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America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

cnn.com

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Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#211

Post by crmd »

tw04 wrote: post #201
legitster wrote: post #77

Everyone is going to make this about money or unions or etc, but my employer briefly worked with some ATC employee groups and I can tell you exactly why they are short staffed: - 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 trainin…

Everything you have listed above could be solved with money. 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 s…

I respectfully disagree - there's always money in the banana stand.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#212

Post by mrguyorama »

bilbo0s wrote: post #176
bombcar wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll bet the final NTSB report lists as a contributing factor that there was only one controller that night; a second controller might have had the time to notice the altitude was too close, or vector the helicopter behind.

No. There are also rules on who can do what. 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 a…

The entire point of Human ATC is that those rules are breached regularly in normal operations and we still expect traffic to be routed safely despite that

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.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#213

Post by landryraccoon »

giantrobot wrote: post #196
jasondigitized wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might get absolutely destroyed for this but here goes. We have video games like Fortnite that can handle collision detection across a hundred players with bullets flying everywhere. Is it that much of a stretch to use similar technology and things like text to speech to help air traffic controllers do a better job? Genuinely curious about the technology advances in this space and if I am completely naive about the…

> I am completely naive about the challenges presented. 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 fli…

This is a general objection to AI responding to real world events in general : "What if something unexpected happens?" It comes up in self driving as well. Things like "What if something suddenly appears in the middle of the road" or "Can it drive in snow conditions with zero visibility?

My question is, how do you know that in general human beings respond better to unexpected or very complex / difficult situations than an automated system would? Yes, human beings can improvise, but automated systems can have reaction times more than an order of magnitude faster than that of even the quickest humans.

I'd like to see some statistics on the opposing hypothesis : How good are humans, really, when encountering unexpected situations? Do they compare better with automated systems in general?

Here's a competing hypothesis: An automated system can incorporate training data based on every recorded incident that has ever happened. Unless a situation is so unexpected that it has literally never happened in the history of aviation, an AI system can have an example of how to handle that scenario. Is it really true that the average human operator would beat this system in safety and reliability? How many humans know how to respond to every rare situation that has ever happened? It's at least possible that the AI does better on average.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#215

Post by kccqzy »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #190
schmookeeg wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand why KSQL is a contract tower and not a full FAA-managed tower.

Did the call sign go to KSQL because of Oracle being right there?

No it predates Oracle, including when it was still called Software Development Laboratories.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#216

Post by cj »

adrr wrote: post #122
eterm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't ban. Tax. Never ban. 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…

Instead we allow private jet owners to fully write off the cost of a jet purchase(new or used) in the first year on their taxes. Can't even do that with a normal sized car.

Source: https://nbaa.org/flight-department-administration/tax-issues...

"Bonus depreciation" exists for cars too, but is capped around $20k. From quick reading, seems like the bonus depreciation for planes was a tax break to incentivize people to, well, buy more planes.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#217

Post by [deleted] »

intended wrote: post #205
bilbo0s wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There are also rules on who can do what. 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 a…

>Staffing at air traffic control tower ‘not normal’ during Washington plane crash, FAA report reveals 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…

[deleted]

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#218

Post by bluGill »

deadbabe wrote: post #129

If you’ve flown in any capacity you probably owe your life to an ATC, you’ve probably been on a plane that would have suffered a collision if not for the ATC.

Sort of. Without ATC you would still be safe - but airplanes would be much less common as no sane pilot will get anywhere close to other planes without someone in control to watch separations. That means instead of planes landing every 30 seconds they will be once every several minutes to make sure everyone takes turns - this isn't just about the runway, it is also the patterns around the airport, with many airplanes refusing to join the pattern because they are not sure they can fit in that close. Airports with more than one runway (which is nearly all commercial airports) will have issues trying to get patterns to work and so likely some runways won't even be used.

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.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#219

Post by Khaine »

It should be noted that the FAA is facing a lawsuit alleging it discriminated against capable candidates[1]. If this is true, this surely must factor into the shortage of air traffic controllers.

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.

[1] https://mslegal.org/cases/brigida-v-faa/

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#220

Post by kccqzy »

toast0 wrote: post #166
fatbird wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 techn…

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