For this kind of staff, it is not just a matter of "training", it is way more demanding.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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...
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.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91270064/a-bay-area-airport-near...
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.
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.
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.
They had 1 tower with 1 operator and no redundancy at a fairly busy airport, which is definitely concerning.
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.
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
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.
Already exists, it's called TCAS
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.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/heres-what-air-traffic-col...
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.
Though this crash was probably just the helicopter flying the wrong altitude.