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Comment by wry_discontent | Hacker News Reader

My dad was an air traffic controller until the mid 10's and this has been a problem easily since like 2005.

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.

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Is there no way to restructure the job to be less onerous to the individual? I don't mean software that automates things, I mean things like more staff, shorter hours, etc. Or is there an irreducible complexity to it that mandates a single person handle everything in a given sector?

I'm not an ATC, but I think there's a clear need for awareness of potentially conflicting traffic. If you divide that traffic over more people, you need to add communication between the controllers in a way that you don't when it's all handled by a single person.

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.

What if you divide the work by time? Give each person a two-hour workday. Would that reduce stress?

That works in theory. Again, I'm not an ATC, but might be better to have reasonable length workdays (maybe two hours is a reasonable shift though) and more time off between workdays. Similar to shift work in hospitals, where more hand offs means more opportunities to fail to hand off successfully. But I suspect it may be easier to hand off an airplane than to hand off an ICU patient.

I know nothing about this field, but if the main claim is personnel shortages, it seems like reducing your workforces hours by 75% would not be optimal.

Is the personnel shortage is because most people can't handle 8 hour shifts, then it's plausible that you'd have more than 4 times as many people that can handle 2 hour shifts

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.

Of course there is a way to make it less burdensome, exactly everything you listed. It's just that it is cheaper to take the risk to crash a few people here and there than do all that.

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