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Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

nytimes.com

101–110 of 362 posts

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#101

Car accidents are up as well, less so this year than last. Both Air traffic and Car accidents have been up since 2020. Its not unique to Air traffic control. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2023/09/28/road-crash... Its also happening worldwide, more air traffic near misses in the EU alongside road accidents as well. I suspect its world wide.

Trains are running more safely, efficiently, elegantly, and reliably than both cars and airplanes, and they have consistently done so with a much longer track record.

Not Amtrak. Worst excuse for a railroad ever.

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but I did review the material before I posted it. Did you?

Blaming DEI is a dog-whistle for 'people should know their place' The Free Beacon, Fox News, and the other last four you listed are in the business of telling old white people to be afraid of everything. It's the same as denying someone a job because they are not culture fit for a company. It's because the people doing the hiring only want to hire people from their background, college, etc. The safety issues and staf…

> Blaming DEI is a dog-whistle for 'people should know their place'

This is a very common trope: claim to have dog-level hearing for detecting what people really mean. Very often, including likely this time, it's totally inaccurate, and just means no discussion can be done as one of the parties relentlessly ad hominems the other.

> since Reagan fired the PATCO ATC workers

Can you cite this?

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#106
I've been warning of software deterioration for the past few years and this seems to be an extension of the same effect. Likely the result of increasingly non-meritocratic employee selection processes and non-meritocratic incentive structures. Due to government interference in the economy (especially due to money printing), we've basically turned our capitalist system into a very poorly implemented communist system. People are broke, have low self esteem, can't afford to own a house and only anticipate further deterioration. Heck, average people can't even find a romantic partner because rich people are monopolizing the supply by dating 10 people at a time. I'm surprised things are not worse than they are. I guess it will take another decade to feel the full effects of the problems we're creating today.

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#107

[flagged]

More details on this: https://x.com/restoreorderusa/status/1731058275720831262?s=2...

Why not throw the veterans under the bus as well though? Nope, it's just the "diversity hires" that are the problem lol.

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#108

[flagged]

Yikes. What a weird thing to try to make it about race. So to clarify, if you're not white and male, then obviously you're just not serious about a job because you're a "diversity" hire and not a serious person. Got it.

If you're (much) less competent but the only reason why you get the job is "diversity", then yes we have a problem.

There can be diverse good candidates of course, there's no racism here.

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#109
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ACT test scores have plummeted too. Combined with what we know about the physical brain changes that can be observed after a single mild infection, it all paints a potentially concerning relationship with COVID.

colleges still care about ACT? I thought SAT was the golden standard. I remember taking the ACT many years ago and it was definitely much easier. Also not many colleges accepted it at the time. SAT was preferred.

The preference is regional. [1] When I took the ACT, many years ago, it was the test the university I was applying to listed first in their requirements.

And that's still true.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SAT-ACT-Preference-Map....

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blaming DEI is a dog-whistle for 'people should know their place' The Free Beacon, Fox News, and the other last four you listed are in the business of telling old white people to be afraid of everything. It's the same as denying someone a job because they are not culture fit for a company. It's because the people doing the hiring only want to hire people from their background, college, etc. The safety issues and staf…

Air traffic is up this year only 4%, would that naturally correspond to a 65% increase in significant incidents? The issue isn't whether or not people are tacitly insisting certain people "deserve" to be in certain positions due to their race/background, and those against DEI are lamenting the loss of the soft apartheid we had in the US that gradually eroded with the civil rights movement. The issue is: in chasing de…

The load on the National Airspace System (NAS) has been growing each year, with slight a dip due to COVID. The FAA has provides 20-year outlooks for a set of metrics, including the number of operations performed with the NAS. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-06/FY2022_42_FA... See Page 33 and 34 for a breakdown in the numbers. We're looking at 50 million to 62 million operations per year within the NAS.

The question asking if DEI is lowering standards is bunk because it is pre-loading the assumption that the best qualified workers are the what was there traditional (straight white males) and that somehow allowing others in requires lowering some standards.

For the purposes of the FAA air traffic control specialists, everyone who applies must go to the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, OK and pass the the courses and tests provided there. They are then transferred to their home facilities where they must become certified for the position that they have been hired in. This requires additional tests, training, simulations, shadowing, and fully supervised workloads. If you become certified for a position and sector, it means that you can safely manage air traffic. Failure at any step along the way means that you wash out. The FAA does not lower standards for ATCS. See the following research paper on ATCS failure rates, rationales, and percentages. https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi...

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