America desperately needs more air traffic controllers
cnn.com
cnn.com
- The FAA has strict hiring requirements. You have to be mentally and physically capable, and by their own admission less than 10% of applicants are qualified for the job. https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications
- The training and onboarding process is incredibly long, and turnover is high
- The fundamentals and technology of the job have not changed in decades, despite air traffic exploding in recent years
- Most people are just not capable of the amount of stress and risk associated with the job
- Seriously, it's a really freaking stressful job
I would argue an ATC employee is worth every penny, but I also don't think there is a magical amount of money where you are going to suddenly double your pool of candidates willing to do this kind of work. These people are already very well compensated, and at a certain point you are just going to be cannibalizing other talent pools.
The real need is new and modern technology that automates much of the mistake-prone, human-centric tasks. But nobody wants to risk introducing changes to such a fragile system.
There would be more people interested in aviation choosing to be ATC than a pilot if our pay matched that of major airline pilots.
There are people going through the training and then quiting when they realize that can't get an opening in their hometown because that spot is reserved for a random person one week behind them in the FAA academy, and the pay won't make it worth moving away from their family.
There are more examples, and appropriate pay would fix most of them.
(Opinions are my own and not necessarily that of the FAA.)
I don't think any sane person would be against raising ATC wages. But to refer back to my post, the situation might be different if it there were not also a massive pilot shortage as well! If these two pools of talent mostly overlap raising wages on one will probably just pull from the other.
It's probably a combination of raising wages and putting more money into recruiting teenagers considering vocational programs.
There are only so many competent people in our society, and that talent pool is being spread thin across all sectors of society which require such candidates.
There are looming doctor shortages, too. Professionals of all stripes.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the...
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/ag...
Look at 1980's population pyramid. Look at 2020's. 1980 is how societies with mild population growth look. 2020 is how populations with below replacements look (see the graph end?)
It doesn't matter how many Americans are under 30. It matters how many are between 20 and 60. And my comment was about "coming up". Over the next 10 years.
There is a very significant shift in our populations, all across the entire planet. The US isn't as bad as some regions, but it's still bad. Moving from "lots of young people" to "the same amount of young people as old", means more taxes, fewer people working in society, and so on.
Older people require more doctors, too. So you have fewer people in the working pool (as a percentage of the overall population), but with doctors you need more, the more aged your population is. And it's not going to get better, it's going to get worse and worse, with such low birth rates. A downward spiral.
So clearly someone just doesn't want to pay up.
In the US, ATC are federal employees, aren’t they? So they are regularly furloughed, too. In the current political climate, facing the wrath of politicians doesn’t seem that unlikely, either.
The US has form in this area, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...
Even if the federal government were to “pay up”, they cannot be relied upon to honor favorable contract terms since they also have the ability to change the law.
It wouldn't happen overnight, but surely if ATC had a similar compensation reputation as, say, investment banking, we wouldn't have the pipeline problem that we do now. Surely banks don't have a problem finding young, quick thinking minds to put through their pressure factories. I don't think the ATC candidate pool is currently even close to the limit of people who could take the stress and do the work. Offer controllers starting salaries of $1M/yr and see how things start to change.
Your point in the other thread about marketing the job to teenagers is also good. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people interested in ATC aren't already "aviation adjacent" to some degree (ex-military, family are pilots, and so on)
Losing millions for your boss, losing your job != killing hundreds with a single mistake made in seconds.
I discovered by accident that people will notice a one-cent change in their paycheck.
there is also the issue of location. where applicants are and where controllers are needed is often two distinct circles and once you throw relocation into remote areas into the mix it becomes really unattractive.
There may be a very go reason to not allow anxiety medication, I don't know enough about it myself.
You’re getting downvoted because your comment is dangerously misinformed. Air traffic controllers aren’t allowed to take those anxiety medications (benzos, etc) because they impair your performance and judgment, even if you feel fine while taking them.
Don’t confuse the way a drug makes you feel with the objective impairment of a drug.
I appreciate you providing reasoning. I think the best way to deal with misinformation is good information and up/down votes are sometimes a good signal, sometimes it is an agree or disagree button.
Many drugs, especially some anxiety medications, produce false feelings of sobriety.
I can’t believe I have to write this, but: Feeling mellow and focused from drugs does not mean you’re okay to perform well at mentally demanding or safety-critical tasks like driving or directing air traffic.
So a rules change could improve things on that front, as they could for example allow working from 40 to 56 to count as enough to earn a full pension, without any change to their safety policy on the age cutoff for finishing working as an ATC - but it wouldn't be cheap, as you not only are massively increasing the cost of pensions across the board, but you're also paying the same amount to train a 40yo applicant as a 30yo one, but getting fewer years of valuable work back from that training cost.
Still a bit of a risk though - if your vision ever degrades you might be out of work unless you can get transferred to a desk job or something.
Working in a bank is the start of a quite lucrative career, working as an ATC is the end.
Indeed, we can offer more money to ATC, but there is not a lot, progression wise.
Honestly, how would a junior ATC look like, compared with a senior?
…kind of. In reality, there is always a qualified individual ready to physically stop you from doing the wrong thing, and there are multiple independent safety systems, interlocks, etc.
Technical jobs should not be promotion driven at all. It should be a combination of seniority, and technical expertise/experience. Their metric should be something like number of accidents under their tenure, vs accident free hours under operation.
A supervising position might not see problems as fast as someone actually doing said job, which wastes the experience acquired by said supervisor!
ATC here, opinons are my own and not necessarily (definitely not in this case) that of the FAA.
Thank you for the laugh.
Out of the 10 supervisors I've had, one was amazing, one was average, and one I attended the funeral of after he drunk himself to death.
ATC salary only increases with the sub-inflation 2% or whatever presidential raise and 1.6% union-negotiated raise, each year.
No one is promoted, they have to apply, and the good controllers don't apply because if they hate it and go back to controlling, they lose their seniority (this is the union's rule). The bad controllers apply to be supervisors so they don't have to really control (they do the minimum 16 hours a month on a empty sector in the morning). Maybe this is a feature - a way to get bad controllers away from traffic.
The mass of unemployed CS grads?
Communication is a learned skill.
Ability to handle stress and thrive under pressure is the key.
This isn’t meant to belittle or scoff at people’s lived experiences, but the difference between “if I get this wrong, my company will lose millions of dollars” and “if I get this wrong, hundreds of people die” is VAST.
while 1.1m/yr sounds like a lot, it isn't the right number to consider. The right number is the difference between this job, and a similar job else where that has better facilities/amenities and comfort. If said surgeons who would qualify could've gotten a similar job in a major city for a similar amount of money, they might prefer it there (near family/friends, amenities etc).
So how much _over_ the typical pay is the 1.1m/yr salary offered?
Doesn't mean you can't keep upping the rate and getting one anyway, but probably it becomes more cost effective to literally ship the rural patients instead of the doctor.
Isn't it 20/20 corrected vision?
Just train an AI on ATC recordings and other data, maybe throw in some reinforcement learning,and then test it in low-stakes commercial airspace (like a regional airport)
Also, just FYI -- airports don't hire their own ATC; it's all FAA (or the equivalent wherever you are located.)
(Opinions are my own and not necessarily that of the FAA.)
I have some wild stories, but unfortunately sharing them would dox me.
The most inaccurate thing though is a transfer CPC (fully-certified controller at their previous facility) plugging in and being able to work without months of training in that area.
Which in turn means that important systems become frozen in time because upgrade attempts become boondoggles that can't meet requirements until they're so far over budget they get canceled, or never attempted.
One of the major problems that should be fixed immediately is that the government pays for code to be written but then doesn't own it, which makes them dependent on the contractor for maintenance. Instead they should be using open source software and, when custom code is necessary, requiring it to be released into the public domain, both for the benefit of the public (who might then be able to submit improvements to the code they're required to use!) and so that maintenance can be done by someone other than the original contractor.
The obvious downside to this is that hardening code becomes a potential large amount of effort/overhead that could normally be concealed behind binaries and proprietary code.
This is not a downside, it's a benefit.
Suppose an adversarial country eventually gets access to the proprietary code. Do you want members of the public to have found and patched any obvious vulnerabilities before this point? Yes you do.
The first proposal to break out the regulation of air traffic control with the provision of the air traffic control was done by the Clinton administration. Support since then has been bipartisan and opposition has also been from members of both parties for various reasons. (I read somewhere that one of the biggest long time opponents of breaking out the air traffic control has been the associations of owners of private jets as they currently pay about 1% of the cost of ATC, but are closer to 10% of the flights in major airports. In reality, owners of private jets can likely afford to pay a more proportional percentage of the costs they impose on the system.)
But yes, presumably there is scope for improved tools.
The problem isn't collision detection or predicting movement. They're not a bunch of particles on simple ballistic trajectories. They're powered objects traveling in a turbulent and difficult to predict medium. In emergency conditions they can turn from a powered vehicle to an unpowered one. They can need to land immediately when flight worthiness changes in flight. A situation on the ground can make landings unsafe or impossible and an aircraft needs to diverted disrupting traffic at another airport.
Automating ATC works until one or more exceptional conditions arises. Then it's completely unsuitable and everyone from pilots to ATC need to work against the happy path automation to keep people alive.
My question is, how do you know that in general human beings respond better to unexpected or very complex / difficult situations than an automated system would? Yes, human beings can improvise, but automated systems can have reaction times more than an order of magnitude faster than that of even the quickest humans.
I'd like to see some statistics on the opposing hypothesis : How good are humans, really, when encountering unexpected situations? Do they compare better with automated systems in general?
Here's a competing hypothesis: An automated system can incorporate training data based on every recorded incident that has ever happened. Unless a situation is so unexpected that it has literally never happened in the history of aviation, an AI system can have an example of how to handle that scenario. Is it really true that the average human operator would beat this system in safety and reliability? How many humans know how to respond to every rare situation that has ever happened? It's at least possible that the AI does better on average.
This is already out there. You can go research how Airbus and their automation works in practice.
You can also listen to air traffic control recordings to get an idea of what types of emergencies exist and how often they happen. I'm sure the FAA has records you can look at. :)
Now that apply that to something 3 orders of magnitude more complex.
I would say this is actually the most likely scenario for an edge case. The sheer number of variables make it unlikely that the same unexpected event would happen twice.
In an emergency situation the combination of, the emergency, ground conditions, weather, visibility, instrumentation functionality, and surrounding aircraft is most frequently going to be unique.
Just another perplexing case of humans insisting on doing a robot's job for no good reason.
(and just to be clear, no I'm not talking the "AI" genie but rather straightforward search algorithms that enforce the needed invariants)
With Fortnite, Epic pushes one update and a week later virtually every gamer has the update for free. And when an update goes bad, or the game goes down, usually nobody dies.
With aviation? Lifecycles there are measured in decades, and the changes needed for new control systems in an existing aircraft can be so huge that the entire aircraft needs a new certification. Hell if you want and can acquire such a thing, you can fly aircraft that's over a century old. Many avionics systems still in use today fundamentally date back to shortly after WW2 - VOR/DME for example is 1950s technology.
For tower control systems, you'd need a system that's capable of dealing with very very old aircraft, military aircraft that doesn't even have transponders activated a lot of the time, aircraft that don't have transponders at all (e.g. ultralights), has well defined interfaces with other systems (regional/national/continental/oceanic control zones)...
Oh and someone has to pay for all of that.
Upgrading to the latest avionics costs tens of thousands of dollars in the cheapest case. Multiply that times the number of aircraft, and the weeks or months it takes for the upgrade to be completed and you're talking about a staggering economic impact.
Everyone likes to imagine the controller has a screen with perfect information on it. They do not. Especially when light aircraft are involved.
Only 10% of applicants are physically and mentally qualified? Sounds like you need more applicants? Want to attract more applicants? Offer more compensation.
The training and onboarding is incredibly long? Sounds like a doctor? Do you know why people go through the pain of becoming a doctor? Because they make a lot of money when they get through the other side.
Technology hasn't changed is a political problem due to lack of... money. There isn't an issue with new technology, there's an issue with the government refusing to invest in upgrading the technology. Canada doesn't have this issue and they're far smaller than the US.
Too much stress? I bet if you paid people so much money that they could work for 10 years and then either retire to a lower paying job, or retire entirely, people would deal with it.
I do absolutely, 100% think that this is a problem that can easily be solved with money.
I also think our politicians will flounder around making excuses about how the problem is unsolvable because it doesn't directly help their chances of re-election.
The first time a plane goes down carrying a dozen congress critters and their families, you can bet there will magically be money in the banana stand.
I think the guaranteed respect and admiration that comes from the title is actually a more powerful draw. Don't get me wrong, the money is good, but on par with senior manager in any large tech firm. Doctor is a primal respect that technical roles do not carry.
You're not getting instant respect from mother in laws and pastors as an ATC.
Used to be. Not anymore. Nowadays many doctors act as a smartass business people.
I remember a former CEO who would come into work each day and let out a heavy sigh before unlocking his office door. I learned that he was trapped in the job until he retired for various reasons...most of his own making.
There's certainly a lot of paperwork that has to be done, but doctors aren't doing it.
"What they learned was that during office hours, half the time — a huge chunk — was allocated to desk work, like documentation in the electronic medical record (EMR), reviewing test results, handling medication requests, and filling out forms. What was remarkable was that even during office visits, doctors interacted with their patients for only half of the time; the rest was EMR and paperwork. As a matter of fact, for every hour of face-to-face patient time, another two hours were spent on desk work." [1]
The paper mentions that was the amount of time spent for doctors with "documentation support" (various forms of automation/streamlining) that would generally be absent in something like a primary care physician's office, meaning he'll be spending substantially more time on paperwork. The paper also (at a quick skim) did not mention out-of-office work, where doctors often spend even more time filling out paperwork. And there are also regulations meaning doctors themselves have to be the ones filling out much of this paperwork.
[1] - https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/physicians-paperwork-and...
You would if it was known to pay $500k/yr+
Banking? Sales?
> Outside of anti-capitalist circles ofc
Well that's quite the point. Maybe those circles are small in the US, but they aren't in most of the rest of the world.
Let me just say that if I called my parents and told them that I had gotten a well-paid job at, say, a hedge fund, they would not be impressed and would likely think less of me for it.
I have respect for lawyers, and i have respect for investment bankers (who make huge merger/acquisition deals work).
Frankly, while I acknowledge their necessity, I have a poor (default) view of both bankers and lawyers. I don't see them as bad people, but people in their professions do many bad things.
If my son brings a banker home as a prospective mate, well, let's say they're not earning status points from their profession.
You (may have) and I (do) have respect for people in tough jobs like see workers. Doesn't mean my mom wouldn't prefer I date a nice doctor. My point being that social respect does not come with your personal respect.
It's very much relevant to this conversation. Without specific negative factors like a "predatory" aspect, increasing earnings will increase prestige. ATC doesn't have those factors.
So yes it is irrelevant in the specific context of that sub-conversation. Which isn't to say that your point arguing why that might not be applicable to ATCs isn't also a relevant thing to say to being the conversation back to the main topic of this thread.
Being relevant to either of those is enough to make it overall be: relevant.
Also, secondary equity issuance is pretty non-controversial, and an important fund raising option for publicly-listed corporations.
Many people believe investment bankers are a net negative for society.
In the case of lawyers, a necessary evil. I have respect for people, not a profession.
And... uhm... software developers.
All of them. Respect is not commanded because you make lots of money or have a certain job.
Not disagreeing, but the US also has a doctor shortage for at least a decade that it is seemingly unable to fix.
Resident doctors are doctors, exactly as junior SWEs are software engineers.
(UK doctors have for some reason long objected to 'junior' and recently become 'resident doctors' over exactly this. All the more confusing - throughout and still there's been 'Senior House Officers', because 'house' used to be what it was called, like US residency, doing house, there were junior and senior house officers, so why not just revert to that? Who knows, but now they're all resident doctors - and some of which are senior house officers - until they're registrars/consultants, and they're happier with that than junior doctors.)
One answer would be to raise GP salaries, but that's difficult, especially if you're self-funding residencies and already paying out the nose for specialists and other inflated expenses deemed necessary in modern healthcare systems. Kaiser California imports medical school graduates from abroad for their in-house residency programs, which is presumably cheaper than raising salaries to draw more US resident candidates.
Kaiser arguably points the way forward. As an HMO--a vertically integrated healthcare system--there's greater financial incentive to self-fund residencies. When insurers, hospitals, and doctors are all at arms length from each other, the financial incentives don't align very well, thus the "need" for outside funding (i.e. the government) of residencies.
Note that unfunded residencies are also a thing, where the resident is responsible for sourcing the funds for their salary and expenses.
They are usually paid several times less than people doing the same jobs in US.
But we wouldn't be starting from nothing. There's a large group of people who would lose income and who will lobby against that.
Also taxes are generally much higher in these countries as well.
> Taxes are usually higher, but not incredibly so
So again.. would you rather make 60k and pay 45% in taxes or make 100k and pay 35%?
> nowhere near what America spends
Sure, if you are above median higher will likely more than compensate the higher healthcare costs (unless you’re very unlucky of course).
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.PHYS.ZS?most_rec...
At one point the AMA lobbied Congress for those funding limits but they reversed position on that years ago.
In other countries people become doctors because they want to heal others. Not because they want to become wealthy. In the US doctors spend half of their time haggling with the insurance companies.
Not just that, but having a shortage means each ATC does more work which is inherently stressful.
But upgrading technology requires government administrative capacity. That's generally cheaper than outsourcing technology development to third parties, but does require a commitment to try to understand the thing you're managing.
Politicians don't hire competent administrators because they believe that building a solution yourself and buying a solution from a contractor are basically equivalent, which anyone on this website can tell you is not true. This is an easier problem to solve than most think, but it's not trivial. And it's really hard when you have clowns like Elon Musk purposefully destroying institutional knowledge for no good reason.
They genuinely cant. They can make a sorta kinda prototype of something that costs Google several million dollars.
There's a joke inside Google that Google infra makes easy things hard and impossible things possible.
Tell me you haven’t worked in aerospace without telling me you haven’t worked in aerospace. There is plenty of money sunk into all corners of the field but progress is slow because the risk of change is lives lost. At some point, the risk of not changing means more lives lost… and that’s when things will change.
Money only does so much to improve your life. Stress is a way to shorten your life. Long term chronic stress literally makes you ill in ways that medicine can’t fix.
- Allow people to retire after a decade rather than several decades of work
- Allow (or require) people to only work part-time (eg 2 days a week, or 5 days of 2 hours a day, or...) while still earning a full time equivalent salary
- Allow a work day to be 10mins on, 50mins resting for every hour (requiring 6x as many staff), while paying as if the full hour was work
- Pay for therapy, stress-management lessons, etc.
- Pay for a professional cleaner at home, a part-time chef or lots of restaurant/takeaway meals, or whatever else helps to minimise the amount of work you need to do outside the job
- Probably other ideas that haven't come into my mind in the two minutes I've spent on the subject of how more money can help fight issues caused by stress
… because of mismanagement, just like other large software rewrites that you are probably familiar with.
It’s the same problem - updating a complex system - except there’s no other vendor you can switch to.
ATC has human operators and people are non-deterministic and non repeatable and you can't just run a few tests and conclude it's fine.
The issues you're trying to stop may only occur once a month globally across all airports or something, and only be noticed once a year.
Another way would be investing in education (instead of dismantling it, or mixing it with religion and politics), making it more accessible so more people come out who are better equipped to take on "complex jobs"
You can see the list of criteria here: https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications
- Be under the age of 31
Well, they restrict the pool pretty harshly right from the start.
Education isn't just about changing the quantity of knowledge people have learned - a country with good free education, along with other things like mental health support, good parenting resources/education/support, etc. will lead to more people having the qualities needed to be ATCs despite not having learned them by going to specific "managing stress 101" classes.
(Edit: It's possible I misunderstood you and by innate qualities you literally just meant the things in their explicit requirements list like being under 31 and being a US citizen, if so apologies but I'll leave my comment here anyway.)
the people you might want mignt
1. always have a better option elsewhere and if your raise the offer, competitors will offer something even higher instead, beyond the pittances the government is willing to spend 2. never be willing to take on the job as specified - huge responsibility and risk of killing people, with long hours and no recognition 3. never finds out that the pay is high - nobody talks about it, or sells its existence as an option. 4. doesnt have a parent in the business to teach them what to do
raising the payment seems to fail a lot, even though its suggested naively all the time as the solution to all labour problems.
alternatives might be to increase outreach, immigration, enslaved prison workers, stronger unions to make the job more like what people are willing to work, etc
The extra expenses will also encourage actual fixes to the system like better automation or whatever to reduce costs.
> Too much stress? I bet if you paid people so much money that they could work for 10 years and then either retire to a lower paying job, or retire entirely, people would deal with it.
I highly doubt that solving the problem with just money will get the right people.
A high salary becomes the goal in an of itself, and everything else falls to the wayside.
Do you really care about safety? Applicants may say they do, but only want to retire after 10 years and will lie through their teeth.
Money is a corrupting factor. I don’t like to take this side of the argument, since I want people to be paid fairly, but there’s something fundamental to seeing unpaid volunteers having the best intentions and most love for their craft
The other side of the coin is you won’t get the candidates you want if they can get the same money for less taxing jobs. Game theory 101.
Or pay people enough they can afford to work part time. A stressful job is less stressful if you only have to work 2 days a week.
No that's actually not true. Government jobs are soul crushing. The way the bureaucracy works, its all about social standing, politics, and seniority. In these jobs you trade your sanity for money, and they have a long reputation for being just like this which is why few ever apply.
No reasonably average intelligence person is going to do that unless they are absolutely desperate. Its a dead end job.
This was already addressed in the original post. Why write in this "spelling it out for you" style when they already addressed it?
> Do you know why people go through the pain of becoming a doctor? Because they make a lot of money when they get through the other side.
This is really reductive. There are multiple reasons:
- very stable employment
- very prestigious job, and has been for centuries. Conveys authority. Your family can boast that you're a doctor.
- very interesting tales come out of employment, and your family probably
- very easy to feel good about being a doctor - directly helping people etc
Not all of those for everyone, and they no doubt don't all turn out to be the case, but doctors apply for multiple reasons, and many of them aren't in high-paying areas at all. Doctors (in America, which I assume is what you're focusing in on) are paid well partly because they have high expenses in terms of liability insurance.
Stability of employment is something that traffic controllers could have, this is just a question of "working conditions" and solvable by money.
I really do not see why traffic controller could not feel good about being traffic controller. They do more "life saving" jobs then any of us on hacker news.
Identifiable tales are illegal, yes. That's not all tales. Surely you know a doctor and they've told you stories before?
I'm listing other reasons doctors like being doctors over just money. I don't know what the rest of your comment has to do with this.
You must know few doctors, or they must work in very boring locations.
> nor should have due to things being private by law
You wouldn't believe how amazingly easy to tell stories without any patient identifying details. Think of any of your best stories - could you tell them to me without providing me breadcrumbs about any identities? I bet you could with nearly every story you have to tell.
Reductive
-tending to present a subject or problem in a simplified form, especially one viewed as crude.
The supply of labor for a given job is related to the market price of the job. This is literally ECON 101.
(Econ 101 again: increased price -> reduced demand, i. e. fewer flights.)
things get complicated of course as the situation under analysis gets further and further from the ideal setup, as data gets more scarce, and so on.
but the job market is pretty darn close to the simple model, and this question is also close to the ideal (how much more price need to rise for supply to meet demand, we draw the graph based on data from other professions, and boom, there's our answer, if we want to get very fancy we can do various models to try to estimate the curves.)
Fact: Somewhere between 1X and 10X is a salary where we would have enough applicants.
It's objectively true.
Whatever prior assumptions prompt you to second guess this obvious, objective truth are ripe for reanalysis.
> at a certain point you are just going to be cannibalizing other talent pools
Nothing to do with raising pay causing/not causing more supply.
- Can you swim now?
- No.
- What if I give you money?
The notion that if you just pay enough, people who are otherwise qualified will do anything, is amazingly reductive. It's a super US-centric view, and not surprisingly, it does not have an amazing history of working out (especially compared to other mechanisms).
Given the people in question have good other options, why would they do this, even if you paid more?
In fact - plenty of smart people will take pay cuts for better qualify of life.
Example: Plenty of folks take pay cuts to work remotely from places they like more, and because they find it a better quality of life.
Not everyone is money driven, and the assumption that here is that the intersection of "money driven, capable of doing this job, etc" is large enough that increasing the amount of money will make the result larger.
It's totally non-obvious this is true.
Pay cuts are not important; profit is! If I get paid 100 less, and spend 90 less because of no commuting, I'm gaining more than before.
I make less working remotely in a LCOL area than I would in the HCOL area where my office resides. The differential in COL, though, is so high that I'm saving a lot more. In other words, I'm making less but I'm building more wealth.
Most of the money that goes into living in a HCOL area and commuting to office is just pure waste to satisfy the egos of upper managers who want to preside over a big floor of workers.
If every part of the US became equally expensive and convenient for work, VHCOL areas like the Bay Area would still be immediately oversubscribed for reasons unrelated to work.
The Bay Area has arguably the best climate (cool Mediterranean) of any major city, unique proximity to a diverse set of outdoor recreation (Big Sur, Napa, Yosemite, Tahoe just to name a few), and all the desirable amenities of a major metro area.
That’s not to say you can’t have a perfectly happy life in other areas if you have different preferences, but the cost of living is ultimately a market, driven by the aggregate preferences of all people.
I think you are right.
Do you have other ideas on what constraints can be relaxed?
You can't say it doesn't work until you've raised the median salary in the field and observed the effect. Managers and bean counters aren't willing to do this so it will never happen.
I knew, of course, this would be the response. But i'm not sure why, in the history of the world, people assume we haven't tried paying people more in various fields, and that "managers and bean counters aren't willing to do it".
It's amazingly silly.
It would take you less than 60 seconds to find at least 100 studies on this, across tons of fields.
The next thing that happens is that when you point out studies (and there are plenty good and bad), they will start arguing with any study that doesn't support their already preferred position, rather than trying to ever spend time considering alternatives.
There are nearly infinite studies on infinite fields and the results are fairly mixed.
Certainly not the amazingly positive expected value that constantly gets paraded around.
Some of y'all are so money driven you just can't possibly contemplate that not everyone is driven by money.
The complaints in the article were all about too many hours. More pay, more workers, less hours.
I didn't see anything about not liking the job. At least not in the article.
There are nearly infinite studies in infinite fields on this, and despite claims here, the results are mixed at best.
Certainly not the utopia consistently predicted.
I'm sure someone will next just say it's not enough money, rather than bother to read any of the studies and whether they tried to account for this or not, or ...
I'm going to ignore those comments, since it doesn't seem like a discussion anyone wants to learn anything in.
If you want to push your preferred position, that's sort of silly. There is no winning or losing here. If you want to actually learn something, happy to discuss it for real.
Why is money the only thing to do here? Why do you assume that is the driver, despite tons of data suggesting it's simply not the only driver?
Can you please, please, take like 10 minutes, and go read any of the 1000's of studies on this, and then make some reasoned argument that is more than just what you are doing now, which is:
A. I think money is the only thing that matters and refuse to present any evidence that it is.
B. I will also claim that we never try it, despite it actually having been tried.
C. When someone takes the time to show me that we do try it, i will simply, without any further evidence, claim we aren't offering enough.
This sort of discussion is just kind of silly to have.
You know what - great, you figured it out. The real problem is that we just aren't paying enough. That's the only problem. It's not that the qualifications are too high, or the job as is is too stressful, or anything else ....
You have, without any data, evidence, etc, figured out the one simple and true solution to a very complex problem that lots of people have spent lots of time trying to puzzle through.
You won hacker news! Congrats!
I actually hope they offer an infinite amount of money to ATC controllers, so we stop having this particular reductive variant pop up in discussions.
It's fine if you want to argue money matters, i even believe money does matter. I just don't think it's the only thing that matters, nor do i believe you can solve a complex problem like this by just taking a single variable in that complex system and pushing it to the extreme.
The most likely outcome seems to be you increase the rejection rate from 90% (which is what it is now) to 99.99999%, given how the process actually works right now.
Plenty of people in the US have finical goals, and providing them a means to more quickly reach their goals will motivate them. Will you convince everyone to apply to a job with more pay? No, but you really just need to convince a few more qualified people.
Yep, I dropped to a 4-day week prorated (so a 20% cut, a little less if you consider that changed my position with respect to tax boundaries, for 20% less work) a while back, to deal with family health issues and my own burn-out. As things are fixing up I'm considering keeping to this routine despite the fact the extra money would be useful – the extra time is _very_ nice too.
[Not sure how far into “smart” territory I'd be considered though :)]
There are three forms of pay cut: reducing pay for the same time spent working, reducing pay for the same work done (when pay is awarded piecemeal rather than by time), or indirectly by a reducing in work. Ask anyone on a zero-hours contract who unexpectedly gets a zero-hours week: it feels like a pay cut to them more than a joyful temporary freedom from work.
There are a number of companies experimenting with a 4-day working week with no change in pay or other conditions, some are finding the reduction in working time often doesn't reduce useful work output. A 20%-ish drop in income for a 4-day week is a pay cut when compared to that.
"The notion that if you just pay enough, people who are otherwise qualified will do anything, is amazingly reductive. ... It's totally non-obvious this is true."
But perhaps you were just responding to the narrower assertion that some people will be happy to trade money for more leisure time. Apologies if I misunderstood which point you were addressing.
This is true for individuals.
With a sample size large enough, the probability that no one will be up for it given the increased pay, is extremely low, tending to zero.
IE it's not particularly useful to say "we will pay 1 million billion dollars to anyone in the united states who wishes to be an air traffic controller" if you want good air traffic controllers.
It is more useful, for example, to take the people who wanted to do this, and you stopped from doing this before for dumb reasons, and offer them more money to go back to doing this.
Citation needed, because...
> IE it's not particularly useful to say "we will pay 1 million billion dollars to anyone in the united states who wishes to be an air traffic controller" if you want good air traffic controllers.
...if you're asserting that offering one quadrillion dollars as the salary for ATCs would not decisively solve the problem, that's insane and there can't be further discussion.
However, if your point is that this might be true, but the statement isn't useful, that's false too - it is useful to say this, because if true, then it means that there some function that describes the relationship between compensation and qualified applicants. And now that we've agreed that there is a function, we can then have a reasonable discussion about the inputs, and specifically the tradeoff between making the compensation higher vs. changing the way the training is structured and the artificial constraints on supply.
If you can say "to increase trained ATCs by 50% you can either make the salary $450k higher for 1k employees, or you can do a tech modernization that will cost $10M and keep your tech recent for the next decade" and provide a specific tradeoff between financial compensation vs non-salary factors, then you'll be able to have a logical argument about the two. And if the numbers are as skewed as in my example, you'll be able to convince the majority of logical people that increasing the salary is the suboptimal strategy.
If you think that, you aren't considering paying them enough money.
> Given the people in question have good other options, why would they do this, even if you paid more?
You ain't thinking about offering them enough money. Enough money means as much as it takes to make your offer better than any other option they have.
> In fact - plenty of smart people will take pay cuts for better qualify of life.
True, but also the same people will take quality of life cuts if you offer enough money.
Also, in general, the best way to improve one's quality of life is... through more money.
> Example: Plenty of folks take pay cuts to work remotely from places they like more, and because they find it a better quality of life.
Counterexample: add four zeros to the salary offered, and watch how many of them won't be happy to uproot and move with their whole family to your location within 24 hours.
> Not everyone is money driven, and the assumption that here is that the intersection of "money driven, capable of doing this job, etc" is large enough that increasing the amount of money will make the result larger.
This assumption is sound in theory and almost always true in practice, it's just rarely attempted, because you need to spend money, which people absolutely hate.
Almost all cases of skilled staff shortage can be solved with multiplying the payment by 2-10x (and convincing people you mean it - at the 10x end, people may start having doubts, precisely because it's so uncommon to see). Do that, and you'll have your competitors' staff jumping ship, and a wave of skilled applicants from abroad, committed to relocate if you let them. If the market for the skill is growing and you're able to sustain the pay bump, people will retrain and entrepreneurs will start schools for future candidates.
And yes, with that much extra money available, other entrepreneurs will try and pitch all kinds of software and hardware that will reduce your need for skilled labor, hoping you pay them instead.
Of course, 2-10x bump might make the whole endeavor stop making business sense on your end. It's often the case. But in this situation, saying there's shortage of labor is a lie. It's only a shortage at the price you're willing to pay.
This all just follows the same dynamics everything else in the economy does. If you believe employment is a special case where this doesn't apply, you're still not imagining paying enough money :).
You really just assume everyone, at their core, is money driven enough. So to you, everything is about whether they are beign offered enough money. You even use the amazingly circular reasoning that if you discover them saying no, it just means you weren't trying to pay them enough.
There is apparently no limit to this, and anything gets solved by more money. This of course, can't possibly be disproven, since you will just say to increase the limits.
Meanwhile, as I've said, this is an intensely researched thing. I have yet to see a single person constantly pushing the infinite money angle make any reasoned argument, backed up by any study or data.
As I've said, plenty of studies have explored the effect and limits of giving more money on happiness, on recruitment, etc, on tons and tons and tons of fields.
Rather than just making reductive arguments that don't really get us anywhere, why don't you make a reasoned one?
also consider, just for a second, the possibility that not everyone is this money driven. Seriously.
"Enough money means as much as it takes to make your offer better than any other option they have."
That doesn't always exist. That's the whole thing about not everyone being money driven.
The original claim was this:
> Only 10% of applicants are physically and mentally qualified? Sounds like you need more applicants? Want to attract more applicants? Offer more compensation.
You then dishonestly moved the goalposts:
> There are plenty of jobs that you can't pay people enough money to want to do.
> The notion that if you just pay enough, people who are otherwise qualified will do anything, is amazingly reductive.
Maybe before accusing people of being reductive, you should respond to the actual point being made instead of moving the goalposts.
> As I've said, plenty of studies have explored the effect and limits of giving more money on happiness, on recruitment, etc, on tons and tons and tons of fields.
None of which you have linked. Go ahead, link a study that says that even offering an unbounded amount of money isn't enough to get enough applicants within the amount of time it takes to go through the training pipeline.
Would you mind listing 2 or 3 examples? All the jobs that I do not want to do that I can think of, are actually poorly compensated.
Name a few.
So, you're claiming that there's empirical evidence that supports your claim. Please link it.
I have had some experience with family, girl friends, friends and med-students. And it was definitely not the primary reason any one of them chose that path.
I don’t think money is a strong enough single motivator for med-school or any other long term hard study/job.
Don't underestimate just how high-stress these jobs are and what it does to you. People quit these kinds of jobs for 2 reasons
1) They can't deal with the stress mentally, or don't want to.
2) They were not smart enough to choose option 1 and their body just physically gives up and they are no longer capable of performing their job as an ATC.
Or the passive visual skin color test (Brigida vs Buttigieg 2021 lawsuit).
That'll be about 4,120 qualified ATC applicants that won't be coming back: would you come back if a sizable class-action award is forthcoming?
If that was the plan (to lock up and away FAA ATCs, to inflate supply-demand, that's a shrewd economic move, but I don't think so).
I feel like this could be counterproductive. If people retire after 10 years instead of after 30 years, you now have to hire 3x the amount of people over time.
Is it realized it almost happened in the recent helicopter / aeroplane crash. As it was said the helicopter was used for moving VIPS ....
Except that when money was on the table, Reagan fired them. ATC is remote from most people's day-to-day awareness unless planes hit each other, but medical help that's held back is really in-your-face.
Granted, that's decades in the past. No way anyone would jump in and try to gut the public service like that today [1].
[1] sarky.
So what happened? Why did the FAA upend a stable hiring process, undercut the CTI schools it had established to train its workforce, and throw the plans of thousands of eager would-be air traffic controllers into disarray?
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
There certainly some automation involved, but not at the level where we can just let the all the people go home and have it take over.
"must have 20/20 vision in each eye, no contacts"
This will be more and more of a bottleneck as time goes on; growing up in-doors and looking at computer screens all day will increase nearsightedness.
> must have 20/20 vision in each eye, no contacts
> Applicants must demonstrate distant and near vision of 20/20 or better in each eye separately. The use of bifocal contact lenses for the correction of near vision is unacceptable.
> The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.Isn't this, ultimately, the real problem? Improved technology with radically more automation would both improve safety and reduce workload on controllers.
What's really needed is some sort of "next-generation ATC" moonshot project. But of course, in such a safety-critical and risk-averse domain, generational improvement is really hard to do. You certainly can't "move fast and break things", so how do you prevent such a project getting bogged down in development hell?
But SpaceX is solving a simpler problem because it’s a greenfield program (aside from docking with ISS, but there’s a spec and they implemented it). ATC involves interactions with the entire existing enormous worldwide fleet of aircraft and pilots.
All that being said, a system that allocates certain volumes of airspace to aircraft and alerts aircraft if they are on a trajectory likely to encroach on someone else’s allocated airspace seems doable and maybe even doable in a backwards compatible way. But this, by itself, would not meaningfully increase capacity.
And I agree this is silly and unfortunate. SFO, for example, has two parallel runways, and airplanes can only land simultaneously on them if visibility is very good. Surely modern GNSS plus radio (which can do time-of-flight and direction measurements with modern technology!) plus inertial measurement could let a cooperating pair of planes maintain appropriate separation and land simultaneously, safely, with zero visibility, even under conditions of active attack by a hostile system. But that would require a kind of competence and cooperation between the government and vendors that does not currently exist.
> cannibalizing other talent pools
If we accidentally paid ATCs so much that it ate into the investment banking or high frequency trading talent pools I think we’d still be ok
> about money
Why don't other highly developed countries have the same issues finding employees? You never read about "ATC hiring crisis" in other countries. Why only the US?
> The real need is new and modern technology that automates much of the mistake-prone, human-centric tasks. But nobody wants to risk introducing changes to such a fragile system.
The link that shared is excellent. When I looked under the medical requirements area, and section "Eye", I see:
> Applicants must demonstrate distant and near vision of 20/20 or better in each eye separately. The use of bifocal contact lenses for the correction of near vision is unacceptable.
The UK has a controller hiring/retention problem at the moment, too. The less lucrative airports keep losing controllers to the bigger players and can’t replace them. Periods of service reduction are common.
Baumol effects. Our economy is incredible, extremely high productivity along with full employment. Its why we have ordering kiosks at fast food restaurants, pay 225k for bucee's managers and 20 dollars/hour to flip burgers at fast food restaurants. ATC is a low productivity growth job, technology hasn't increased the number of planes or amount of airspace one ATC can manage. As other jobs and sectors of the economy improve in productivity, people migrate to those sectors from low productivity sectors like ATC because on average high productivity sectors can pay more. The salaries of ATCs rise because there is more competition for the limited pool so you end up paying more but getting the same or worse outcomes over time.
which should put pressure on the entity managing the ATC to increase an ATC's productivity via tech. And yet this hasn't happened. So why is that?
I say at a guess, that capitalism isn't working for the entity that manages ATC, because that entity is immune to the pressures of capitalism - ala, federal gov't doesn't care that these ATC isn't as "profitable".
In a scenario where different ATC zones are managed by separate, private entities that are looking to make a profit (e.g., the higher number planes in a single ATC zone, the more they profit) would spend to improve ATC's individual capacity.
> technology hasn't increased the number of planes or amount of airspace one ATC can manage
Loosely related: I cannot remember the website now, but someone posted here in the last 3 years an insane website that showed (visually!) the new approaches to London Heathrow Airport (world's busiest two runway airport). It was batshit crazy. I am sure they spent months designing the new approaches. It looked like multiple DNA helix'es where planes circle to wait for landing slots.
I'm getting close to doxxing myself, so without getting into specifics... controllers often bring in food to share, and we dress pretty casually every day. There used to be a professional dress code years ago, but that was negotiated out by the union.
Why technology still does not track every airplane at the airport and flag runway incursions.
Why there still are not cameras constantly recording flight ops at the airport. Why are we relying on accidental dash cam recordings?
Why the cockpit voice recorder still does not record video.
All well within what we can do with radar and computers and radio today.
You might be interested to know that the video feed (the marketing one at least, not the one for engineers) for the recent boom supersonic flight was just a phone and a starlink in one of the planes following. Things can be done.
Not.
This stands out to me:
> Be under the age of 31
> Applicants must demonstrate distant and near vision of 20/20 or better in each eye separately. The use of bifocal contact lenses for the correction of near vision is unacceptable.
This almost seems like a catch-22 give than approx most adults (80%+) will experience presbyopia by their mid-40s. So even if you're a qualified candidate, you've likely only got 10-15 years max before you are disqualified.
More broadly, I suspect some of these vision requirements could be reconsidered in the face of improved display technology and UX improvements (e.g. accommodations for certain forms of partial colorblindness).
If they're hiring 10 people and have 20 good, qualified applicants then sure, maybe diversity efforts would mean that a straight white man gets overlooked.
But we're talking about the context of them complaining that they can't hire enough people, and absolutely no diversity program anywhere is saying "well we need to hire people, and there aren't any good applicants left except those who don't tick diversity boxes, but still let's not bother hiring them". It really doesn't make sense at all unless those 900 people actually weren't good enough applicants and are wrongly believing that diversity is the reason.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
Ok what's the top-5 list of technology things that need to be changed? finally rolling out the decades-delayed ATCC upgrade (currently delayed to 2032)? real-time transponders? satellite location? using digital radio instead of VHF, for better audio quality? Is https://www.city-journal.org/article/reagan-national-airport... accurate?
(Total ATC salaries are 14,000 ATCs * median salary of $140K = only $1.9bn, so they could certainly hire more and pay higher.)
The goal here shouldn't be to have a small set of brilliant people-machines that perform always 100% under various stress and understaffing, the goal is to have a larger set of good workers that are easily replaceable (ie if they call in sick, have accident or other sudden events).
Money and probably just a mild change of approach how such team is created and maintained. If you pay those folks more than lawyers and doctors, then many of those and other high performers will apply for such job. Also it would be one of the more moral high paying jobs out there.
Given how much is constantly at stake money and people wise its still peanuts, feel free to take away 10% budget from completely useless airport security ala TSA - here literally everybody would win (apart from security folks, but those jobs are crap and they hate it AFAIK)
Government has historically been far behind the pay scale curve for things like this, but that isn't the main driver of people not going into these fields.
There is a huge talent pool that simply will not apply for Government jobs. That is because the work environment is toxic. A special kind of parasite that walks upright on two legs rears its head where everything is about standing, and seniority, rather than production and results, and DEI is a big part of that.
The restrictions are also very high, for any G-man job. Government jobs have gotten the worst reputation, because quite literally any good person doing those jobs eventually trades their sanity for them. Its filled with personal cost.
It also doesn't help matters that the government actually created these problems to begin with. If you don't know what I'm talking about google the 1981 Reagan ATC strike, and how Reagan broke the backs of the ATC union labor movement overnight.
The system is fragile because its centralized. Single points of failure, and front of line blocking are some of the worst types of problems to deal with in highly complex systems because they often are not obvious except to the people whose job it is to design resiliency into the system.
The turnover part is usually solved by salaries and working conditions. High turnover is consonance of bad working conditions and low salaries. So, this point can be solved by money.
The other points are just repetition of the same thing - people doing this job must be capable.
Becoming a doctor is a long, expensive and arduous process in the US, with a very narrow funnel (much too narrow but that's another topic). But if you make it through residency, you're mostly guaranteed to make good money for the rest of your life (if you don't screw up, etc.)
Start by tripling the ATC salary and see what happens.
Then, reduce ATC hours to reduce stress and errors. That means hiring more people (==higher incentives).
But my instinct tells me some filters happen too early. Don't know about the US but in France for example you need to be an engineer to become an air controller; and to be an engineer you need to go to prep school; and to go to prep school you need to have majored in physics in high school (not just math).
Which means that, if you choose not to take physics in 11th grade when you're 16, that's it: you will never be an air controller in France, whatever your other motivations or qualities.
But it would seem some personal qualities, like the ability to switch context easily, be resistant to stress (or even enjoying it), etc. should be more relevant to this job than just having studied physics in high school.
There is an iron law of nature that, hiring is never a problem of shortages, just insufficient pay. If you don't pay them enough they will get a job doing something that pays more and/or has better working conditions.
Labor isn't any more immune to market forces than any other good. The only people who are qualified for the job and willing to do it for cheap are the ones on the right side of the bell curve. Pay moves that bell curve and exposes more of it.
Like, perhaps there is merit in arguing for more controllers or more pay for controllers, and perhaps that would lead to a safer airspace, but the attempts to implicitly tie the fatal crash to ATC in this case seems pretty poor form, here. What we know from the ATC transcripts[1] already tells us that ATC was aware the helicopter & the plane would be near each other well in advance of the crash; ATC informed the helo, the helo responded that he had the aircraft in sight. Time passed, the ATC gets a proximity warning (labelled as "[Conflict Alert Warning]" in VASAviation's video), ATC immediately acts on it, again reaching out to the helo, the helo again confirms they have the aircraft in sight, and moments later we can hear on the ATC transcripts the crash occur as people in the room witness it and react in horror.
To my armchair commenting self, the ATC controllers seem to be exonerated by the transcript, and I'm going to otherwise wait until an NTSB report tells me why I'm wrong to break out the pitch forks on them.
Put another way, military aircraft, especially certain military aircraft, can do things that civilian aircraft can't.
If I were piloting a helicopter in that airspace, that ATC transcript would have been significantly different.
We should be looking at root causes. Which means we should ask the uncomfortable questions about the deference given to some military/government aircraft. But we don't want to ask those questions. So we keep quibbling around the edges by talking about ATC or Reagan firing everyone or even the ridiculous suggestion that maybe the civilian airliners could be in a hold pattern at certain times.
It would be humorous if it wasn't so tragic.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/dc-plane-c...
>on Wednesday evening was also monitoring planes taking off and landing, according to the FAA report reviewed by The New York Times. These jobs are typically assigned to two different people, the outlet reported
But:
>However, the National Transportation Safety Board said they will not speculate on the causes of the crash and will release a preliminary report on the incident within 30 days.
So perhaps its not staffing. Although I don't really know what world the report is going to be going out into in 30 days.
One complaint I've seen is that the ATC should not have let the helicopter do visual spacing in that regime, that it was somewhat careless and unsafe and possibly discouraged. If the ATC operator was overloaded with work, they would be incentivized to "outsource" the spacing management to the helicopter who would then be able to screw it up by "seeing" the wrong plane. I can see the merits of the argument but it would take the NTSB to have the right knowledge to confirm or deny it.
This is what I mean. Clearly, people are unfamiliar with what actions certain military/government pilots are able to take in that airspace. It's rules. It's not about being encouraged or discouraged or overworked or underworked or rainbow farting unicorns. That's not how ATC works.
I would want to change the rules that allow military pilots to do this sort of thing. Or at least, have a reasoned conversation about why it's necessary to allow them to do this sort of thing. But that sort of conversation is difficult. So everyone wants to talk about everything else instead. The issue being that everything else is very likely not the root problem.
I hope when the reports do come out we can stop this nonsense about ATC, or Reagan being a moron, or civilian airliner holding patterns or whatever else and actually have the hard sit down on that issue.
The problem isn't that the controller didn't notice they were too close; it is that less than 1000 feet of separation is considered fine and normal and commonplace. It's too close and leaves no room for error.
Echoes.
The fired workers were replaced as rapidly as possible. That would result in massive change in the age distribution of controllers. It takes a few years to train a new controller so lets assume the youngest new hires were 22. New controllers have to be 31 and under.
Let's take the best case and assume all the new controllers are 22 through 31 and are evenly distributed in that range, and started in 1982. The group will start reaching 56 in 2007 and finish reaching 56 in 2016. That's over 11000 controllers retiring over a 10 year span.
I haven't been able to find data on the actual distribution of ages for the replacements. I'd guess that it was skewed younger, which could make that echo narrower. Maybe 11000 controllers retiring over 5 years.
If they hired enough people to replace those that group too will show up as another echo, but more spread out.
The union's problem was that they assumed air traffic control was so important they could dictate terms and then they got called on it and lost. Public sector unions don't really work because the other side of the table is the government (and by extension the public), so the two possible outcomes are that the union gets screwed by the government or the public gets screwed by the union.
For that to be the case there would have to be some more proximate problem compromising the ability to replace air traffic controllers at the rate it was possible to in the 1980s. Like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42939941
If it had become a norm then a second controller would probably not change anything.
I think we're going to wind up talking about SOP and whether visual separation is permissible in this class of airspace when using NVGs or under other conditions present in this mishap, e.g., on nighttime training. There are companies (lufty for instance) that, by policy, prohibit visual separation at night.
There might be some scrutiny on the controller for approving visual separation in the first place, and I think that'll get into weeds of how he should have known the risk factors for the helo. Still, as Juan notes, it didn't sound like thoughtful consideration, but like rote call and response.
This would have been prevented if the helo had to take vectors. There would be no talk of visual separation. The controller was aware of how tight it was, and if it were simply a rule, he would have told the helo to hold present position, waited for an appropriate place in the sequencing, and then given a clearance.
Noticing aircraft flying off assigned course is exactly the type of thing that a resource constrained ATC would be guiltless in NOT noticing, but that a non-constrained ATC probably would notice.
Obviously if ATC were fully staffed and this happened, it wouldn’t be worth seriously looking into, but there’s a reason the intended staffing levels are what they are, which can basically be summed up as “cognitive burden.”
>FAA embroiled in lawsuit alleging it turned away 1,000 applicants based on race — that contributed to staffing woes https://nypost.com/2025/01/31/us-news/faa-embroiled-in-lawsu...
The guy behind it is quite interesting. Got 100% on his exams but told they were only hiring 'diverse' folk https://archive.ph/ixmFB
This dude leading the lawsuit is incredibly unreliable. The ATC biographical assessment didn't have any race-based questions - it was just a decision making questionnaire: https://123atc.com/biographical-assessment
It was a questionable assessment, but the idea that he failed it for being white is peak self-victimization.
The risk of DEI was fast-passing under-qualified candidates, or that they were misplacing their recruitment efforts. But the idea that they would not be filling necessary positions with qualified white people continues to be something of a polemic myth.
(Opinions are my own and not necessarily that of the FAA.)
Furthermore, the bias was literally baked into the test - certain minority candidates got to skip the test altogether. Although it's still not evidence that qualified white people were prevented from filling in vacancies.
It looks like you did not read what you linked to.
That's not a study guide for the biographical questionaire. There was never a study guide for biographical questionaire.
> certain minority candidates got to skip the test altogether.
Source?
> I don't think...
That's okay. I know the answers were leaked. However you can speculate all you want about ridiculous "secret racial kabals".
There's people who actually believe this stuff?
Hopefully these people are not allowed to infect the NTSB with their idiocy. We have to keep focused on safety. Which means we don't ignore the root cause of helo pilots losing, (or maybe never even having), situational awareness.
How can we make the space safe even if helo pilots lose situational awareness?
All this DEI nonsense has to take a back seat to answering those primary safety related questions. This is not a game, or political rally, or whatever. We have to fix this.
Looks like this is the case, https://casetext.com/case/brigida-v-buttigieg-1.
"Though not at issue in this motion, the Plaintiffs allege that the FAA failed to 'validate' the Biographical Questionnaire, and that the Biographical Questionnaire awarded points to applicants in a fashion untethered to the qualifications necessary to be an air traffic controller. For instance, applicants could be awarded fifteen points, the highest possible for any question, if they indicated their lowest grade in high school was in a science class. But applicants received only two points if they had a pilot's certificate, and no points at all if they had a Control Tower Operator rating, even though historic research data indicated that those criteria had 'a positive relationship with ATCS training outcomes'. Further, if applicants answered that they had not been employed at all in the prior three years, they received 10 points, the most awarded for that question."
Can you explain to me why it was more important for air traffic controller candidates to be bad at science and unemployed than it was for them to be pilots or trained in air traffic control?
For instance, there is a 15-point question for which you have to answer that your worst grade in high school was in Science, and a separate 15-point question where you have to answer that your worst grade in college was in History/Political Science; picking any of the other options (each question has 5 possible answers) means 0 marks for that question. Collectively, these two questions alone account for one eighth of all the available points. (Many questions were red herrings that were actually worth nothing.)
But then the same blacks-only group that had lobbied internally to get the questionairre instituted (the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees) leaked the "correct" answers to the arbitrary questions to its members, allowing them to get full marks. Effectively this was a race-based hiring cartel. Non-blacks couldn't pass; blacks unwilling to join segregated racial affinity groups or unwilling to cheat the test couldn't pass; but corrupt blacks just needed to cheat when invited to and they would pass easily, entering the merit-based stage of hiring with the competition already eliminated by the biographical questionairre.
(A sad injustice is that blacks who wouldn't join the NBCFAE or cheat the test, and so suffered the same unfair disadvantage as whites, are excluded from the class in the class-action lawsuit over this whole mess. Since the legal argument is that it was discrimination against non-blacks, blacks don't get to sue - they lost out because of their integrity, not their race, and they have no recourse at law for that.)
See the questions at https://github.com/kaisoapbox/kaisoapbox.github.io/blob/main... or read an account of the story at either https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-... (short) or https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa... (long).
Perhaps if these sorts of tactics, or even just circumstances, weren't so prevalent, then they wouldn't seem like such a good idea to purposely replicate.
No one is gullible enough to believe that, if the alleged is true, it would be the first time that unscrupulous methods were used to advantage a particular group in recruitment for jobs or education, right? Or that, when it has happened, it has been primarily used to advantage black applicants?
>... investigative reporting from outlets like the New York Times has failed to consider the role of the hiring scandal at all
I wonder -- if half of the air traffic controllers took the offer to leave their jobs, do we have a Plan B? The deadline they have been given to decide is Thursday; I have not seen any communication as to whether ATC (and TSA, etc.) will be operational Friday.
In theory you could do what Reagan did and tell the military to do ATC.
Whether or not this is a good idea is another matter.
A good counter-example of ATC would be police. Police have strong collective bargaining rights, but mostly came at the expense of accountability and citizen oversight. (And also police departments are still chronically understaffed).
Or in the private sectors, non-unionized manufacturers like Toyota and Honda always outperform legacy manufacturers in the US on quality.
I'm not saying there's not a strong argument for unionization, but an improvement in quality is not one backed by any sort of evidence and it's a really weak argument. To put it another way, it would be hard for a unionized employee to outperform a Foxconn employee with no human rights on output quality - but it's not at all the kind of argument we should be making.
I'm going to guess that there are far stronger correlations with household wealth when it comes to student performance than there are whether the students are taught by teachers who are employed under a CBA.
> Or in the private sectors, non-unionized manufacturers like Toyota and Honda always outperform legacy manufacturers in the US on quality.
That could very well be because of how the cars are engineered and made versus the union representation for the people who make them.
GM, for example, tends to build cars in a way as to make them as cheap as possible to build. That lets them compete on price versus quality. You need the car now, after all; what happens in 40k miles isn't as important to you now. Of course, that comes with the risk, like when some essential component on my college girlfriend's Pontiac's shat the bed, and they'd had to take the entire front of the car apart to replace it because it was cheaper to build that way. They've just taken the price of having a functioning vehicle and charged you for it at the mechanic, not the dealership.
Toyota and Honda used to do the opposite, of course. You were going to pay more (depending on exchange rate) upon purchase of the vehicle but the result was that the car wouldn't need as many trips to the mechanic. They've since started doing more value engineering.
There's also a cultural difference between Japanese and American businesses, but that's far more nebulous.
GM makes crappy because, if they tried to make high quality cars, they would be priced like Cadillacs
What's the excuse for the shoddy non-union Mexican GM vehicles?
Vehicle designs, powertrains, critical components are all made by the HQ or its suppliers.
It's interesting that other car companies have backed off from the multiple brands/badges. We don't have plymouth, Oldsmobile, mercury, Pontiac.
The abstract cultural differences might be difficult to articulate, but many of the effects are concrete: Toyota still maintains lifetime employment for Japanese factory employees. And Toyota factory workers in Japan are represented by a union, AFAIU, though like Germany the relationship between unions and management is less adversarial in Japan.
Interestingly, the change in union employment in Japan seems to have tracked the US, from a high of over 50% mid-century to 16% today versus ~35% and ~10%, respectively, in the U.S.
which was a substantial improvement for millions of people. It's worth pointing out that the one (and probably only) good thing I can think of that Reagan did would get him tossed out of today's republican party.
That's why Republicans are unwilling to budge a second time.
But regardless of if this was the fault of Reagan or the largely Democratic-controlled Congress, Republicans in government since then have soured on any idea giving an ounce of amnesty because of it.
That didn't really happen. You see plenty of roundups of illegal immigrants, many/most are employed. What you don't see ever are roundups of their employers.
If you want to actually see this problem solved immediately all you need to do is show a daily perp walk of the employers on the evening news for a few months.
They found about 900 undocumented workers.
Many of them gave evidence to officials, including written instructions from Tyson that advised them how to fill out employment, banking, taxation paperwork if they "didn't have documentation" and how to stay under the radar, i.e. Tyson didn't just know they might have undocumented workers, they were facilitating and actively enabling it.
In press conferences, when journalists asked "Are there any plans to investigate the company or issue fines or charges?", the response? "We are not considering that at this time." (And they never did.)
What it ended up looking like was that Tyson had been getting in some trouble, getting bad press for OSHA safety issues and perhaps had decided their undocumented workers were getting a little too angry about poor safety standards, making waves.
It would be entirely unsurprising to me if Tyson made a sweetheart deal with ICE that said "Hey, if you come to these plants, you'll get to make this big stink about undocumented workers" (and this was during the Trump administration), "but in return, can you leave us out of it?", very much shades of "Won't someone rid me of these meddlesome workers?"
Seriously, why else would the name of a president who hasn't served in 40 years suddenly be brought up all the time?
Also, his handling of the disaster was pretty good.
Besides never missing an opportunity to 'slam' the opposition, I have no idea why this is being construed as an ATC failure.
That's part of the problem here, everyone is just taking political potshots. Which is to be expected. But the danger is you lose sight of the real issue. As you mentioned, the helo pilot's loss of situational awareness. (Did they ever even have situational awareness?)
We can't be getting into these situations where every crisis is met by this typical American emotional reactionism. We can't be blaming the "left", or the "right", or the most ridiculous one which was "it was the black guys somehow". We gotta stop letting that crap distract us.
Operator error is only the first 'why' in the 5 whys for this incident.
Just saying what I've heard. One issue is that the controller allowed visual separation, to begin with. They say he should have known that it was difficult, especially at night, and shouldn't have allowed it.
"Yo watch out for that big plane on your left" and then hope for the best.
ATC already couldn’t work remotely. The only people who would take a deal like this would be people who were thinking about quitting or retiring anyway. I suspect ATC will not be substantially affected by people taking that deal.
Your sentiment is a result of their incredibly vague first attempt at messaging.
The offer was (or ended up being) a full buyout offer. The “offer” is probably genuine, but it’s not a clean offer, as many edge cases are unclear (e.g., can they terminate you if they accept the offer… currently there is nothing stopping them from doing that, how can someone of retirement age accept the offer and then retire, etc.).
Iirc, ATCs can accept the buy out if they so chose. I’m guessing most won’t, as the ATC deal is good to stick with until you retire.
Edit: Per the article, the status of the offer is unclear. It wasn’t cleared with the union before the letter was released, and it hasn’t been officially rescinded either (despite comments that it has from DoT).
That’s a reasonable take.
I don’t think anyone involved is actually on the same page about targeting or intent. It’s a complete shit show.
I have many fed gov friends, and I’m getting some incredible insider takes.
Interestingly, I think that the idea of reducing the federal work force size has a lot of supporters from both sides of the aisle, but this implementation has been haphazard (at best).
A “good” implementation would remove a lot of “build headcount” positions while also adding/filling positions that are still lacking. ATCs and contracting (to name two) fall under the latter.
Also, this doesn't save us any money at all. Congress allocates money and in many cases specifies employment levels. But like the OMB memo says -- taxpayers still have to spend the money for these employees whether they do any work or not.
The reason they are doing this haphazard mess is that their positions are not popular and therefore cannot pass in Congress.
Hmmm… this is short-term correct (at a minimum), but may not be correct long term. Time will tell.
Yes, the money for current jobs has been allocated/budgeted for the fiscal year, and the folks who resign will actually be paid for not working until the end of the fiscal year.
This is standard buyout stuff, and the government does this every year on a smaller scale, usually targeting high-paid, low productivity employees who are eligible to retire.
That said, what happens next fiscal year? The speculation is that the default will be that the positions vacated will basically be lost — as in, the slot/allocation will no longer exist and will not get funded. I imagine exceptions will exist, but this will create a noticeable reduction in the federal workforce if it ends up this way.
Said another way, paying 8 months for no work is cheaper than paying for 5-10 years of unneeded/inefficient work (at least that’s the theory).
> The reason they are doing this haphazard mess is that their positions are not popular and therefore cannot pass in Congress.
As I mentioned above, I think there is broad support on both sides for cutting and/or right-sizing the federal workforce.
Anyone who has worked in or with the federal government knows about instances of gratuitous headcount growth and substantial underemployment in some areas. There exist grifters who maybe put in 10 hours a week on average of very mediocre work for a salary that they absolutely could not earn outside of the government.
These same people also know about areas of the government that are grossly understaffed, seemingly in perpetuity (ATCs, contracting, etc.) and/or extremely underpaid (e.g., anything in tech).
I think it would be trivially easy to get broad support in Congress to implement changes that fix these problems, but that fix doesn’t start with a hastily written “fork you” all-hands e-mail.
All that said, all of this gratuitous motion is basically a drop in the bucket compared to modest and reasonable changes that could be made in social security, Medicare/medicaid, and/or defense spending.
I think both sides are aligned in the desire to reduce the size of government. (Which has been steadily declining relative to the size of the population/economy for something like 4 decades.)
However, the administration is not pushing for right-sizing the workforce. They are proposing deeply unpopular cuts to things Americans actually value, without any debate or discussion of tradeoffs.
I believe that this is largely how this round will turn out. The numbers look very low so far (20k?).
> the administration is not pushing for right-sizing the workforce. They are proposing deeply unpopular cuts to things Americans actually value, without any debate or discussion of tradeoffs.
Just to be clear, I agree with all of this.
As I mentioned above, this is an absolute shit show. If chaos ensues, I think that will be seen as a success by those making the top-level decisions.
Our system of checks and balances is completely broken right now, and the limits are being tested by a group of folks who have no concept of noblesse oblige.
The results will be interesting.
I saw that, and it immediately made me realize that it's sort of not a useful number without context. Are those 20k spread roughly evenly across the government, or are there places where everyone quit? I am sure there are parts of government that will cease to function if the wrong 500 people suddenly quit.
As I mentioned before, I think the folks doing this would be fine with a “cease to function” outcome.
Next steps would be to blame it on the democrats, and then probably privatize it for a song to one of their cronies.
If you expect to be fired ~ in the fall, it is not unreasonable to be interested in the offer to keep getting paid from your federal job while you look for alternate employment.
1 - I am not going to get into who fits this category. The point is which employees might think they fit into this category.
Edit: except for the asbestos. I'm glad my house doesn't have that. (IIRC they were all built in the 1960s.)
There have also been trials done with "virtual towers" at smaller airports, using a bunch of cameras and with controllers remotely monitoring them and communicating.
If enough ATCs quit that major airports have to be shut down or reduce flights, the airlines (and stock market) will turn against Trump pretty quickly. My guess is the going salary for ATCs is going to increase substantially once they realize they need to lure back those who quit.
I would love to see all ATCs in DC quit, and for others refuse to work there, so that Trump and Musk feel the consequences for their actions directly. Wouldn't it be great if Air Force One was stranded because of this.
I was under the impression that AF1 flew in/out of Andrews air force base, which I (possibly naively?) assumed did not use civilian ATC. But yes, that would be great :)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-exempt...
It's all a twisted yarn:
https://wlos.com/news/nation-world/no-evidence-trump-fired-t...
In America? Who knows.
The employee's agency determines if they spend it on leave, not OPM. Congress will determine if there's even money after March 14th available to pay for 8 months of anything, let alone 8 months of admin leave.
You think air traffic controllers are “doing nothing”? What VA staff, park rangers, food inspectors, etc.? I realize this stereotype is something a lot of people spend money reinforcing but you should consider why you believe it to be true of a nationwide group doing a huge range of jobs and what evidence that’s based on.
[1] "large" here generally meaning over 100k employees, relatively concentrated (so a hypothetical org with 5k employees in each of 20 countries likely does not fit). For scale, the US has any number of domestic bases where personnel count exceeds Meta's total staffing, with a couple being roughly the size as Microsoft's US employment.
So first we need more training capacity, and they already have trouble hiring and retaining instructors. This is a more direct place you can throw more money at now.
A start would be moving some of the primary training to the control centers. There's more than one of them, spread around the country, and they already have their own significant training departments.
A significant fraction of people who get into the academy end up not making the cut. Then another good fraction "wash out" during extensive training for the specific airport/center they end up in.
It's a very difficult job and nothing they've tried before is very good at predicting who's going to be successful at it quickly/cheaply.
1: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/bay-area-airport-losing-...
2: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/san-carlos-airport-reach...
Why would the FAA be involved in locality pay or staffing a Contract Tower? I thought the whole point of Contract Towers was a private company staffed and paid them and the FAA merely dispersed the contractual amount to the company.
> The contract, however, did “not include locality pay to account for the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area.” This resulted in the new offer to SQL’s air traffic controllers coming in “significantly lower” than their current compensation, according to the county.
Is this just RVA trying to lowball controllers? I can't imagine their contract with the FAA specify the maximum amount they would pay their own controllers.
Frankly, if RVA can't fulfill their contract, then they should be penalized and have their contracts stripped. Given the contract is for several hundred million dollars and multiple airports, I imagine they'll figure out a way to add a housing stipend back in.
There's only additional risk if you treat the amount of planes in an area as some kind of inevitable force of nature. If an area isn't safe because of a lack of staff, flights can be canceled to reduce the load on remaining staff without impacting safety.
Sucks for the people who bought a ticket, but a canceled flight is a lot better than dying in a plane crash.
Admittedly, its a big if, and second even if it is true it is not clear to me how much of a factor this is in the shortage.
> First, to liberals:
> I dislike Trump as much as anyone. Maybe I’m not supposed to play my hand like that while reporting a news article, but it’s true. I’ve wanted him out of politics since he entered the scene a decade ago, I voted against him three elections in a row, and I think he’s had a uniquely destructive effect within US politics. So I understand—please believe, I understand—just how disquieting it is to watch him stand up and blame DEI after a major tragedy.
> But Democrats did not handle it. The scandal occurred under the Obama administration. The FAA minimized it, obscured it, fought FOIA requests through multiple lawsuits, and stonewalled the public for years as the class action lawsuit rolled forward. The Trump administration missed it, too, for a term, and it’s likely most officials simply didn’t hear about it through the first few years of the Biden administration. No outlets left of Fox Business bothered to provide more than a cursory examination of it, and it never made much of a dent on the official record. Even when the New York Times ran a thoroughly reported article on air traffic controller shortages late last year, it never touched the scandal. It was possible to miss it.
If relevant to who gets hired, you are literally discriminating against candidates on the basis of race. If irrelevant, you still have the "maybe they're just an affirmative action hire" pall hanging over those people. Nobody wins.
"American society" is a little broad – I don't think there is a single solution (at that scale) which will do more good than harm.
Rather they added an insane biographical test that only DEI students could pass, with the net effect of dramatically reducing the availability of ATC's.
i.e. a minority ATC is just as qualified, but there are far fewer white ATC than there should be.
> Throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s, the FAA faced pressure to diversify its field of air traffic controllers, historically a profession that has been primarily white men, notably from the NBCFAE.4 In the early 2000s, this pressure focused on the newly developed air traffic control qualification test, the AT-SAT, which the NBCFAE hired Dr. Outtz to critique from an adverse impact standpoint. As originally scored, the test was intended to pass 60% of applicants, but predictions suggested only 3% of black applicants would pass.5 In response, the FAA reweighted the scoring to make the test easier to pass, reducing its correlation with job performance as they did so.6 In its final form, some 95% of applicants passed the test.7
> This was a bit of a shell game. In practice, they divided it into a “well qualified” band (with scores between 85 and 100 on the test, met by around 60% of applicants) and a “qualified” band (with scores between 70 and 84), and drew some 87% of selections from that “well qualified” band.8 Large racial disparities remained in the “well qualified” band. As a result, facing continued pressure, the FAA began to investigate ways to deprioritize the test.
> Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” outperforming “most other strategies in predicting mean performance,” and it was low cost and low time commitment. On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute. When they tested alternative measures like biographical data, they found that the test scores predicted 27% of variance in performance, while the “biodata” predicted only 2%. It just didn’t do much.9
> The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss.10 They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?” There is a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes. How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?
Though the facts on the latter are Not Great, and nuance is not exactly abundant right now.
"Like 85% of their fellow CTI students, Brigida and Reilly found themselves faced with a red exclamation point and a dismissal notice: “Based upon your responses to the Biographical Assessment, we have determined that you are NOT eligible for this position."
The article also mentions that there were fewer applicants and fewer offers extended from 2014 onward.
> Per Fischer, applicants declined year-over-year from 2014 onward. In 2016, hiring was divided into two pools: Pool 1, veterans and CTI students (4021 applicants, 1451 offer letters) and Pool 2, for general population (25,156 applicants, 6799 who passed the biographical questionnaire, 1500 offer letters). By 2019, only 9265 applied, with 6419 (923 from Pool 1, 5496 from Pool 2), with 234 Pool 1 offer letters and 680 in Pool 2.16
Trump was likely referencing it with his DEI comments about the FAA.
Pete Buttigieg's tweet response (acting as if Trump's accusation was coming completely out of left field, when there's literally a case named "Brigida v. Buttigieg"): https://x.com/PeteButtigieg/status/1885013865676562491
a) More money
b) Video game technology
To truly get this problem, you really need to be in it. Either as a pilot or as a controller.
Watching threads like this reminds me that I have expertise within a couple of specialized domains and that’s it. Beyond those, I’m a tourist.
As a (non-commercial) pilot it's honestly infuriating watching people who have never tried to fly a plane, never tried to locate and identify another aircraft from the air, and never controlled (or even sat with a controller or toured a tower, tracon, or center) make these claims and statements about how easy these problems they don't understand are to fix as if they're experts on the topic.
The challenge:
- electrical planes are coming and are going to cause an influx of pilots who can now afford to own and fly their planes. Teslas with wings basically. Cheap to buy, cheap to fly, lower noise, no emissions, what's not to like? It will take some time but early versions of these things are being certified right now. The 100$ hamburger run becomes a 5$ coffee run. It's going to have obvious effects: more people will want to get in on the fun. Way more people.
- a lot of those things will be used to fly medium distances for work in bad weather; which creates an obvious need for some level of ATC interaction.
- Likewise, cheaper/sustainable commercial short hops are going to increase traffic movements.
- Autonomous drones and planes are going to be part of the mix of traffic ATC has to factor in. Autonomous operation is key to operating safely. Especially in low visibility situations. Shuttle flights between city centers and terminals, short local hops, package deliveries, aerial surveillance, etc. On top of regular planes with way smarter auto pilots than today. The volume of this traffic will be orders of magnitudes of what ATC deals with today.
There's some time to prepare for this. Certification processes move slowly. But a lot of this stuff is being experimented with right now at small scale or stuck in the certification pipeline already. We're long past the "will it work" moment for most of this stuff. Technically, this would be happening right now if the FAA would allow it. They'll be fighting a losing battle to slow this down and delay the inevitable here. But the end result is that ATC needs to be ready for orders of magnitude more movement in their controlled air spaces. And right now they clearly aren't.
In short, all this requires new, modern tools. It's obvious. Training more ATC people to do things the way we have been doing them for the last 50 years is not a good plan for the next 50. It's a stop gap solution at best. With a very short shelf life.
Does this not blow anyone else's minds? This seems like a clear case of 'because we've always done it that way'. There's no way if a system was being developed today they'd say to hell with screens, lets just give them instructions over audio and assume they'll follow them to a T if acknowledged.
I hear in my headset "Clear for the option runway two-five-right, number two behind a cessna, two mile final, on the go make right traffic" and I know exactly what is expected of me without having to look at a screen. A digital display would be a step backwards.
EDIT: I will add I get that adding something like that to a general aviation cockpit is much easier than putting it on a commercial 787, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
If anything, the helicopter needed more avoidance technology from the sounds of it. And that has more to do with the lack of integration the military does with civilian systems.
But there are tons of flying general aviation planes that are from the 50s/60's, and a long tail going back even further than that. Some of them don't even have a radio to talk on. Or an electrical system to run it.
Mandating ADSB took many years, and still has exceptions carved out. And that's a fairly simple technology. There are companies that build it all into a replacement tail light LED "bulb" to provide compliance for ~$2000.
Still that might be 5-10% of the value of your 1977 Cessna 152. If you take the cheap airframes out of the sky, that makes new pilots getting their 1500 hours more expensive before they can go get a job on the big boy planes.
Audio makes perfect sense as a backup, but 99.99% of flights would benefit from having a screen showing object and current planned route.
In this particular case, simply having that information available would have allowed an onboard computer to predict a collision.
If a plane loses comms there are well defined procedures and everyone knows exactly what that plane will do as they proceed to their destination.
That's not how ATC works.
Reporting integrates approach and flight tunnel envelopes. Envelopes are specified with coordinates, not just sequential points + altitude.
Cryptographic authentication in subsequent position broadcast from plane flight systems efficiently confirms receipt and acceptance of prior control messages.
Flight systems warn on countdown to envelope exception not only actual envelope exception or altitude exception.
For passenger planes, ability of ground control to command autonomous landing with blessing of federal government in an emergency (eg. no pilots conscious, interface borked), and to send urgent, cryptographically authenticated ATC command requests (change altitude or heading immediately, etc.) for pilot consideration in the event of ATC-detected potential emergent danger conditions.
Computer -> human -> radio(spoken protocol) -> human -> plane.
There aren't a lot of practical reasons it can't just be
Computer -> radio(digital protocol) -> plane
(There are nonzero reasons, such as the presence of weird situations, VFR aircraft, etc., but it's not a lot.)
And yeah, my understanding is we have much the same physical, mental and technical requirements as other countries.
They struggled to recruit people who could do the job at all, and when people got into the building to be trained (after an initial training) most of them would quit because they couldn't do it.
That's not to say there's not ways to divide it up, but it's not always easily divisible. Well implemented technology can help, but poorly implemented technology can hurt, so everything needs to be done slowly and carefully.
If 1 in 100k can handle 8 hours, and 1 in 10k can handle 2 hours, then the solution is to employ 4 times as many people for 2 hours.
Think they'll now work as ATC after they win?
Doesn't help to tie up 900+ more potential qualified ATC (again of certain persuadion) when FAA tried reverse discrimination AGAIN in 2021 in Brigida vs Buttigieg lawsuit.
Will they ever learn?
Source
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
Market problem requires a market solution.
As an employee it is your duty to refuse orders that potentially risk lives.
> The number of flights at Reagan National is capped because of its congestion. But lawmakers have an interest in boosting direct flights to their states – for themselves and their constituents – because the airport is more convenient to downtown than Dulles International Airport
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/01/30/safety-...
So the knew the airport was already at max number of flights that it could handle safely and yet they still increased the number of flights in pure selfishness.
It takes 1 hour by subway as there is no direct connection and the lines have a lot of stops.
The real solution would be a direct subway with no stop between Dulles and Pentagon. 20 miles using a fast subway should be no more than 25 minutes in travel time. The subway could then continue making a loop in central DC, serving all the offices next to the White House etc.
But that would be good public transportation and that is outside of Congress' Overton Window.
Is it really safe to fly these days if this is now a national discussion?
Prior to the midair at DCA, there had not been a fatal (edit) airliner crash in this country since 2009, and there had not been a midair collision involving an airliner since the 1970s. The fact that some people have an irrational fear of flying does not justify that irrational fear dictating policy any more than people who have an irrational fear of clowns wanting them banned.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_...
The Asiana crash at SFO had multiple fatalities, and was in 2013.
From the Wikipedia page:
“This is a list of fatal commercial aviation accidents and incidents in or in the vicinity of the United States or its territories. It comprises a subset of both the list of accidents and incidents involving airliners in the United States and the list of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft. It does not include fatalities due to accidents and incidents solely involving private aircraft or military aircraft.”
Given the leadership, I don't trust it to not get less safe, fast. We're not in statistically normal times. I highly doubt it's a coincidence that Trump fires various controllers and less than a week later we get that first midair collision in 16 years.
You can talk statistics, but the physics are another magnitude. I get in a really bad wreck and car safety standards may let me walk away without a scratch. No amount of safety can protect against a multi thousand foot droop from freefall.
Go tell that to the casualties. Oh wait, you can't. Which part of them being dead is irrational exactly?
> “You might think there is some irreducible risk level we can’t get below,” adds Barnett, a leading expert in air travel safety and operations. “And yet, the chance of dying during an air journey keeps dropping by about 7 percent annually, and continues to go down by a factor of two every decade.”
0: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09696...
1: https://news.mit.edu/2024/study-flying-keeps-getting-safer-0...
Not saying that your sources aren't useful or anything.
The reason this (and Boeing before it) are in the news is because the US air system is incredibly safe.
For perspective, there are ~27,000 US passenger flights per day. [0]
I think the last commercial US passenger carrier midair collision was in 1990? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mid-air_collisions
(Approximate numbers: 3M US passengers per day, 600 people on a 747).
Head over to https://www.reddit.com/r/ATC/ and have a look.
Entry level ATC salaries are about $50,000 (~$23 an hour).
And you do not get to "choose" where you land on your first assignment.
Try living on $23 an hour in a HCOL area.
I have zero issues with research into AI research into those areas, but I think it does a major disservice to claim that a weekend is all it takes to get something close to ready for life or death decisions.
but forget the focus on automating air traffic control, datalink, complex ground IT, remote controls.. That is way to costly and difficult to do in the context of a collection of decentralized legacy systems.
Instead most people are trying to get rid of paper strips (notes used by ATC), and sell complex system that try to automate conflict management.
The hard thing is to improve the UX, the ATC has to communicate with humans (hard even with the highly codified language used), and DO NOT want to solve technical issues, the system has to indicate potential conflicts well in advance but not nag for it at a bad time. They are a lot of human factors to take in consideration and a system well designed with the air traffic controller at the center of it could help a lot.
I'm looking at the recent airport crash of the Helicopter and plane as an example of where traffic should be limited. Must be other over busy airports too...
I wonder what the software UX is like for ATC, and if there's room for improvement? Is the software/hardware ancient? I'd hope that it is absolutely rock solid but knowing big custom projects I'm not very hopeful!
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/tfdm/efs (Image caption: "Paper flight strips currently in use")
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/tfdm/implementati...
Notable entry:
Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA), Washington, D.C.
July 2028
Why? It's seems ripe for technical solution. Technical solutions have solved tons of things in the past. What's special about air traffic controlling?
"do both" is actually a good answer. The Manhatten project did this. Thermal diffusion and other forms of concentration were initially put head-to-head in competition. It took a while for people to realise both worked, and should be run in parallel or even enriching feedstock. A competitive A or B not both position would not have worked out better.
So yes. research tech replacement, but expect it to be a 15-20 year project with the same costs as other 15-20 year projects. At the same time, don't assume tech will solve social issues, and pay ATC better and increase richness of training programmes by cloning the schools.
https://www.natca.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2016NATCACB...
> The approximate median annual wage for air traffic control specialists is $127,805. The salaries for entry-level air traffic control specialists increase as they complete each new training phase.
Some fully-certified air traffic controllers cannot afford to live where they work, not to mention the trainees that have the added stress of training and making less money. At my first facility, to live within 45 minutes of work, my whole paycheck went to rent, thank goodness I had savings from my previous job.
With regards to stress, other controllers have told me about how they arrive at home after work not remembering their drive home, or driving slowly in silence. I remember trying to open my apartment door with my car fob/remote one time wondering why it wasn't working.
And that pay is on par with M-F 9-5 desk jobs that don't kill you mentally and physically. ATC is 24/7 and is notorious for leading to drinking problems, suicide, etc. Entry-level pilots for major airlines make more per hour than us, and we're pay-capped by law and will never make as much as their captains.
Not sure that "can't afford to" is quite on the nose, but terminology aside I wouldn't object to paying them more.
Thanks! What an elusive bit of critical damning evidence.
How many days per week?
Paid vacations?
Most people work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Some work 10 hours a day, 4 days a week. A few work 10 hours one day, 6 hours a second day, and 8 hours the third/fourth/fifth days.
Many facilities are 24/7 so we have rotating schedules where people have to work the midnight shifts. Shift work is brutal.
Most controllers also work Saturdays and Sundays. Controllers often miss their kid's activities and other family or social functions.
Standard Federal leave accrual: - 4 hours of sick leave every pay period (two weeks). - Employees with 0-3 years accrue 4 hours of annual leave per pay period. - Employees with 3-15 years accrue 6 hours... - Employees with 15+ years accrue 8 hours...
We bid once a year for our RDOs (Regular Days Off aka "weekend") and annual leave for the following year.
Some controllers advocate that we should accrue more sick leave (and they make good points), and while the 4 hours may be a federal law, they could implement work-arounds such as allowing us to accrue an additional different type of leave.
Opinions are my own and not necessarily of the FAA.
Sorry for the delay, I wanted to write a long reply about my experience in math/physics. Short version:
After teaching math for 3 hours I get tired, and in some special cases I teach for 6 hours but at the 5 hours mark I was making too many errors. (And it included some pauses in between.) I'd would not try to make a decisions that risk lives after that.
I took some exams that were 3, 5 or even 8 hours long. It's possible but I have to administer the pauses, bathroom and even going to the bar to drink a coffee to survive them and give good answers. And in case of a mistake, I can review it half an hour later and there are no lives at risk.
> At my first facility, to live within 45 minutes of work, my whole paycheck went to rent...
That's because your federal base payscale starts very low, $47K base for an ATC-4 in 'No locality' [1], right?
[0]: https://www.faa.gov/jobs/working_here/benefits
[1]: https://www.faa.gov/jobs/working_here/benefits/pay/atspp_pay...
By law we cannot work more than 10 hour days, 6 days in a row. There are some facilities where controllers are all being scheduled to that limit.
I do often get calls on my days off asking if I want to come in for overtime that day.
Our schedules are generally pretty consistent, so I can kind of plan my time off in advance, but on a particular day I won't know if my shift starts at noon or 3pm until the schedule is posted. We can trade shifts, ask to be bumped up or back an hour or two, or even use leave for maybe the first few or last few hours of a shift, but coworkers get squirrelly about it if you do it too often.
If you bid leave, those days are guaranteed. If something comes up that you want to do (party, convention, child's recital) and put in a leave request and it doesn't get approved, then most people will call in sick. As long as there's not a pattern to calling in sick (like you only call in sick on Saturdays), then most people don't care, because this is a job where your head needs to be focused and not distracted or in a funk.
You could probably FOIA the wash-out/quit stats, but I have no idea.
Yes, pay after graduating from the FAA Academy is about 50k until you start getting certified on sectors (D1, D2, D3, then CPC).
Opinions are my own and not necessarily that of the FAA.
Why? What's the rationale to that? Presumably that doesn't work if you have small kids or dependents, or a commute with a bad rush-hour.
What I'm trying to get at is now that the situation at ATC has the full attention of the public, in a bipartisan way, time to tell us if you could wave a magic wand at the whole setup, what things would you improve?
Some days people don't have any leave bid, some days maybe one person who works on the morning shift and one person who works on the evening shift both have the day bid off, some days everyone who works the evening shift has the day bid off.
Whomever is making the schedule has to balance the controller availability with the minimum-required staffing numbers for that time of day.
Some facilities will let you flex in early, so you could just plan to arrive half an hour early (and leave half an hour early). If once in a blue moon you are a few minutes late due to unusually bad traffic, most managers are okay with that as long as it isn't a common occurance, in which case you need to leave home earlier.
Answers to second question:
(I have smaller suggestions that are needed, but I figure I'll try to be efficient with people's time and give probably the biggest two issues that I think everyone can get behind.)
1) Fix initial facility assignment. It's currently random and wastes a ton of time and money. If you're from a small town that has an opening in the control tower or you're from a large city that has an approach control or "center", you should be able to choose to go there (or close to there) once you graduate from the FAA academy. As it is now, the spot could go to a random person in a class behind you at the Academy who doesn't want that spot, and you go to some random place where you're miserable, waste everyone's time and FAA money while training there, then apply to transfer (and it's basically impossible to transfer when everywhere is below staffing and they won't release you), and then spend more time and FAA money training again at a new facility (and that other person who got the spot you wanted will also be wasting time and money training at a facility they don't want to be at either). There should be a way to submit a list of preferences and have an algorithm place you close to one of your top 10 choices/areas. If someone in authority asked me to develop a system/algorithm and a fair set of rules that's hard to game, I could probably do it, but it would take some work to come up with and then a lot more work to develop and test, but it would be worth it to the NAS (National Airspace System). Unfortunately such an assignment would probably go to the union for them to hand out to their buddies (Article 114 of the collective bargaining agreement).
Suggestion 1 (above) will save money and be more efficient in the long-run. Suggestion 2 (below) will cost more money initially, but should balance out in the long-run by attracting more qualified people who will be less likely to wash-out (whereas money is wasted on training people who will eventually wash-out, or quit when they realize it's not worth it.
2) Pay us more. Attract more qualified people who will be better controllers, by offering a better salary. The salary used to be better, but it has been eroded away through inflation. Pilots are getting 40% raises (over a couple of years) and we get 2% raises (well, 3.6% or so with the union contract). There are a lot less Air Traffic Controllers than pilots, and we are vital to the nation's security and economy. Qualified people who might be interested in ATC realize they can make just as much money in other industries that don't kill them mentally and physically like ATC does for the same if not more amount of money.
(Opinions are my own and not necessarily that of the FAA.)
For the DC locality specifically, median annual wage is $170,350 with a location quotient of 3.5 (!!)[2].
To be sure, this is just base wage, which explicitly excludes things like holiday premiums, weekend premiums, overtime, shift differentials, bonuses, etc.
This also doesn't include that oh-so-sweet defined benefit pension. The most ambitious civil service employees absolutely love gaming the shit out of this by lateral transfer to a high cost of living locality (e.g. DC metro area) for the last 3 years before retiring (at age 56) and moving to relatively low cost of living areas (e.g. Florida).
[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes532021.htm
[2] The location quotient is the ratio of the area concentration of occupational employment to the national average concentration.
Why assume with some random .com TLD source when authoritative data is both public[1] and direct from the cow's mouth?
[1] https://www.faa.gov/jobs/working_here/benefits#collapse5386
(Opinions are my own and not necessarily that of the FAA.)
I have some wild stories, but unfortunately sharing them would dox me.
The most inaccurate thing though is a transfer CPC (fully-certified controller at their previous facility) plugging in and being able to work without months of training in that area.
Reagan was looking for a reason to break up the government unions and the union overplayed their hand. So, Reagan fired all of the striking ATCs -- 11,359 -- and banned them from federal service for life (later lifted by Clinton).
This is the same headline as the professional trucking shortage in the USA and glosses over the real reasons no one will take these jobs. mandatory overtime, low wages, miserable benefits, high stress and a well documented history of retaliation against organized labor.
However, there isn't a massive pool of people abroad who can handle US airspace demands (which now seems to include helicopters flying in the approach pathways of active runways in VFR while wearing night vision goggles and ignoring their radar altimeters all so some DC asshat doesn't have to sit in a car for 20 minutes, and also includes people like my former college hallmates who take handheld aviation radios, ask for permission to depart, and run on the taxiways with their arms extended, to great dismay of ATC)
You can't just drop a tidbit like that without elaborating.
But if you do manage to get in the air you will be safe and get there. You would get used to long waits in hubs and 3 transfers to get there unless you live in a hub and are going to a hub. (Boston to Salt Lake city would be fly to NYC, then to Denver, then to Salt Lake. Even Boston to Atlanta would be a transfer in NYC). Those transfers would also involve long waits, right now airlines plane everyone to arrive at the hub and leave again more in about an hour and then little traffic for several hours. However after airlines will not coordinate schedules as they can't land so layovers will be several hours.
Tax low capacity flights more. That both reduces the number of flights and raises money which can be put toward paying ATCs more and increasing the headcount.
You then have a lever available to dial up and down to further reduce flights / raise money.
Banning is expensive and increases legislative and judicial burden.
Taxing is a much more efficient way to stop people doing things.
You have to be careful not to only lock the poorest in society out while the rich enjoy carrying on regardless, but in the case of low capacity private jets, I don't think that's a significant problem.
If the tax doesn't put off people enough, just raise it more until either it does start to dampen demand or you're raising so much money through it you no longer care and have a new revenue stream to spend on fixing whatever problems they're causing.
It probably is reasonable to look at occupancy percentage along with engine type, and adjust landing fees based on that. Two out of 18 souls on board with a turbine? High landing fees, divert some to an ATC fund.
Very common. How do you think pilots train to fly such aircraft? Would you prefer pilots not to be trained, or for this type of aircraft to cease service?
They don’t have to be trained in class B airspace to get their type rating.
Good luck trying to replicate that now.
Im sure that person could have paid out of pocket. But I doubt he did.
And an upper-mid car is not by any means beyond the reach of many regular working class people.
The prop exemption alone would clear most gen-av, but this kind of ruleset would also be very easy for the richies to bypass/game.
"Bonus depreciation" exists for cars too, but is capped around $20k. From quick reading, seems like the bonus depreciation for planes was a tax break to incentivize people to, well, buy more planes.
1910s Rockerfeller peaked at nearly $1b. That's $33b today, or chump change. He, like Gates after him, gave away a lot of wealth.
Come 1995, Bill Gates took the mantle with a net worth of $15b, or $31b today.
So from 1910 to 1995 there was very little inflation in the super rich.
By 2000 Gates reached $60b ($110b). By 2010 he'd dropped to $56b ($81b today), still nearly 3 times richer than Rockerfeller
By 2015 he'd recovered to $105b in today's money, despite giving away lots of money.
In 2018 Bezos took over with $140b, a 40% real-terms increase on the "richest person" in just 3 years.
2022 Musk took over with $236b, but lost out to Arnault in 2024 when Musk was worth a mere $210b, but today he's nearly doubled his wealth. Maybe Musk is a special case due to the excessive corruption, but Bezos has increased 30% in 12 months.
in the last 30 years, the inflation rate of super-rich-wealth has increased on average 10% a year even ignoring the Musk outlier. Inflation meanwhile was 2.5%
At those rates, in the next 30 years the super-rich will be worth $4.2 trillion, but someone more normal with a net worth of $1m will be worth $2m.
But "planning what best goes where when" could very much be algorithmic, yes. AI in the sense that A* path finding, and Kuhn's Hungarian algorithm for optimisation are "AI".
But yes, it inevitably devolves into that in practice. Because money gives you more time to make your voice heard, or delegate it to someone else representing you. Or simply bribing others.
ATC is there to provide specific services that increase safety and throughput (mostly by sequencing and separation).
If you did this with the ruling class, they'd likely pass regulations that would benefit themselves disproportionately and hurt general aviation (the small little Cessnas flying around). There is already a bunch of problems with privatized ATC, don't make it worse.
The ruling class flies private aircraft and don't have to operate out of large municipal airports.
I don't think it matters much to them whether they spend the hour in traffic out of JFK, or on a highway from White Plains.
Depends where you're going though. DCA looks pretty convenient if you're visiting the capital; but lots of big cities have smaller airports that are more convenient if you can land at any airport.
Trust in federal gov is vanishing before our eyes folks. And the billionaire class is getting what it wants — no regulations, “network states” (delusional libertarian concept by Balaji and backed by billionaire shitheads like Thiel), limited power to the people and labor force.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/04/politics/education-department...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/coast-guard-homeland-security-pri...
[3] https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-demands-...
[4] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-dei-diversity-policies-pl...
[5] https://apnews.com/article/trump-buyout-offer-federal-worker...
https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications
Edit: I didn't take a stance on this topic, if you think I did, you are incorrect. I was simply linking the website that outlines the requirements instead of postulating as to what they were.
"With FAA order 3930.3B ATC vision standards were made similar to airman standards. With or without correction air traffic controllers must demonstrate 20/20 distant vision in each eye separately, 20/40 in each eye at 16 inches near vision, and 20/40 in each eye at 32 inches intermediate vision if they are 50 years of age or older. Glasses or contact lenses are permitted."
https://aviationmedicine.com/article/vision-and-faa-standard...
Still, seems like a crazy requirement.