Comment by bryondowd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryondowd | Hacker News Reader

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Worth noting that this mass firing is coming around for a second wave of hurt. They re-staffed most of the ATC force with military personnel who were around the same age, all at the same time. Now that block of people are hitting the ATC's mandatory retirement age (56) and last I checked they haven't had much success (arguably intentionally, but that's another story) in increasing their onboarding stream enough to compensate for the sudden loss. Current controllers are already working large (possibly unsafe) amounts of overtime and have limited ability to change locations or positions due to the shortage, which is only getting worse.

At some point, they'll either need to find a way to accept more trainees, retain employees longer, or reduce services/throughput.

EDIT: I may be out of date. Perhaps this second wave already came and went with little impact. My math says anyone hired in 1981 would be past retirement age by now. Not sure how they handled it.

My brother in law is an ATC. Didn't go to school for it, but studied and went through the training and passed the sequential tests required to get a seat in the building. He enjoys the job a ton.

Based on just observing him through the process, it seems like there's a combination of things that might keep younger people away from being an ATC. One might be the unfortunate politicization of government jobs at large, and especially how people like ATC's get affected during those pesky "government shutdowns". There's also, I think, the fact that being an ATC is more or less an "invisible job" to many people and especially college educated people. Also, the job itself can be stressful (but nothing like the horror story myths I've read about, apparently) and the exams to get in whittle down the herd pretty dramatically it sounds like.

There's no shortage of applicants. They get tons of applicants every year, but the FAA academy can only accept a limited number to their 3-4 month training program. Then they wash out roughly 50% of the trainees with their final exam, which is a set of ATC scenarios on a simulator. Existing controllers have to take the same exam to become a trainer at the academy, and roughly 1/3 of them also fail, so one could argue that the standards are set far too high. The survivors go on to their first posting, where they spend another year or two training before they can actually control live traffic on their own, and more wash out in this stage if they fail to certify.

I think it depends on your definition of "younger people" in this case. For the "off the street" hires like your brother in law, those postings require you to be under 31.

That said, there isn't really a good path to ATC for those 18-22 either. The off the street bids require something along the lines of "4 years progressively responsible work experience" to even be eligible to start the process. The Collegiate Training Initiative (CTI) schools exist, but have not provided much meaningful benefit to graduates since the FAA's changes to the hiring process in December 2013.

When I was offered a training slot 30 years ago, I was told they had better results the younger you were. 18 year olds could get in with the right test results. I suspect the establishment and CTI relationships intended to close up the rate of younger onboarding as the post-Reagan guard got older.

Back then journeymen controllers in Chicago were making $150K.

I get the impression that whatever the FAA intended with the CTI schools, it didn't work out as they wanted. I attended a CTI school in 2013-2014 but left when they modified the hiring process to essentially devalue the CTI path. In recent years it looks like the CTI schools have clawed back a little bit more preferential treatment when it comes to weighing ATSA results, but it's not like it was before.

I don't resent it though - it sounds like at the time CTI students weren't much more successful than off the street hires at the academy, nor were the different CTI schools very consistent in their quality and curriculum. I went to a good one, and was sad to leave as it was a ton of fun, but I've heard stories of some CTI programs being little more than a few lecture-based classes and a certificate.

One of my friends was a hired courtesy of Reagan's actions. He retired in the middle of last year (mandatory retirement). I know 2 other ATCs that retired in the last year. I bet you're right.

where's the plucky upstart wanting to disrupt ATC with their AI trained system to automatically route airtraffic? The uber of ATC?

move fast and break things can't possibly go wrong in the ATC world.

Guessing this is humorous, but it does seem like a job that could one day benefit from being automated. The job is highly rules-based, and the rules are well documented requirements.

The biggest two problems that immediately come to mind:

1) Current ATC communication with planes happens by human voice over radio. Wouldn't want to trust an AI's speech recognition over that medium, so you'd probably have to mandate some kind of pilot-ATC interface that all planes would need to carry. You'd get huge pushback from the community of small planes. Probably from commercial pilots as well, since they'd have to train on the new system, and it would likely add to their cognitive load, at least short term.

2) We've put a ton of effort into producing a good radar picture to let controllers know where planes are, but it's far from perfect and requires some intuition. Radar waves bend due to atmospheric conditions, and it's difficult/impossible to distinguish real targets from various forms of clutter. The heuristics we currently use are pretty amazing, but you still get things popping up on ATC's radar scope that aren't really there.

> Guessing this is humorous, but it does seem like a job that could one day benefit from being automated

The tools ATCs use have evolved tremendously. Just three decades ago, not all major airports had ground radar for instance. Then there's ADS-B that's fully automated and does part of the job. The problem is that air traffic has increased a lot.

Even if automation goes much further, ATCs are needed for supervision of operation, compliance and backup in case systems fail. The evolution mirrors that of the job of pilots. Flight engineers have been rendered obsolete long ago, maybe copilots will be eventually replaced by a remote operators for backup at some point. Each ATC will be able to handle more and more traffic, as they already have, but someone's gotta be keeping an eye on the system.

> The job is highly rules-based, and the rules are well documented requirements.

Yes, so is actually flying a plane. However, MCAS let us see how badly things can go wrong following rules that were not well defined/understood/studied. Contributing to that was the system's method of knowing its environment came from sensors. If/when those sensors malfunction then the system is useless. At the end of the day, even if 100% of all instruments and sensors were to stop working, a human can still use its back up sensors (eyes,ears,brain) to continue flying where the auto system pretty much is game over.

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