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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

#551

Post by Shinolove »

WalterBright wrote: post #362
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.

there is an insane overhead to any improvement that can be made to these systems.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#552

Post by Physkal »

robertlagrant wrote: post #516
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…

> 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 prest…

New vocabulary, thanks.

Reductive

-tending to present a subject or problem in a simplified form, especially one viewed as crude.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#553

Post by natnat »

watwut wrote: post #546
natnat wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't honestly think that technology is meaningfully downstream of money. A startup or hobbyist can build something that costs Google several million dollars in a weekend. Most of these systems are complex, but not as complex as e.g. an operating system. But upgrading technology requires government administrative capacity. That's generally cheaper than outsourcing technology development to third parties, but does r…

> A startup or hobbyist can build something that costs Google several million dollars in a weekend. They genuinely cant. They can make a sorta kinda prototype of something that costs Google several million dollars.

You're right that a hobbyist couldn't build something like search or maps or docs in a weekend, but a lot of what Google ships is boring webapps. And I promise that they are really hard to ship: approvals are annoying and time-consuming, and the infrastructure is designed for scalability and performance, not flexibility or iteration speed.

There's a joke inside Google that Google infra makes easy things hard and impossible things possible.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#554

Post by ttyprintk »

ch4s3 wrote: post #192
XCabbage wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it didn't have race-based questions, which I don't think anyone claimed. Rather it had totally arbitrary questions, not related to merit in any plausible way, and a score cutoff that made it highly likely you'd fail if you hadn't been tipped off with the correct answers. For instance, there is a 15-point question for which you have to answer that your worst grade in high school was in Science, and a separate…

I don't understand how this isn't a giant public scandal. Is there something I'm missing here?

Comments moved to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42944203

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#555

Post by sgarland »

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.

What job have you ever held where the management was consistently better than ICs?

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#556

Post by HelloMcFly »

watwut wrote: post #521
robertlagrant wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 prest…

Doctors dont have interesting tales to tell, nor should have due to things being private by law. Stability of employment is something that traffic controllers could have, this is just a question of "working conditions" and solvable by money. I really do not see why traffic controller could not feel good about being traffic controller. They do more "life saving" jobs then any of us on hacker news.

> Doctors dont have interesting tales to tell

You must know few doctors, or they must work in very boring locations.

> nor should have due to things being private by law

You wouldn't believe how amazingly easy to tell stories without any patient identifying details. Think of any of your best stories - could you tell them to me without providing me breadcrumbs about any identities? I bet you could with nearly every story you have to tell.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#557

Post by Shinolove »

kgilpin wrote: post #401

Today, hacker news solves air traffic control with either: a) More money b) Video game technology To truly get this problem, you really need to be in it. Either as a pilot or as a controller. Watching threads like this reminds me that I have expertise within a couple of specialized domains and that’s it. Beyond those, I’m a tourist.

I am in the sector, I develop ATC software. It is not rocket science (which was also solved with money actually) you can actually solve ATC with more money.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#558

Post by smath »

RandomBacon wrote: post #413
smath wrote: post #246

I might have missed this in the article - how is the pay level set for ATC staff? In a free market economy price is the magical signal that is supposed to increase supply when there is unmet demand.

There is a formula that is negotiated with the union. See Appendix A in the collective bargaining agreement: https://www.natca.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2016NATCACB...

Ah interesting - a formula. To me it seems that makes it not a free market. Ie the formula is producing numbers that are too low, than what the current demand supply imbalance would otherwise produce.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#559

Post by sgarland »

mcmcmc wrote: post #301
applied_heat wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully they don’t throw juniors on to the busiest runways in the country

Where else would they learn how to handle that kind of environment?

On submarines (still flying, just underwater), we don’t throw new underway buddies into the most difficult scenarios right away. We do give them a seemingly overwhelming amount of qualifications to achieve in a very short period of time, but we don’t make them practice the hard stuff until we’re sure that they understand the fundamentals. Because much like ATC, if you make a mistake hundreds of feet underwater (or thousands of feet in the sky), you’re gonna have a bad time.

…kind of. In reality, there is always a qualified individual ready to physically stop you from doing the wrong thing, and there are multiple independent safety systems, interlocks, etc.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#560

Post by rascul »

portaouflop wrote: post #327
nicoburns wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earning highly does not universally command respect the way being a doctor does. Some would even see earning that much as being immoral (i.e. actually negative)

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

> Which very highly paid job does not command respect in society?

All of them. Respect is not commanded because you make lots of money or have a certain job.

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