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America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

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Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#331

Post by l2edline »

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'm an air traffic controller at a core 30 airport and I firmly believe that many but not all of the issues we face can be fixed by increasing compensation. Namely mandatory 6 day work weeks, high attrition, and burnout.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#332

Post by rlpb »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #329
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…

> about money Some light Googling tells me that median pay is about 100K to 120K USD per year. Most people here would say that is not outstanding for such highly skilled work. 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-pro…

> You never read about "ATC hiring crisis" in other countries. Why only the US?

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.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#333

Post by tzs »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #279
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…

How could this be anything to do with Reagan firing them? The Reagan thing was 1981. Air traffic controllers have a mandatory retirement age of 56. Anyone under the age of 56 in 2025 would have been under the age of 12 in 1981.

> How could this be anything to do with Reagan firing them?

Echoes.

The fired workers were replaced as rapidly as possible. That would result in massive change in the age distribution of controllers. It takes a few years to train a new controller so lets assume the youngest new hires were 22. New controllers have to be 31 and under.

Let's take the best case and assume all the new controllers are 22 through 31 and are evenly distributed in that range, and started in 1982. The group will start reaching 56 in 2007 and finish reaching 56 in 2016. That's over 11000 controllers retiring over a 10 year span.

I haven't been able to find data on the actual distribution of ages for the replacements. I'd guess that it was skewed younger, which could make that echo narrower. Maybe 11000 controllers retiring over 5 years.

If they hired enough people to replace those that group too will show up as another echo, but more spread out.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#334

Post by rlpb »

Yeul wrote: post #316
RandomBacon wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 s…

Ofcourse it would. Capitalism is all about dealing with shortages in exchange for money. So clearly someone just doesn't want to pay up.

I think there’s a catch, which is lag time. Even under pure capitalism, if the market doesn’t believe the money will last, prospects aren’t going to risk their careers given the training lead time required.

In the US, ATC are federal employees, aren’t they? So they are regularly furloughed, too. In the current political climate, facing the wrath of politicians doesn’t seem that unlikely, either.

The US has form in this area, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...

Even if the federal government were to “pay up”, they cannot be relied upon to honor favorable contract terms since they also have the ability to change the law.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#335

Post by brewdad »

10u152 wrote: post #266
giantrobot wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Aircraft work within an envelope. You can model what a max speed/min speed max/climb min climb/ trajectory is and work that in. It's a solvable problem. Aircraft can't go from 200-0 knots or 0-200 knots instantly etc

200-0 happens regularly. especially with GA aircraft. The plane will be scattered across a field most likely.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#336

Post by brewdad »

Melatonic wrote: post #228
sombrero_john wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be younger than 31 to qualify for training as an ATC: https://www.faa.gov/faq/what-are-age-requirements-individual...

Does seem odd to me - why restrict it this low? People are living longer and healthier than ever into older years (and better vision)

The job requires 20/20 uncorrected vision near and far. After 50, that starts to become pretty darn rare. The mental load required to keep all of these moving parts in your head and recall both what you have instructed them to do and what needs to still be instructed in the very near future requires a mental acuity that is not a young person's game. It can also take years for an ATC to have the experience required to meet the most pressing needs. I can see why they don't want to waste their efforts on people likely to be unqualified soon after reaching a useful level of experience.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#337

Post by josephcsible »

brewdad wrote: post #336
Melatonic wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does seem odd to me - why restrict it this low? People are living longer and healthier than ever into older years (and better vision)

The job requires 20/20 uncorrected vision near and far. After 50, that starts to become pretty darn rare. The mental load required to keep all of these moving parts in your head and recall both what you have instructed them to do and what needs to still be instructed in the very near future requires a mental acuity that is not a young person's game. It can also take years for an ATC to have the experience required to…

> The job requires 20/20 uncorrected vision near and far.

Isn't it 20/20 corrected vision?

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#338

Post by Aloisius »

nradov wrote: post #286
jerlam wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like a doctor? Not disagreeing, but the US also has a doctor shortage for at least a decade that it is seemingly unable to fix.

There are multiple reasons for the doctor shortage but it's at least partly intentional. The primary bottleneck on producing new physicians is the number of residency program slots: every year some students graduate with an MD but are unable to practice medicine because they can't get matched to a residency slot (some do get matched the following year). Most residency programs are funded through Medicare and Congress…

I love how that page is from the AMA, the organization that is largely responsible for pushing Congress to institute the residency caps in the first place because they feared too many physicians would drive down existing physician's incomes.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#339

Post by [deleted] »

legitster wrote: post #79
tim333 wrote: post #75

There's a lawsuit going on: >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

> When Mr Brigida tried again to become an air traffic controller under the new tests, he said he failed the biographical questionnaire because he “didn’t fit the preferred ethnic profile”. 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 questi…

[deleted]

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#340

Post by brewdad »

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…

Ultimately, I would expect the report to lay blame on both ATC and the helicopter pilot. The degree to which that blame should be allocated will be determined by the investigation. A less likely factor that could conceivably be uncovered would be some sort of controls failure that should have alerted one or all of the impacted pilots and controllers.
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