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.