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.
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.
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.
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.
Not disagreeing, but the US also has a doctor shortage for at least a decade that it is seemingly unable to fix.
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"
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.
> 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
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.
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.
Not just that, but having a shortage means each ATC does more work which is inherently stressful.
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).
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
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.
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.
- Can you swim now?
- No.
- What if I give you money?
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 ....
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
Losing millions for your boss, losing your job != killing hundreds with a single mistake made in seconds.
The mass of unemployed CS grads?
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.
So clearly someone just doesn't want to pay up.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone likes to imagine the controller has a screen with perfect information on it. They do not. Especially when light aircraft are involved.
But yes, presumably there is scope for improved tools.
> 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
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.
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)
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
(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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
If it had become a norm then a second controller would probably not change anything.
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.”
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.
>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.
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).
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?
(Opinions are my own and not necessarily that of the FAA.)
>... 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.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-exempt...
In America? Who knows.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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.
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 :)
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...
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.
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.
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.
Though the facts on the latter are Not Great, and nuance is not exactly abundant right now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
That's not how ATC works.
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.
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.
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_...
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?
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
> “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.
(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.
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...
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
> 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.
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.
(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.
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".
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.
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...