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America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

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Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#361

Post by wqaatwt »

sweeter wrote: post #309
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.

I mean going to school for 10 years only to be in debt for 100K-300K+ dollars, and not have a good idea of whether you will be able to pay that back... is a massive problem. Most countries don't have this issue, for example. They have an abundance of doctors and engineers, because people who actually want to do those things, are able to pursue those careers without financial investment. We are snubbing an entire gene…

> They have an abundance of doctors and engineers

They are usually paid several times less than people doing the same jobs in US.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#362

Post by WalterBright »

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 still don't know why radar does not detect aircraft on a collision course.

Why technology still does not track every airplane at the airport and flag runway incursions.

Why there still are not cameras constantly recording flight ops at the airport. Why are we relying on accidental dash cam recordings?

Why the cockpit voice recorder still does not record video.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#363

Post by chii »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #352
portaouflop wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which very highly paid job does not command respect in society? I can’t think of any (Outside of anti-capitalist circles ofc)

Many people have a low view of lawyers and investment bankers.

Those "low view" is out of jealousy and the idea that they're "doing evil" to get that money. It's a personal bias, which i personally also would ignore.

I have respect for lawyers, and i have respect for investment bankers (who make huge merger/acquisition deals work).

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#364

Post by nradov »

joenot443 wrote: post #311
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.

My simple understanding is that the width of the bottleneck is controlled by existing doctors who are (unfortunately) monetarily motivated to limit the supply of new doctors.

Nope, your understanding is mostly wrong. It's primarily controlled by Congress in the form of Medicare limits on residency funding. And to a lesser extent by the management of teaching hospitals. Most of those people aren't doctors.

At one point the AMA lobbied Congress for those funding limits but they reversed position on that years ago.

https://savegme.org/

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#365

Post by chii »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #344
ryandrake wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would argue an ATC employee is worth every penny, but 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. These people are already very well compensated, and at a certain point you are just going to be cannibalizing other talent pools. It wouldn't happen overnight, but surely if ATC had a similar compensation reputat…

I think you're simplifying the frame far too much here. My wife works in medicine as an ENT surgeon. There is an ENT surgeon position open in a rural hospital outside of fresno CA that pays 1.1M dollars/year, or about 2.5-3x the salary a large hospital in a major metro would pay for the work. The position has been unfilled for 4 years. As best I can tell, the two main reasons the job goes unfilled are a combination o…

> There is an ENT surgeon position open in a rural hospital outside of fresno CA that pays 1.1M dollars/year

while 1.1m/yr sounds like a lot, it isn't the right number to consider. The right number is the difference between this job, and a similar job else where that has better facilities/amenities and comfort. If said surgeons who would qualify could've gotten a similar job in a major city for a similar amount of money, they might prefer it there (near family/friends, amenities etc).

So how much _over_ the typical pay is the 1.1m/yr salary offered?

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#366

Post by azemetre »

tzs wrote: post #333
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also you know... seeing a job get absolutely decimated by a labor hating President might make future candidates less likely apply to a hostile job where asking for better conditions mean you will lose your livelihood.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#367

Post by chii »

nradov wrote: post #291
pbalau wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a naive way of looking at the problem. People that start working in banks, generally do that as a starting point. ATC is the end of the road for that career. Working in a bank is the start of a quite lucrative career, working as an ATC is the end. Indeed, we can offer more money to ATC, but there is not a lot, progression wise. Honestly, how would a junior ATC look like, compared with a senior?

ATC salary increases with experience. The better ones are promoted to supervisors.

promoting someone to their level of incompetence i see?

Technical jobs should not be promotion driven at all. It should be a combination of seniority, and technical expertise/experience. Their metric should be something like number of accidents under their tenure, vs accident free hours under operation.

A supervising position might not see problems as fast as someone actually doing said job, which wastes the experience acquired by said supervisor!

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#368

Post by nradov »

sweeter wrote: post #309
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.

I mean going to school for 10 years only to be in debt for 100K-300K+ dollars, and not have a good idea of whether you will be able to pay that back... is a massive problem. Most countries don't have this issue, for example. They have an abundance of doctors and engineers, because people who actually want to do those things, are able to pursue those careers without financial investment. We are snubbing an entire gene…

It's hardly "most countries". The USA is about average for developed countries in terms of physicians per capita. We're higher than France, Belgium, UK, Japan, Canada, etc.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.PHYS.ZS?most_rec...

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#369

Post by amluto »

Reason077 wrote: post #251
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…

> "The fundamentals and technology of the job have not changed in decades, despite air traffic exploding in recent years" Isn't this, ultimately, the real problem? Improved technology with radically more automation would both improve safety and reduce workload on controllers. What's really needed is some sort of "next-generation ATC" moonshot project. But of course, in such a safety-critical and risk-averse domain, g…

SpaceX moved fast, broke things, and still did pretty well on their safety-critical Dragon program, all things considered.

But SpaceX is solving a simpler problem because it’s a greenfield program (aside from docking with ISS, but there’s a spec and they implemented it). ATC involves interactions with the entire existing enormous worldwide fleet of aircraft and pilots.

All that being said, a system that allocates certain volumes of airspace to aircraft and alerts aircraft if they are on a trajectory likely to encroach on someone else’s allocated airspace seems doable and maybe even doable in a backwards compatible way. But this, by itself, would not meaningfully increase capacity.

And I agree this is silly and unfortunate. SFO, for example, has two parallel runways, and airplanes can only land simultaneously on them if visibility is very good. Surely modern GNSS plus radio (which can do time-of-flight and direction measurements with modern technology!) plus inertial measurement could let a cooperating pair of planes maintain appropriate separation and land simultaneously, safely, with zero visibility, even under conditions of active attack by a hostile system. But that would require a kind of competence and cooperation between the government and vendors that does not currently exist.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#370

Post by chii »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #348
throwaway2037 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"Why don't other highly developed countries have the same issues finding employees?" Baumol effects. Our economy is incredible, extremely high productivity along with full employment. Its why we have ordering kiosks at fast food restaurants, pay 225k for bucee's managers and 20 dollars/hour to flip burgers at fast food restaurants. ATC is a low productivity growth job, technology hasn't increased the number of planes…

> technology hasn't increased the number of planes or amount of airspace one ATC can manage

which should put pressure on the entity managing the ATC to increase an ATC's productivity via tech. And yet this hasn't happened. So why is that?

I say at a guess, that capitalism isn't working for the entity that manages ATC, because that entity is immune to the pressures of capitalism - ala, federal gov't doesn't care that these ATC isn't as "profitable".

In a scenario where different ATC zones are managed by separate, private entities that are looking to make a profit (e.g., the higher number planes in a single ATC zone, the more they profit) would spend to improve ATC's individual capacity.

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