America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

There are plenty of jobs that you can't pay people enough money to want to do.

The notion that if you just pay enough, people who are otherwise qualified will do anything, is amazingly reductive. It's a super US-centric view, and not surprisingly, it does not have an amazing history of working out (especially compared to other mechanisms).

Given the people in question have good other options, why would they do this, even if you paid more?

In fact - plenty of smart people will take pay cuts for better qualify of life.

Example: Plenty of folks take pay cuts to work remotely from places they like more, and because they find it a better quality of life.

Not everyone is money driven, and the assumption that here is that the intersection of "money driven, capable of doing this job, etc" is large enough that increasing the amount of money will make the result larger.

It's totally non-obvious this is true.

> 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.

> 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.

> Only 10% of applicants are physically and mentally qualified?

Another way would be investing in education (instead of dismantling it, or mixing it with religion and politics), making it more accessible so more people come out who are better equipped to take on "complex jobs"

> 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.

> Offer more compensation.

> 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.

I highly doubt that solving the problem with just money will get the right people.

A high salary becomes the goal in an of itself, and everything else falls to the wayside.

Do you really care about safety? Applicants may say they do, but only want to retire after 10 years and will lie through their teeth.

Money is a corrupting factor. I don’t like to take this side of the argument, since I want people to be paid fairly, but there’s something fundamental to seeing unpaid volunteers having the best intentions and most love for their craft

> 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.

I think the guaranteed respect and admiration that comes from the title is actually a more powerful draw. Don't get me wrong, the money is good, but on par with senior manager in any large tech firm. Doctor is a primal respect that technical roles do not carry.

You're not getting instant respect from mother in laws and pastors as an ATC.

> 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.

Don't underestimate just how high-stress these jobs are and what it does to you. People quit these kinds of jobs for 2 reasons

  1) They can't deal with the stress mentally, or don't want to.

  2) They were not smart enough to choose option 1 and their body just physically gives up and they are no longer capable of performing their job as an ATC.

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 of (1) it has a stressful call schedule and (2) its in an remote and undesirable location. ATC jobs have a wide geographic distribution. You need ATC at the commercial airports in Klamath Falls OR and Elmira NY and these are places people are generally moving away from, not moving into because they are run down and have low opportunity and general prevalence of rural poverty. Paying more money doesn't automagically fill these roles, and there is an upper limit to how much you can pay someone and have it be a net benefit.

part of the problem is the structural problems caused by high turnover are themselves causing high turnover. people can't take vacation, people need to work 6 days 12 hours a week.

there is also the issue of location. where applicants are and where controllers are needed is often two distinct circles and once you throw relocation into remote areas into the mix it becomes really unattractive.

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?

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.

It's a different kind of pressure. Lives aren't on the line making trades, not like air travel. This lends to a different type of stress.

Losing millions for your boss, losing your job != killing hundreds with a single mistake made in seconds.

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

The mass of unemployed CS grads?

> 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 and putting more money into recruiting teenagers considering vocational programs.

Ofcourse it would. Capitalism is all about dealing with shortages in exchange for money.

So clearly someone just doesn't want to pay up.

That was quite the rabbit hole. Thanks for sharing.

Maybe occasional free pizza, casual Friday's, and an employee of the month plaque would help?

"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 or amount of airspace one ATC can manage. As other jobs and sectors of the economy improve in productivity, people migrate to those sectors from low productivity sectors like ATC because on average high productivity sectors can pay more. The salaries of ATCs rise because there is more competition for the limited pool so you end up paying more but getting the same or worse outcomes over time.

> 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.

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.

* the voters need to be willing to not scream bloody murder if long term ATC investment raises taxes or airfares by $0.01

If anything tech upgrades could potentially just make the job less stressful for current traffic controllers - which might end up (long term) with big benefits for everyone.

The government is making that investment. Upgrading the legacy system will take decades regardless of how much money they spend.

https://www.faa.gov/nextgen

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.

There are some small airports that don’t have an ATC. You could start with those

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 aircraft. But we don't want to ask those questions. So we keep quibbling around the edges by talking about ATC or Reagan firing everyone or even the ridiculous suggestion that maybe the civilian airliners could be in a hold pattern at certain times.

It would be humorous if it wasn't so tragic.

I would bet on "Normalization of deviance", such a close altitude separation should probably just not exists (default is 1000ft).

If it had become a norm then a second controller would probably not change anything.

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 15-point question where you have to answer that your worst grade in college was in History/Political Science; picking any of the other options (each question has 5 possible answers) means 0 marks for that question. Collectively, these two questions alone account for one eighth of all the available points. (Many questions were red herrings that were actually worth nothing.)

But then the same blacks-only group that had lobbied internally to get the questionairre instituted (the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees) leaked the "correct" answers to the arbitrary questions to its members, allowing them to get full marks. Effectively this was a race-based hiring cartel. Non-blacks couldn't pass; blacks unwilling to join segregated racial affinity groups or unwilling to cheat the test couldn't pass; but corrupt blacks just needed to cheat when invited to and they would pass easily, entering the merit-based stage of hiring with the competition already eliminated by the biographical questionairre.

(A sad injustice is that blacks who wouldn't join the NBCFAE or cheat the test, and so suffered the same unfair disadvantage as whites, are excluded from the class in the class-action lawsuit over this whole mess. Since the legal argument is that it was discrimination against non-blacks, blacks don't get to sue - they lost out because of their integrity, not their race, and they have no recourse at law for that.)

See the questions at https://github.com/kaisoapbox/kaisoapbox.github.io/blob/main... or read an account of the story at either https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-... (short) or https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa... (long).

>> The ATC biographical assessment didn't have any race-based questions - it was just a decision making questionnaire

Looks like this is the case, https://casetext.com/case/brigida-v-buttigieg-1.

"Though not at issue in this motion, the Plaintiffs allege that the FAA failed to 'validate' the Biographical Questionnaire, and that the Biographical Questionnaire awarded points to applicants in a fashion untethered to the qualifications necessary to be an air traffic controller. For instance, applicants could be awarded fifteen points, the highest possible for any question, if they indicated their lowest grade in high school was in a science class. But applicants received only two points if they had a pilot's certificate, and no points at all if they had a Control Tower Operator rating, even though historic research data indicated that those criteria had 'a positive relationship with ATCS training outcomes'. Further, if applicants answered that they had not been employed at all in the prior three years, they received 10 points, the most awarded for that question."

Can you explain to me why it was more important for air traffic controller candidates to be bad at science and unemployed than it was for them to be pilots or trained in air traffic control?

I don't know anything about the lawsuit, but I do know that someone leaked the "answers" to members of a group representing people of a specific race.

(Opinions are my own and not necessarily that of the FAA.)

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...

So what does that really mean for those he outright fired? They didn't "resign".no one who (stupidly) responded to that email to resign would have taken any effect anyway.

They have nonetheless signaled that a subset of the staff is marked for firing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936406

Reagan taking away collective bargaining rights for ATCs seems to be what have led to the shortage and the helicopter accident last week.

Part all of this BS is sure at twitter if you pull this you might get a decent attrition rate but isn't the federal government known for people never quitting? If they quit, it's quiet quitting coming in every day and doing nothing. Isn't that generally the purpose behind this too? Like...good luck get a real amount of people to quit they are going to hold on for dear life

> I thought the buyout offer went along with the cancellation of remote work.

Your sentiment is a result of their incredibly vague first attempt at messaging.

The offer was (or ended up being) a full buyout offer. The “offer” is probably genuine, but it’s not a clean offer, as many edge cases are unclear (e.g., can they terminate you if they accept the offer… currently there is nothing stopping them from doing that, how can someone of retirement age accept the offer and then retire, etc.).

Iirc, ATCs can accept the buy out if they so chose. I’m guessing most won’t, as the ATC deal is good to stick with until you retire.

Edit: Per the article, the status of the offer is unclear. It wasn’t cleared with the union before the letter was released, and it hasn’t been officially rescinded either (despite comments that it has from DoT).

The other set of people who might take the deal are people who are concerned that the new administration will consider them "DEI hires"[1] and fire them later in the year. This is not an unreasonable fear given that the administration has already blamed the DC crash on "DEI" and pledged to root out "DEI" everywhere.

If you expect to be fired ~ in the fall, it is not unreasonable to be interested in the offer to keep getting paid from your federal job while you look for alternate employment.

1 - I am not going to get into who fits this category. The point is which employees might think they fit into this category.

Wait, why can't ATC work remotely? Serious question. They're looking at data on a screen and communicating via radio. Would the latency of any radio-digital relay be too high? Sure it's feeling like one step closer to Ender's game. But it could be possible in theory?

I couldn't find anything immediately definitive but this 2023 survey of federal workers was quite eye-opening: https://ourpublicservice.org/fed-figures/a-profile-of-the-20...

It never was a buy out, and everyone should stop referring to it as such.

> Wouldn't it be great if Air Force One was stranded because of this.

I was under the impression that AF1 flew in/out of Andrews air force base, which I (possibly naively?) assumed did not use civilian ATC. But yes, that would be great :)

This has been a snowballing problem since Reagan fired 11,000 controllers for striking in 1981... so sort of, but not the one you're thinking of, and there's been plenty of both sides of the aisle doing nothing to solve the problem in the meantime.

Realistically, because standing up a new academy isn't fast, and everyone wants fast solutions and won't invest long term. That isn't a party line thing, both parties have that issue.

Did the call sign go to KSQL because of Oracle being right there?

Contract towers in general are a terrible idea. The level of service is consistently lower than FAA towers.

The FAA chooses the contractor, and, according to the article:

> The contract, however, did “not include locality pay to account for the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area.” This resulted in the new offer to SQL’s air traffic controllers coming in “significantly lower” than their current compensation, according to the county.

It truly boggles my mind that Trump may have a legitimate basis for alleging that DEI policies have contributed to issues with ATC staffing.

> First, to liberals:

> I dislike Trump as much as anyone. Maybe I’m not supposed to play my hand like that while reporting a news article, but it’s true. I’ve wanted him out of politics since he entered the scene a decade ago, I voted against him three elections in a row, and I think he’s had a uniquely destructive effect within US politics. So I understand—please believe, I understand—just how disquieting it is to watch him stand up and blame DEI after a major tragedy.

> But Democrats did not handle it. The scandal occurred under the Obama administration. The FAA minimized it, obscured it, fought FOIA requests through multiple lawsuits, and stonewalled the public for years as the class action lawsuit rolled forward. The Trump administration missed it, too, for a term, and it’s likely most officials simply didn’t hear about it through the first few years of the Biden administration. No outlets left of Fox Business bothered to provide more than a cursory examination of it, and it never made much of a dent on the official record. Even when the New York Times ran a thoroughly reported article on air traffic controller shortages late last year, it never touched the scandal. It was possible to miss it.

US doesn't innovate anymore. Looking forward to seeing what Comac and China bring to the table before 2030.

Welcome to hacker news! The confidence is strong amongst the readership here and often confidently wrong at that!

Also, you can process and respond to audio without taking your eyes off of whatever they are on, and without taking your hand off the stick/yoke.

I hear in my headset "Clear for the option runway two-five-right, number two behind a cessna, two mile final, on the go make right traffic" and I know exactly what is expected of me without having to look at a screen. A digital display would be a step backwards.

>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.

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

In the latest crash, the heli was on VFR, and that situation happens often at DCA since it also serves general aviation.

Yes — it reached a point where Ryanair made a website on the issue: https://www.atcruinedourholiday.com/

I'm not an ATC, but I think there's a clear need for awareness of potentially conflicting traffic. If you divide that traffic over more people, you need to add communication between the controllers in a way that you don't when it's all handled by a single person.

That's not to say there's not ways to divide it up, but it's not always easily divisible. Well implemented technology can help, but poorly implemented technology can hurt, so everything needs to be done slowly and carefully.

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.