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Comment by Neywiny | Hacker News Reader

No mention of what games they're playing?

Also no mention of when the NYC ones were told to move to Pennsylvania or be fired? Interestingly also cbs's article https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/new-york-philadelphia-a...

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Not sure - but I know there's a really serious community of folks who do ATC virtually on VATSIM: https://vatsim.net

I feel like those folks would already have been candidates for air traffic controller jobs though.

Having flown in VATSIM towered air space and airports it is some of the best VR flight sim time I ever had.

Had someone on ground and tower at KPAO and several of us pilots were just flying the pattern and it was a blast. Not to mention one was a licensed pilot based out of there who gave me IRL tips for my lesson that week about the field which were really helpful.

Such a remarkable community.

I suspect popularity of sims like this is because of people who cannot be candidates for ATC roles - either have family or lifestyle restrictions that prevent them relocating or doing shift work, drug dependencies or medical issues, or criminal backgrounds.

Of the controllers I have chatted with while they stream on twitch this is the answer. Many people don't realize the controllers have medical tests as well.

The biggest one tends to be that they are simply too old, or have retired already. The retirement age is 56, with effectively no exceptions.

Virtually nobody lasts that long. If they don't end up needing a prescription that disqualifies them before 50, they end up getting incentivized to leave at 50 anyways.

It seems like they probably just ran recruitment ads targeted to people with an interest in gaming, right? The article actually doesn't say anything about how they went about recruiting gamers.

Probably this:

https://airport.apunen.com/

It shouldn't really matter. If you have the proclivity to sit on your bum for hours monitoring many parameters at a time and making decisions you're a much better fit to be trained up for ATC than someone picked at random.

Angry Birds, of course

My wife is an Angry Bird 8)

Logging on to news dot ycombinator dot com for some Borat posting

I think I read a different article than the one from CBS that got posted here, but I can't remember where it was (sorry I can't be more specific, but it's been a busy week for me and it's gone clean out of my head). Anyway, I remember that that article quoted one of the new hires saying that he had always enjoyed flight simulator games, so applying for an ATC job seemed like a natural fit.

I don't know if he was typical or cherry-picked, but it does seem likely that the people who would respond to that kind of campaign would be people who were already interested in aviation, so my guess would lean towards "typical" rather than "cherry-picked".

Again, sorry my memory is vague about an article I read several days ago so that I can't link to the source. I almost didn't post this, but I figured another data point (even a vague one) would be handy.

> No mention of what games they're playing?

According to Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, people typically play video games about controlling traffic in the air? Or the quote was just completely butchered to be something completely else than what was said:

> "A lot of what they do playing games ... is what they do ... controlling traffic in the air," Duffy told CBS News

Presumably they meant staring at a screen for hours on end while talking through a headset.

>No mention of what games they're playing?

Indeed, that's the interesting part that remains missing. I don't think Farming Simulator 26 is going to be on their list, but that is an assumption; where is their ad targeting data?!

https://www.openscope.co/

GTA 5 online, probably.

"Weird, this always worked in GTA V..."

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