America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

> 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 reputation as, say, investment banking, we wouldn't have the pipeline problem that we do now. Surely banks don't have a problem finding young, quick thinking minds to put through their pressure factories. I don't think the ATC candidate pool is currently even close to the limit of people who could take the stress and do the work. Offer controllers starting salaries of $1M/yr and see how things start to change.

Your point in the other thread about marketing the job to teenagers is also good. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people interested in ATC aren't already "aviation adjacent" to some degree (ex-military, family are pilots, and so on)

I've dreamed of having an AI model run ATC.

Just train an AI on ATC recordings and other data, maybe throw in some reinforcement learning,and then test it in low-stakes commercial airspace (like a regional airport)

> 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 spot is reserved for a random person one week behind them in the FAA academy, and the pay won't make it worth moving away from their family.

There are more examples, and appropriate pay would fix most of them.

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

It seems like a good career path for people retiring from commercial aviation. They have been on the other end of ATC and know the gravity of the situation.

I work closely with transportation dispatchers, and this applies almost word for word

there are already a lot of screens and things to look at in a cockpit. and in emergency situations, screens can fail. audio has the advantage of being highly backwards compatible and extremely reliable, so long as the pilots are alive and conscious (and if they're not, the plane is most likely SOL anyways: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522)

> and assume they'll follow them to a T if acknowledged

That's not how ATC works.

It seems they clawed back the offer or never gave it in the first place.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-exempt...

> if half of the air traffic controllers took the offer to leave their jobs, do we have a Plan B?

In theory you could do what Reagan did and tell the military to do ATC.

Whether or not this is a good idea is another matter.

I thought the buyout offer went along with the cancellation of remote work. Like, if you are thinking about quitting because you don’t want to come in, here have an extra incentive to do that and take some time to find another job.

ATC already couldn’t work remotely. The only people who would take a deal like this would be people who were thinking about quitting or retiring anyway. I suspect ATC will not be substantially affected by people taking that deal.

It's a colossal error to accept. The government isn't authorized to do a buy-out by congress so you're just quitting and won't receive the payment.

I'd be interested to see the daily staffing levels over the past couple of weeks. If anyone knows where that could be found.

ATCs have the upper hand in this negotiation because they're essential and can't be quickly replaced.

If enough ATCs quit that major airports have to be shut down or reduce flights, the airlines (and stock market) will turn against Trump pretty quickly. My guess is the going salary for ATCs is going to increase substantially once they realize they need to lure back those who quit.

I would love to see all ATCs in DC quit, and for others refuse to work there, so that Trump and Musk feel the consequences for their actions directly. Wouldn't it be great if Air Force One was stranded because of this.

I’ll bet the final NTSB report lists as a contributing factor that there was only one controller that night; a second controller might have had the time to notice the altitude was too close, or vector the helicopter behind.

I still don't understand why KSQL is a contract tower and not a full FAA-managed tower.

> 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 questionable assessment, but the idea that he failed it for being white is peak self-victimization.

The risk of DEI was fast-passing under-qualified candidates, or that they were misplacing their recruitment efforts. But the idea that they would not be filling necessary positions with qualified white people continues to be something of a polemic myth.

It has always been and will continue to be more safe than driving to the airport. The fact that something extraordinarily safe is potentially less safe is a topic for discussion, but not at the expense of realizing the relative risks of everything else.

Prior to the midair at DCA, there had not been a fatal (edit) airliner crash in this country since 2009, and there had not been a midair collision involving an airliner since the 1970s. The fact that some people have an irrational fear of flying does not justify that irrational fear dictating policy any more than people who have an irrational fear of clowns wanting them banned.

As with all things in current news: yes.

The reason this (and Boeing before it) are in the news is because the US air system is incredibly safe.

For perspective, there are ~27,000 US passenger flights per day. [0]

I think the last commercial US passenger carrier midair collision was in 1990? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mid-air_collisions

[0] https://www.airlines.org/impact/

Here's a study[0] looking at data from 2022 that says flying keeps getting safer. The press release[1] has some nice quotes:

> “You might think there is some irreducible risk level we can’t get below,” adds Barnett, a leading expert in air travel safety and operations. “And yet, the chance of dying during an air journey keeps dropping by about 7 percent annually, and continues to go down by a factor of two every decade.”

0: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09696...

1: https://news.mit.edu/2024/study-flying-keeps-getting-safer-0...

USA Air Traffic deaths spiked back in 2018 during the Boeing 737 Max debacle. They have declined since then. With the introduction of ADS-B things are only getting safer for commercial air travel. A lack of ATC personnel will probably just mean airport delays and cancelled flights. They can't get any more tired and burnt out than they are now.

I don't think there can be a single simple answer to that question.

Certain immigrants actually seem to excel in trucking and even enjoy it (Punjabi truckers especially in California - I always see the Sikh logos on the back of their trucks between LA and SF!). A quick policy adjust would resolve any shortage in truckers with other people who'd probably also enjoy the work.

However, there isn't a massive pool of people abroad who can handle US airspace demands (which now seems to include helicopters flying in the approach pathways of active runways in VFR while wearing night vision goggles and ignoring their radar altimeters all so some DC asshat doesn't have to sit in a car for 20 minutes, and also includes people like my former college hallmates who take handheld aviation radios, ask for permission to depart, and run on the taxiways with their arms extended, to great dismay of ATC)

They have fascinatingly ancient UX:

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/tfdm/efs (Image caption: "Paper flight strips currently in use")

I don't know more about ATC, but it looks like a field ripe for disruption and innovation. AI should be able to handle the coordination of flights without the downside of the delays and limitations of the human training pipeline, worker fatigue, and stress - all for less expense. The more I think about it, the more I feel like I could have something tangible at the end of a weekend or two - at least a prototype.

You'd have to change more regulations, because airports don't close when ATC closes, it regresses to an untowered airport environment (and related airspace designation).

ATC is there to provide specific services that increase safety and throughput (mostly by sequencing and separation).

If you did this with the ruling class, they'd likely pass regulations that would benefit themselves disproportionately and hurt general aviation (the small little Cessnas flying around). There is already a bunch of problems with privatized ATC, don't make it worse.

> Cut the hours back to something sane, and as much as possible time the airport closures in ways that affect the ruling class

The ruling class flies private aircraft and don't have to operate out of large municipal airports.

The ruling class makes the rules, though. That's their whole deal. That's why nothing works right.

This is childish.