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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

#231

Post by nine_k »

b112 wrote: post #146
legitster wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at a certain point you are just going to be cannibalizing other talent pools 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 an…

Because we are an aged society, with such an incredibly low birth rate, this will only get worse. There are only so many competent people in our society, and that talent pool is being spread thin across all sectors of society which require such candidates. There are looming doctor shortages, too. Professionals of all stripes.

A doctor shortage cannot be solved with more money, sadly! It needs to be solved with political / regulatory means, allowing more people go through the hospital training / practice programs and become doctors.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#232

Post by iancmceachern »

bluGill wrote: post #203
jjk166 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what data? In 2024 there were 0 domestic airline collisions in 16 million flights, in 2025 there was 1 in 1.3 million.

Which is statistically the same number.

Then we are looking at the wrong (meaningless) statistics. The while point of stats is to turn data into meaningful distillatios of trends so that we can act upon them. If plane crash deaths are increasing and its not shown in the stats, then we need better stats no?

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#233

Post by everybodyknows »

perihelions wrote: post #126
bloopernova wrote: post #32

(this is going to sound like I think this can be fixed with a technical solution. I don't) 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!

They have fascinatingly ancient UX: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/tfdm/efs (Image caption: "Paper flight strips currently in use ")

Look up deployment date of upgraded tech at your local airport here:

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/tfdm/implementati...

Notable entry:

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA), Washington, D.C.

July 2028

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#234

Post by gtsop »

psunavy03 wrote: post #24
butterlettuce wrote: post #16

Fellas, I got a question. Is it really safe to fly these days if this is now a national discussion?

It has always been and will continue to be more safe than driving to the airport. The fact that something extraordinarily safe is potentially less safe is a topic for discussion, but not at the expense of realizing the relative risks of everything else. 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 airlin…

> The fact that some people have an irrational fear of flying does not justify that irrational fear dictating policy

Go tell that to the casualties. Oh wait, you can't. Which part of them being dead is irrational exactly?

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#235

Post by AnthonyMouse »

fiftyfifty wrote: post #183
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…

I've toured a couple of ATC towers recently and my impression was they were surprisingly low tech. A tech upgrade seems like the most viable solution at this point. There are processes for writing and testing software and hardware for environments such as this, but the government needs to be willing to make the investment.

The general problem here is that we need to do something about the government contracting process. It has been thoroughly captured by large government contractors who do mediocre work for enormous sums of money while excluding anyone who could do better from the process through corruption and red tape.

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.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#236

Post by ketralnis »

cj wrote: post #206
ketralnis wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That there is a computer at ATC that a human looks at, reads what it says with their eyes, speaks those instructions over the radio in a specific protocol, another human listens to it (and confirms within that protocol), and inputs those control signals into the airplane. Computer -> human -> radio(spoken protocol) -> human -> plane. There aren't a lot of practical reasons it can't just be Computer -> radio(digital p…

Sometimes having humans in the loop is a feature, not a bug.

In that case the pilot would still be able to override controls

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#237

Post by mikeyouse »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #156
bobthepanda wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are already a lot of screens and things to look at in a cockpit. and in emergency situations, screens can fail. audio has the advantage of being highly backwards compatible and extremely reliable, so long as the pilots are alive and conscious (and if they're not, the plane is most likely SOL anyways: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522 )

>and in emergency situations, screens can fail. 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.

Onboard computers did predict the collision

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#238

Post by nine_k »

mschuster91 wrote: post #197
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…

> We have video games like Fortnite that can handle collision detection across a hundred players with bullets flying everywhere. 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 existi…

How many ancient aircraft are there? What would be the cost of upgrading them, as compared to the cost of training more ATCs, and having them burn out and leave in a few years?

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#239

Post by gtsop »

fatbird wrote: post #123
wry_discontent wrote: post #12

My dad was an air traffic controller until the mid 10's and this has been a problem easily since like 2005. 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.

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?

Of course there is a way to make it less burdensome, exactly everything you listed. It's just that it is cheaper to take the risk to crash a few people here and there than do all that.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#240

Post by lazystar »

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…

Thanks for the link, I was curious if I'd be a candidate and it turns out I was eliminated by the very first qualification:

"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.

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