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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

#511

Post by HPsquared »

RobotToaster wrote: post #505
tw04 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Too much stress? I bet if you paid people so much money that they could work for 10 years and then either retire to a lower paying job, or retire entirely, people would deal with it. Or pay people enough they can afford to work part time. A stressful job is less stressful if you only have to work 2 days a week.

This also applies to doctors and any stressful job really. Long hours compound the stress problems, making the job really unattractive.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#512

Post by swores »

imoverclocked wrote: post #373
portaouflop wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the technology part can’t be fixed easily with money but sounds to me like all the other aspects of the money argument are still valid.

Like “too much stress?” Money only does so much to improve your life. Stress is a way to shorten your life. Long term chronic stress literally makes you ill in ways that medicine can’t fix.

Paying more money can make a huge difference to stress. Obviously it can't make an hour of doing the work less stressful in itself, but more money could do one or more of the following:

- Allow people to retire after a decade rather than several decades of work

- Allow (or require) people to only work part-time (eg 2 days a week, or 5 days of 2 hours a day, or...) while still earning a full time equivalent salary

- Allow a work day to be 10mins on, 50mins resting for every hour (requiring 6x as many staff), while paying as if the full hour was work

- Pay for therapy, stress-management lessons, etc.

- Pay for a professional cleaner at home, a part-time chef or lots of restaurant/takeaway meals, or whatever else helps to minimise the amount of work you need to do outside the job

- Probably other ideas that haven't come into my mind in the two minutes I've spent on the subject of how more money can help fight issues caused by stress

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#513

Post by skirge »

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…

with more money you will attract greedy people and greedy is contradictory with being responsible

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#514

Post by HPsquared »

janalsncm wrote: post #294
tw04 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Too much stress? Not just that, but having a shortage means each ATC does more work which is inherently stressful.

This is the same problem doctors have, which pushes a lot of people away from the profession. It's a self-reinforcing problem.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#515

Post by swores »

kccqzy wrote: post #207
avn2109 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The million dollar salary thing is compelling. I would certainly switch careers from ML engineering for a million bucks of cash comp, especially in a low CoL location :) Also, the "30 years old" thing mentioned in the GP seems excessive, surely if they were really desperate to staff up, they could loosen that age limit.

My own experience tells me that past 30 years old my thinking is slightly slower in the form of slightly longer reaction times, and slightly longer time to recall specific facts. This hardly matters in my current job but perhaps ATC would be different. Perhaps they are taking that into account.

What they're taking into account is their mandatory retirement age (56), which is indeed related to things like reaction times for people as they get older; and then they work back from that to say you need to be young enough to have earned your pension by the time you're forced to retire.

So a rules change could improve things on that front, as they could for example allow working from 40 to 56 to count as enough to earn a full pension, without any change to their safety policy on the age cutoff for finishing working as an ATC - but it wouldn't be cheap, as you not only are massively increasing the cost of pensions across the board, but you're also paying the same amount to train a 40yo applicant as a 30yo one, but getting fewer years of valuable work back from that training cost.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#516

Post by robertlagrant »

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…

> Want to attract more applicants? Offer more compensation.

This was already addressed in the original post. Why write in this "spelling it out for you" style when they already addressed it?

> 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 side.

This is really reductive. There are multiple reasons:

- very stable employment

- very prestigious job, and has been for centuries. Conveys authority. Your family can boast that you're a doctor.

- very interesting tales come out of employment, and your family probably

- very easy to feel good about being a doctor - directly helping people etc

Not all of those for everyone, and they no doubt don't all turn out to be the case, but doctors apply for multiple reasons, and many of them aren't in high-paying areas at all. Doctors (in America, which I assume is what you're focusing in on) are paid well partly because they have high expenses in terms of liability insurance.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#517

Post by swores »

rlpb wrote: post #332
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…

> 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.

To add to this - it's just generally not a very interesting story internationally, so naturally we would, even if it were an exactly equal problem in every country, hear about it from the US most and UK secondarily due to our reading English-language sites like HN. If the polish media were constantly talking about about lack of ATCs in Poland, would we ever notice?

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#518

Post by Dylan16807 »

swores wrote: post #510
Dylan16807 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You miss the point. why the low view exists is irrelevant. It's very much relevant to this conversation. Without specific negative factors like a "predatory" aspect, increasing earnings will increase prestige. ATC doesn't have those factors.

They brought up bankers and lawyers in response to someone asking "Which very highly paid job does not command respect in society? I can’t think of any" So yes it is irrelevant in the specific context of that sub-conversation. Which isn't to say that your point arguing why that might not be applicable to ATCs isn't also a relevant thing to say to being the conversation back to the main topic of this thread.

It's not directly relevant to that preceeding comment, but it's relevant to the reason those were being brought up a couple commments higher.

Being relevant to either of those is enough to make it overall be: relevant.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#519

Post by swores »

hattmall wrote: post #422
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…

There's a class action of about 900 people who were rejected based on the FAA prioritizing diversity in ATC hiring. That would be a good place to start hiring new people.

Do you have a source? Because that doesn't pass the smell test to me.

If they're hiring 10 people and have 20 good, qualified applicants then sure, maybe diversity efforts would mean that a straight white man gets overlooked.

But we're talking about the context of them complaining that they can't hire enough people, and absolutely no diversity program anywhere is saying "well we need to hire people, and there aren't any good applicants left except those who don't tick diversity boxes, but still let's not bother hiring them". It really doesn't make sense at all unless those 900 people actually weren't good enough applicants and are wrongly believing that diversity is the reason.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#520

Post by watwut »

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 training and onboarding process is incredibly long, and turnover is high

The turnover part is usually solved by salaries and working conditions. High turnover is consonance of bad working conditions and low salaries. So, this point can be solved by money.

The other points are just repetition of the same thing - people doing this job must be capable.

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