no way I'm the first to think of this...but just the fact that here it is day 3 or so, and literally NOT ONE MENTION ANYWHERE in the media about the potential for AI to safely land and direct all these flying things.
It's good to see that both Chicago airports are at full staffing though (when counting staff in training ).
They're handling multiple airports remotely. In 2016, this was planned to be Grand Rapids, Lansing, Muskegon, Flint, and Saginaw, though I'm not sure all of them were consolidated.
Not every field needs automation.
You really think you are the first person smart enough to come up with this idea? If this worked, it would have been automated many many years ago. We probably would not even need pilots.
Most of the complication is probably accidental, due to history or human traditions.
From first principles, the problem is obviously straightforward to formulate (assign nonoverlapping regions of spacetime to aircraft containing their position and destination, that they can maneuver in and such that the travel time is approximately optimal).
Applying simplifying constraints to the form of the regions (e.g. a discrete set of departure slots and fixed takeoff/landing envelopes, a route that follows the optimal trajectory in latitude/longitude plus a discrete lateral offset, discrete set of altitudes that change only at route crossings), it should be possible to reduce to a discrete optimization problem solvable in linear time.
Very 'draw the rest of the owl'. If you handwave any harder, you'd need ATC to bring you down to Earth.
Here's how to instantly cure shortages of ATCs: Each airline is responsible for staffing N ATCs per scheduled flight at a given airport, calculated on a yearly basis.
Of course, other Airlines are free to step in and schedule flights there. The average cost per seat might go up, but so will the number of ATCs.
I agree that both will solve the staffing problem, but neither seem particularly practical.
Firing everyone during the 1981 strike fucked up hiring for a decade. Rehiring a bunch of people all at once meant that they all would have the same general retirement timing (20-30 years). The bush era had some fucking around with the FAA as well.
COVID accelerated retirements and now Trump is demanding the fee that remain retire as well. So naturally the end result is a complete lack of staffing and a poor training pipeline for a job few people want to do.
The former FAA administrator was pushed out (by Musk) after one year of a five-year term. FAA employees were encouraged to resign (https://www.opm.gov/fork).
The current (or previous) administration is not to blame for the current situation, but the current administration is certainly causing a lot of uncertainly and chaos unnecessarily.
While they did initially receive the resignation memo the Office of Personnel Management clarified that Air Traffic Controllers aren’t eligible for the resignation offer nor subject to the hiring freeze. [1]
1. https://apnews.com/article/jet-helicopter-crash-air-traffic-...
I'm curious to know if this OPM policy was there was there from the beginning, or whether it's a backtrack after the 'bad optics' after the Washington, DC, crash.
Either way you have a plan that wasn’t well thought through or thoughtfully executed. Having said that, at least they’re not (ultimately) directly tempting understaffed critical workers to quit although one wonders which functions haven’t had a plane crash moment.
Instead of simply biasing their hiring based on race. The FAA brilliantly denied anybody who scored too low on their "compatibility" matrix, presumably as a legal dodge.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/faa-embroiled-in-lawsuit-a...
Here take the test yourself and tell me it's not rigged.
https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/