19 ms·

How to fix America's aviation system (2023)

131 points by camkego 2y ago

camkego 2y ago
The article says: "near misses are [...] up 25% in the past decade" For example, there was almost a collision between Southwest and Jetblue Thursday morning at Reagan Airport. https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/18/us/washington-ronald-reagan-airport-plane-crash/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/18/us/washington-ronald-reagan-a... I wonder, it going to take actual collisions to spur the focus and attention to work on this issue of "so many close calls"?
- agsnu 2y ago
  There was almost an even worse collision at Kennedy on Wednesday as well that only just came to light https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW6lAwLy_Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW6lAwLy_Os
  - hggh 2y ago
    Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40098469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40098469
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- nimbius 2y ago
  Its a simple answer I give professional drivers in the diesel engine shop I work at. Youre going too fast. Mashing different departments together to do things quicker, faster turnarounds at the gates, playing with flight times to game service hours...it all comes back to you in the worst way. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if Reagans sacking the air controllers union isnt still haunting this country to this day. Those were professionals, and you decided the rates interfered with profits, so now you get a lot more near misses from a much more exhausted crew.
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    the data on airline safety over the last forty years does not bear out your argument at all. Air travel has gotten much cheaper and much safer since Reagan -- TFA and Boeing's problems notwithstanding. What you're describing sounds a lot like, to me, someone who loves unions and is mad about something that happened two generations ago, and it's looking for some bad effect to blame on it.
    - meowster 2y ago
      Air Traffic Controller here. A major problem is staffing, and that's still a problem because of Reagan's mass-firing. I don't care about unions one way or the other. I'm just a member of my union for the "job insurance", but now I'm thinking about quiting next January (we can only quit in January) because they showed themselves to be ineffective and not representative of my needs (pay).
  - dralley 2y ago
    "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast"
- delfinom 2y ago
  There was a near miss in JFK Friday between a Swiss Air that was cleared to takeoff, with 3 planes immediately after that cleared to cross the same runway by a second controller. Would have had a death toll rivaling 9/11 if it was on a foggy day with no visibility downstream for the Swiss Air to abort in its take off.
NegativeLatency 2y ago
Would love to see low lead fuel phased out too while we’re fixing the system.
- Plasmoid 2y ago
  The FAA recently approved 100UL fuel
- tjohns 2y ago
  That's actively happening. 94UL was approved a couple years ago, and some of the smaller airports in the SF Bay Area are already dispensing it. 100UL was the last major barrier (since high performance aircraft need 100 Octane fuel), and that was just approved last year. It should start being dispensed at smaller airports soon. There's a lot of pressure to get this in pumps as quickly as possible before the EPA bans 100LL. (Probably not fast enough to prevent San Carlos Airport in the bay area from closing - the county officially wants to close it due to leaded fuel, though it's an open secret that's just a convenient excuse so they can free the airport land + airspace up for real estate developers. The airport's already switched over entirely to 94UL pumps.)
Slava_Propanei 2y ago
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KennyBlanken 2y ago
The reason America's aviation system is so broken is because the FAA's budget is primarily user fee/tax funded. Airlines want as low government fees and taxes as possible, so they heavily lobby against any sort of funding increase. Congress could fund technology updates and ATC training programs...then rapidly increase the number of controllers in the country, and then lower the maximum hours controllers can work in a shift/week, increase break times, etc. But that means raising fees and taxes and tariffs, and both wealthy travelers and corporate interests don't want that. Airline travel is predominantly done by people who make over $100k a year, and business travelers comprise 75% of profits. Oh, and it doesn't help that AOPA screams blue bloody murder any time anyone so much as suggests phasing out incredibly expensive, outdated technologies.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  There are about 45.000 flights a day [1] in the US or 16 million a year, and that's just commercial, not including GA the 2010 dataset [2] is the newest I could find, it assumes 1/3rd for commercial, 1/3rd charters and the rest for GA, military and cargo, and I assume that this ratio has been roughly the same in the last decades. So, a surcharge of 100 dollars per flight to fund FAA controllers would lead to a whopping 1.6 billion dollars a year while only adding less than 50 cents in ticket costs per passenger (assuming an average of 200 people per flight). Further income could be made with a lower surcharge for cargo and charters (let's say 50 dollars), and a very small one (let's say 10 dollars) for GA - assuming the above roughly 1/3rd split, you'd have an additional 800 million dollars from charters and cargo, and 160 million from GA, leading to a total of about 2.6 billion dollars. Increase the fees to 200 dollars for commercial flights and you'd get 4.2 billion dollars - an about 20% increase of the FAA's current 19.8 billion dollars. That's a lot of money that even the most price-sensitive, high frequency fliers will not really feel. Assuming some rich executive flying twice a day for 250 working days a year, he'd pay 1000$ more in travel costs, a tiiiiny fraction of his expenses. A hobbyist pilot with his PPL needs a minimum of 24 hours and a checkride every two years, so ~12 flights per year, so their FAA surcharge cost would be around ~120 dollars a year - not very much compared to the cost of getting and maintaining a PPL. In the end, the whining is pointless (especially as I've shown the actual impact is negligible). Either the government subsidizes air traffic of all kinds (similar as it does for road and to a lesser extent rail traffic) and distributes the cost across all members of society, or it makes for a self-sufficient system, or a mix of both - but the status quo of keeping it on life support is no longer sustainable. Personally, I'd prefer a self-funding mechanism, alone because governments (not just in the US, it's just most pronounced there) seem to be completely incapable of actually governing, and preferring to cut costs even where it's actually life-critical. [1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers [2] https://sos.noaa.gov/catalog/datasets/air-traffic/ https://sos.noaa.gov/catalog/datasets/air-traffic/ [3] https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2023-03/FAA_FY_2024_President_Budget_508.pdf https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2023-03/F...
MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
„Well, it’s hard to think of a tougher or more important job than being an air traffic controller. Go ahead and try, it will take you a while. Every day, more than 2.5 million Americans fly in or out of US airports, along with, of course, many billions of dollars of cargo. At any one time, there are about 5,000 aircraft above the United States. On 9/11, for example, air traffic controllers guided every one of them to a safe landing in a little over an hour. Go ahead and try that. It’s the kind of job where even a small mistake could lead instantly to the deaths of hundreds of people. Not surprisingly, the hiring standards for air traffic controllers were long among the most selective of all federal jobs. Applicants typically needed to complete military service or pass the FAA’s Collegiate Training Initiative Program. After that, they sat for a specially-designed exam that tested for relevant job skills, skills like math ability and complex problem-solving. Only those with the highest scores made the cut. The system was designed to choose the best. And for decades, it worked. Then, during the Obama administration, activist bureaucrats decided that the pool of air traffic controllers wasn’t diverse enough. They never explained why diversity ought to matter in air traffic control or why it was more important than traditional goals like competence and public safety. The FAA, without a vote, just scrapped the old hiring system and replaced it with a diversity-friendly version. Most people have no idea this happened. The FAA now requires many of its applicants to fill out what they call a biographical questionnaire before any other screening. Those who answer the questions in a way that diversity monitors don’t like cannot be considered for hiring, not matter how much experience they have or how well they may do on the other portions of the testing. The biographical questionnaire is all important. So, what is in this biographical questionnaire? Well, we can answer that question because we’ve got a copy of it and we also got information about how it is scored. And it’s shocking! For example, one question asked test-takers to name their worst grade in high school. The preferred answer for that is science. In other words, if you can’t do science, the FAA is especially eager to hire you as an air traffic controller. You get 10 points for being bad at science, according to the scoring sheet. Another question asked about work history. According to the FAA, the best answer to that question is you haven’t worked at all in the past three years. You get 10 points for not working. Apparently, unemployed people make the best air traffic controllers. This is demented, by the way, but it’s real. So do applicants who played a lot of sports in high school. They’re rewarded too. By contrast, applicants who say they know a great deal about air traffic control get only five points. Trained pilots get two points. Once again, applicants who haven’t worked at all, who have been unemployed for the past three years, get 10 points. Pilots, 2 points. This is insane. And it’s dangerous. It’s also indefensible. We asked the FAA’s top spokesman why applicants for an air traffic control job would get more points for playing high school sports than for flying planes or knowing a lot about air traffic control. His response, “I’m trying to find that out as well.” Well, not actually trying very hard, it turns out. We still haven’t heard back with a real explanation and, of course, we won’t because there isn’t one, other than shut up, diversity. But we won’t shut up. This is too important. Lives are at stake.“ https://vdare.com/posts/faa-lowers-standards-for-air-traffic-controllers-because-diversity https://vdare.com/posts/faa-lowers-standards-for-air-traffic...
methuselah_in 2y ago
Let engineering team work as engineering team
- threatripper 2y ago
  We can't have this, think of alternate solutions.
- cpursley 2y ago
  And get some engineers on the executive boards.
  - tacocataco 2y ago
    Social engineers?
- CivBase 2y ago
  Interesting idea. I'm going to need you to provide a cost-benefit analysis on this.
  - drtgh 2y ago
    Why? in the short term they will say "expensive", "low ROI", without analysing the long term gains when the bridge does not collapse, and those happy customers attract new customers to our company, to run away from those companies that have done such kind of ROI analysis in an attempt to justify their lack of common sense.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > run away from those companies that have done such kind of ROI analysis…lack of common sense Are we seriously arguing for management by gut feeling over numbers in a thread about air traffic control? ROI is a weighing of costs and benefits. It isn’t inherently short or long term. I can use 19th century physics to prove no plane can fly. That doesn’t mean we conclude physics is fucked, never do physics again.
ysofunny 2y ago
gotta get rid of it so we can have free UFO tech
seatac76 2y ago
How much of this due to flight controllers and aircraft crew being overworked. Looks like the FAA is starting to take action https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/us/faa-to-increase-time-off-between-air-traffic-controller-shifts-after-report-highlights-risks/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/us/faa-to-increase-time-off-b...
- meowster 2y ago
  Air Traffic Controller here. That is going to screw up our schedules even worse. It also violates the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the FAA and the Air Traffic Controller's union. The FAA released that without discussing it with the union beforehand. The biggest complaint among Air Traffic Controllers is pay. Second is staffing. Staffing is what is causing Controllers to work 6-day-workweeks and causing fatigue, not the time in-between shifts. Most controllers are willing to put up with it if the pay is commensurate with what we're being told to do. But our effective pay is dwindling with inflation while pilots are getting raises and we are not. It's VERY demoralizing and causing people to quit, which makes staffing worse. The easiest and best fix is to increase our pay. (It's also demoralizing when a Controller f**s up so bad and so egregiously, that they aren't fired unless it makes the news. I can't give any examples without doxing myself.) ##### Reading the article now, but no one likes Paul Rinaldi. He extended the CBA right before he left office which caught everyone by surprise because they said Biden is the "most labor friendly president" and no one tried to negotiate pay raises in the midst of bad inflation. On top of that, then Rinaldi gets a 250k/year "consulting" contract with the union. Now the union is saying they are going to extend the contract again because they're afraid if Trump becomes President, we will get screwed, but we're already getting screwed and the Controllers wants to renegotiate the contract anyway. Our union is not effective right now, and the FAA is fine with that. And since ATC is government, we cannot take any work action that others like pilots can which is why they're getting 40% raises and we are not. ##### Opinions are my own, etc. We can get in trouble for talking to the media. Supposedly r/ATC is being censored which is why someone created r/ATC2 which is a little more unhinged, but still accurately reflects controllers' frustration on pay.
  - Waterluvian 2y ago
paulgerhardt 2y ago
I’m always surprised no one talks about the top of funnel for ATC controllers. As a pilot, ham radio operator, and operations enthusiast I considered it as a career change at 35 but it’s an impossible field to switch into. In particular: Must be a U.S. citizen Must be age 30 or under on the closing date of the application period (with limited exceptions) Must have either three years of general work experience or four years of education leading to a bachelor’s degree, or a combination of both Must relocate to Oklahoma City + a rural airport for multiple years. Salary is $135k/yr I suspect a lot of others get weeded out during the Hogan test (mmpi2) and no-history-of-ADHD-or-depression requirements. The extensive relocation periods don’t bother me but one would have had to come straight out of school with the mission of doing ATC to even qualify. This hiring thread is worth a read: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1c1wmt2/i_am_an_air_traffic_controller_next_week_the_faa/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1c1wmt2/i_am_an_air_t... Coming from startup land, it’s so clear the lack of available and qualified controllers is directly down line of this thorny problem. It’s the inverse corollary to growth fixes all problems.
- meowster 2y ago
  The salary varies from 60k to a middle-of-nowhere tower to $150k in New York or California which is not enough to live on comfortably. Of course we are going to burn out and make mistakes when we have to drive an hour plus to and from the city six days a week because we can't afford to live any closer and staffing isn't better because people quit because of the pay. It's not a supply problem with staffing, it's a pay problem. Over 50,000 people apply every year, but people are quiting because quality of life sucks, and the biggest thing the FAA can do to change it, is to increase pay, and they aren't doing that.
  - imoverclocked 2y ago
    Given your username, I have to ask. Do you ever meow on guard? On a serious note, what are your views on privatization of ATC? The one airport in my region that I know is privatized has a horrible reputation among pilots and DPEs alike.
petermcneeley 2y ago
There shouldnt even be pilots much less air traffic controllers. This is the same as the people that think subways need human drivers.
- meowster 2y ago
  Air Traffic Controller here. Tour an ATC facility and talk with them. You'll see why it can't be completely automated.
  - petermcneeley 2y ago
    Yes but 99% probably could be. Go to Vancouver sometime. All the subways are automated. But in rare cases they need to be driven remotely and every few years they need to be driven by a human.
    - tnmom 2y ago
      ATC is a unique thing - if you’re interested, suggest listening to the https://www.opposingbases.com/ https://www.opposingbases.com/ podcast. It’s eye opening how much complexity they deal with, and how frequent the edge cases really are.
    - nostrademons 2y ago
      It's the same issue that self-driving cars have. 99% can be automated. The remaining 1% is a bitch, and life-threatening. I've heard piloting described as 99% moments of boredom, followed by 1% moments of sheer terror. If you actually could program a computer to anticipate all of the possible scenarios in that 1%, it'd be good to take the sheer terror out of the equation. But it's frightening because those are the moments when something has gone wrong and normalcy no longer applies, and you need to apply collected knowledge, wisdom, and experience to save your life and the lives of your passengers.
      - petermcneeley 2y ago
        It is actually not like self driving at all. In the self driving case the nominal situation requires hard AI. In aircraft the nominal situation does not require hard AI, only the emergency situation. If aircraft did not have mechanical failures the nominal situation is really well defined. The ATC job is even more nominal since they are not actually dealing with the mechanics of the plane. I would guess that you could make a video game that covers 99.999% of all ATC jobs and you could undoubtly with enough effort also program an AI to cover this.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ggernov 2y ago
Just stop hiring incompetent people in maintenance departments. Planes are falling out of the sky primarily because of bad maintenance and poorly developed procedures to conduct maintenance. Pilot standards also need to be increased. Everyone doesn't "deserve" to be a pilot. I don't care about their race or gender, I just care that they can pilot the plane in stressful conditions without error compared to pilot quality when we had the safest flight records.
- tnmom 2y ago
  What incidents are you looking at that make you think pilot standards are too low? In the US?
chasingthewind 2y ago
I'm hesitant to comment because while I'm an aviation fan I really know very little. I subscribe to VAS Aviation and Blancolirio where a lot of these incidents are reported and analyzed and one thing that continually strikes me is that the architecture of airport runways seems like an incredible arsenal of footguns. The way the runways intersect each other and parallel each other creating the need for complex and sometimes dangerous intersections seems like such an unfortunate and possibly unsolvable problem. Airports are forced by economic and logistical necessity into spaces that are really too small to solve these issues with better layout and that means the solutions "have" to be found in process or technology. I've encountered constraints like this so often in software but mercifully I've never worked on anything with life or death consequences.
- bombcar 2y ago
  The parallel nature is caused by the realities of wind; you don’t want to be doing crosswind activities unless forced to. Even airports with “unlimited” space have parallel runways and resulting taxiways.
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  Being a pilot: not that hard in reality. There are even uncontrolled airports with intersecting runways. Cars have a way harder time handling red lights than ATC does dealing with runway crossings, at least from a number of dead people point of view.
Slava_Propanei 2y ago
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financetechbro 2y ago
Listening to the radios is an eye opening experience. There was a case in NYC recently where one pilot was given clearance for takeoff and right after three different planes were given permission to cross the same runway, forcing the pilot to abort the takeoff. Pretty wild stuff
- meowster 2y ago
  > three different planes were given permission to cross the same runway Four planes. As someone else said: if it was too foggy for the pilot to see the traffic, it would have been an unfathomable disaster. Although I wonder if the momentum would have dissipated by the time it got to the fourth plane.
piloto_ciego 2y ago
Aviation is fine. I was a pilot for for a living during my 20s. Aviation is extremely safe, it’s a good model for safety (checklists, no fault error reporting, etc). The problem is the push to put more airplanes through the system, and the bottlenecks to the system. Every few weeks you see a video about some near miss in at EWR or LGA. We need to simply tolerate less efficiency or hire more people. Also, and this is a really controversial take, as an AI adjacent person now that I’m not in the cockpit, I think LLMs and AI are a natural solution to some of these problems… I see ATC getting automated before SICs are.
- BWStearns 2y ago
  One thing that stands out to me is that most (all?) of the near-incidents people are worried about are aircraft are Part 135 ATP ops. GA will always be mildly dangerous, and increasingly they'll just not let you near a Class B in your clapped out 150, and that's fine. It's too expensive to retrofit the trainer fleet. But the big guys _all_ have working ADSB/other safety equipment and have operators that would be able to add new mandatory equipment in a reasonable time period. I wonder if they could pick up the pace in terms of safety tech adoption for 135s to relieve the bottlenecking.
asne11 2y ago
> the air traffic control system is not inherently governmental. Doing what Paul did for 30 years is not an inherently governmental activity. It's safety critical. That's absolute nonsense, I'm wondering what angle she's playing here. If it's safety critical, such as ambulances and functioning stoplights, that's what makes it governmental. > You can't make those kind of investments if you're a government agency, you have to pay for things up front, nor can you make the kind of incremental improvements that air traffic control needs. Sure you can. Look at healthcare.gov, or TSA.
NoNameHaveI 2y ago
Related: https://dailyegyptian.com/117259/news/set-up-to-fail-air-traffic-control-shortage-casts-clouds-over-siu-aviation-program/ https://dailyegyptian.com/117259/news/set-up-to-fail-air-tra... Hard to train new pilots when they refuse to fly due to distrust in ATC.
paulddraper 2y ago
"Aviation system" = "Air traffic control" Which...is a subset.

131 points by camkego 2y ago

The article says: "near misses are [...] up 25% in the past decade" For example, there was almost a collision between Southwest and Jetblue Thursday morning at Reagan Airport. https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/18/us/washington-ronald-reagan-airport-plane-crash/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/18/us/washington-ronald-reagan-a... I wonder, it going to take actual collisions to spur the focus and attention to work on this issue of "so many close calls"?

agsnu 2y ago
There was almost an even worse collision at Kennedy on Wednesday as well that only just came to light https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW6lAwLy_Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW6lAwLy_Os
- hggh 2y ago
  Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40098469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40098469
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nimbius 2y ago
Its a simple answer I give professional drivers in the diesel engine shop I work at. Youre going too fast. Mashing different departments together to do things quicker, faster turnarounds at the gates, playing with flight times to game service hours...it all comes back to you in the worst way. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if Reagans sacking the air controllers union isnt still haunting this country to this day. Those were professionals, and you decided the rates interfered with profits, so now you get a lot more near misses from a much more exhausted crew.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  the data on airline safety over the last forty years does not bear out your argument at all. Air travel has gotten much cheaper and much safer since Reagan -- TFA and Boeing's problems notwithstanding. What you're describing sounds a lot like, to me, someone who loves unions and is mad about something that happened two generations ago, and it's looking for some bad effect to blame on it.
  - meowster 2y ago
    Air Traffic Controller here. A major problem is staffing, and that's still a problem because of Reagan's mass-firing. I don't care about unions one way or the other. I'm just a member of my union for the "job insurance", but now I'm thinking about quiting next January (we can only quit in January) because they showed themselves to be ineffective and not representative of my needs (pay).
- dralley 2y ago
  "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast"
delfinom 2y ago
There was a near miss in JFK Friday between a Swiss Air that was cleared to takeoff, with 3 planes immediately after that cleared to cross the same runway by a second controller. Would have had a death toll rivaling 9/11 if it was on a foggy day with no visibility downstream for the Swiss Air to abort in its take off.

NegativeLatency 2y ago

Would love to see low lead fuel phased out too while we’re fixing the system.

Plasmoid 2y ago
The FAA recently approved 100UL fuel
tjohns 2y ago
That's actively happening. 94UL was approved a couple years ago, and some of the smaller airports in the SF Bay Area are already dispensing it. 100UL was the last major barrier (since high performance aircraft need 100 Octane fuel), and that was just approved last year. It should start being dispensed at smaller airports soon. There's a lot of pressure to get this in pumps as quickly as possible before the EPA bans 100LL. (Probably not fast enough to prevent San Carlos Airport in the bay area from closing - the county officially wants to close it due to leaded fuel, though it's an open secret that's just a convenient excuse so they can free the airport land + airspace up for real estate developers. The airport's already switched over entirely to 94UL pumps.)

Slava_Propanei 2y ago

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KennyBlanken 2y ago

The reason America's aviation system is so broken is because the FAA's budget is primarily user fee/tax funded. Airlines want as low government fees and taxes as possible, so they heavily lobby against any sort of funding increase. Congress could fund technology updates and ATC training programs...then rapidly increase the number of controllers in the country, and then lower the maximum hours controllers can work in a shift/week, increase break times, etc. But that means raising fees and taxes and tariffs, and both wealthy travelers and corporate interests don't want that. Airline travel is predominantly done by people who make over $100k a year, and business travelers comprise 75% of profits. Oh, and it doesn't help that AOPA screams blue bloody murder any time anyone so much as suggests phasing out incredibly expensive, outdated technologies.

mschuster91 2y ago
There are about 45.000 flights a day [1] in the US or 16 million a year, and that's just commercial, not including GA the 2010 dataset [2] is the newest I could find, it assumes 1/3rd for commercial, 1/3rd charters and the rest for GA, military and cargo, and I assume that this ratio has been roughly the same in the last decades. So, a surcharge of 100 dollars per flight to fund FAA controllers would lead to a whopping 1.6 billion dollars a year while only adding less than 50 cents in ticket costs per passenger (assuming an average of 200 people per flight). Further income could be made with a lower surcharge for cargo and charters (let's say 50 dollars), and a very small one (let's say 10 dollars) for GA - assuming the above roughly 1/3rd split, you'd have an additional 800 million dollars from charters and cargo, and 160 million from GA, leading to a total of about 2.6 billion dollars. Increase the fees to 200 dollars for commercial flights and you'd get 4.2 billion dollars - an about 20% increase of the FAA's current 19.8 billion dollars. That's a lot of money that even the most price-sensitive, high frequency fliers will not really feel. Assuming some rich executive flying twice a day for 250 working days a year, he'd pay 1000$ more in travel costs, a tiiiiny fraction of his expenses. A hobbyist pilot with his PPL needs a minimum of 24 hours and a checkride every two years, so ~12 flights per year, so their FAA surcharge cost would be around ~120 dollars a year - not very much compared to the cost of getting and maintaining a PPL. In the end, the whining is pointless (especially as I've shown the actual impact is negligible). Either the government subsidizes air traffic of all kinds (similar as it does for road and to a lesser extent rail traffic) and distributes the cost across all members of society, or it makes for a self-sufficient system, or a mix of both - but the status quo of keeping it on life support is no longer sustainable. Personally, I'd prefer a self-funding mechanism, alone because governments (not just in the US, it's just most pronounced there) seem to be completely incapable of actually governing, and preferring to cut costs even where it's actually life-critical. [1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers [2] https://sos.noaa.gov/catalog/datasets/air-traffic/ https://sos.noaa.gov/catalog/datasets/air-traffic/ [3] https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2023-03/FAA_FY_2024_President_Budget_508.pdf https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2023-03/F...

MrBuddyCasino 2y ago

„Well, it’s hard to think of a tougher or more important job than being an air traffic controller. Go ahead and try, it will take you a while. Every day, more than 2.5 million Americans fly in or out of US airports, along with, of course, many billions of dollars of cargo. At any one time, there are about 5,000 aircraft above the United States. On 9/11, for example, air traffic controllers guided every one of them to a safe landing in a little over an hour. Go ahead and try that. It’s the kind of job where even a small mistake could lead instantly to the deaths of hundreds of people. Not surprisingly, the hiring standards for air traffic controllers were long among the most selective of all federal jobs. Applicants typically needed to complete military service or pass the FAA’s Collegiate Training Initiative Program. After that, they sat for a specially-designed exam that tested for relevant job skills, skills like math ability and complex problem-solving. Only those with the highest scores made the cut. The system was designed to choose the best. And for decades, it worked. Then, during the Obama administration, activist bureaucrats decided that the pool of air traffic controllers wasn’t diverse enough. They never explained why diversity ought to matter in air traffic control or why it was more important than traditional goals like competence and public safety. The FAA, without a vote, just scrapped the old hiring system and replaced it with a diversity-friendly version. Most people have no idea this happened. The FAA now requires many of its applicants to fill out what they call a biographical questionnaire before any other screening. Those who answer the questions in a way that diversity monitors don’t like cannot be considered for hiring, not matter how much experience they have or how well they may do on the other portions of the testing. The biographical questionnaire is all important. So, what is in this biographical questionnaire? Well, we can answer that question because we’ve got a copy of it and we also got information about how it is scored. And it’s shocking! For example, one question asked test-takers to name their worst grade in high school. The preferred answer for that is science. In other words, if you can’t do science, the FAA is especially eager to hire you as an air traffic controller. You get 10 points for being bad at science, according to the scoring sheet. Another question asked about work history. According to the FAA, the best answer to that question is you haven’t worked at all in the past three years. You get 10 points for not working. Apparently, unemployed people make the best air traffic controllers. This is demented, by the way, but it’s real. So do applicants who played a lot of sports in high school. They’re rewarded too. By contrast, applicants who say they know a great deal about air traffic control get only five points. Trained pilots get two points. Once again, applicants who haven’t worked at all, who have been unemployed for the past three years, get 10 points. Pilots, 2 points. This is insane. And it’s dangerous. It’s also indefensible. We asked the FAA’s top spokesman why applicants for an air traffic control job would get more points for playing high school sports than for flying planes or knowing a lot about air traffic control. His response, “I’m trying to find that out as well.” Well, not actually trying very hard, it turns out. We still haven’t heard back with a real explanation and, of course, we won’t because there isn’t one, other than shut up, diversity. But we won’t shut up. This is too important. Lives are at stake.“ https://vdare.com/posts/faa-lowers-standards-for-air-traffic-controllers-because-diversity https://vdare.com/posts/faa-lowers-standards-for-air-traffic...

methuselah_in 2y ago

Let engineering team work as engineering team

threatripper 2y ago
We can't have this, think of alternate solutions.
cpursley 2y ago
And get some engineers on the executive boards.
- tacocataco 2y ago
  Social engineers?
CivBase 2y ago
Interesting idea. I'm going to need you to provide a cost-benefit analysis on this.
- drtgh 2y ago
  Why? in the short term they will say "expensive", "low ROI", without analysing the long term gains when the bridge does not collapse, and those happy customers attract new customers to our company, to run away from those companies that have done such kind of ROI analysis in an attempt to justify their lack of common sense.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > run away from those companies that have done such kind of ROI analysis…lack of common sense Are we seriously arguing for management by gut feeling over numbers in a thread about air traffic control? ROI is a weighing of costs and benefits. It isn’t inherently short or long term. I can use 19th century physics to prove no plane can fly. That doesn’t mean we conclude physics is fucked, never do physics again.

ysofunny 2y ago

gotta get rid of it so we can have free UFO tech

seatac76 2y ago

How much of this due to flight controllers and aircraft crew being overworked. Looks like the FAA is starting to take action https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/us/faa-to-increase-time-off-between-air-traffic-controller-shifts-after-report-highlights-risks/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/us/faa-to-increase-time-off-b...

meowster 2y ago
Air Traffic Controller here. That is going to screw up our schedules even worse. It also violates the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the FAA and the Air Traffic Controller's union. The FAA released that without discussing it with the union beforehand. The biggest complaint among Air Traffic Controllers is pay. Second is staffing. Staffing is what is causing Controllers to work 6-day-workweeks and causing fatigue, not the time in-between shifts. Most controllers are willing to put up with it if the pay is commensurate with what we're being told to do. But our effective pay is dwindling with inflation while pilots are getting raises and we are not. It's VERY demoralizing and causing people to quit, which makes staffing worse. The easiest and best fix is to increase our pay. (It's also demoralizing when a Controller f**s up so bad and so egregiously, that they aren't fired unless it makes the news. I can't give any examples without doxing myself.) ##### Reading the article now, but no one likes Paul Rinaldi. He extended the CBA right before he left office which caught everyone by surprise because they said Biden is the "most labor friendly president" and no one tried to negotiate pay raises in the midst of bad inflation. On top of that, then Rinaldi gets a 250k/year "consulting" contract with the union. Now the union is saying they are going to extend the contract again because they're afraid if Trump becomes President, we will get screwed, but we're already getting screwed and the Controllers wants to renegotiate the contract anyway. Our union is not effective right now, and the FAA is fine with that. And since ATC is government, we cannot take any work action that others like pilots can which is why they're getting 40% raises and we are not. ##### Opinions are my own, etc. We can get in trouble for talking to the media. Supposedly r/ATC is being censored which is why someone created r/ATC2 which is a little more unhinged, but still accurately reflects controllers' frustration on pay.
- Waterluvian 2y ago

paulgerhardt 2y ago

I’m always surprised no one talks about the top of funnel for ATC controllers. As a pilot, ham radio operator, and operations enthusiast I considered it as a career change at 35 but it’s an impossible field to switch into. In particular: Must be a U.S. citizen Must be age 30 or under on the closing date of the application period (with limited exceptions) Must have either three years of general work experience or four years of education leading to a bachelor’s degree, or a combination of both Must relocate to Oklahoma City + a rural airport for multiple years. Salary is $135k/yr I suspect a lot of others get weeded out during the Hogan test (mmpi2) and no-history-of-ADHD-or-depression requirements. The extensive relocation periods don’t bother me but one would have had to come straight out of school with the mission of doing ATC to even qualify. This hiring thread is worth a read: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1c1wmt2/i_am_an_air_traffic_controller_next_week_the_faa/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1c1wmt2/i_am_an_air_t... Coming from startup land, it’s so clear the lack of available and qualified controllers is directly down line of this thorny problem. It’s the inverse corollary to growth fixes all problems.

meowster 2y ago
The salary varies from 60k to a middle-of-nowhere tower to $150k in New York or California which is not enough to live on comfortably. Of course we are going to burn out and make mistakes when we have to drive an hour plus to and from the city six days a week because we can't afford to live any closer and staffing isn't better because people quit because of the pay. It's not a supply problem with staffing, it's a pay problem. Over 50,000 people apply every year, but people are quiting because quality of life sucks, and the biggest thing the FAA can do to change it, is to increase pay, and they aren't doing that.
- imoverclocked 2y ago
  Given your username, I have to ask. Do you ever meow on guard? On a serious note, what are your views on privatization of ATC? The one airport in my region that I know is privatized has a horrible reputation among pilots and DPEs alike.

petermcneeley 2y ago

There shouldnt even be pilots much less air traffic controllers. This is the same as the people that think subways need human drivers.

meowster 2y ago
Air Traffic Controller here. Tour an ATC facility and talk with them. You'll see why it can't be completely automated.
- petermcneeley 2y ago
  Yes but 99% probably could be. Go to Vancouver sometime. All the subways are automated. But in rare cases they need to be driven remotely and every few years they need to be driven by a human.
  - tnmom 2y ago
    ATC is a unique thing - if you’re interested, suggest listening to the https://www.opposingbases.com/ https://www.opposingbases.com/ podcast. It’s eye opening how much complexity they deal with, and how frequent the edge cases really are.
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    It's the same issue that self-driving cars have. 99% can be automated. The remaining 1% is a bitch, and life-threatening. I've heard piloting described as 99% moments of boredom, followed by 1% moments of sheer terror. If you actually could program a computer to anticipate all of the possible scenarios in that 1%, it'd be good to take the sheer terror out of the equation. But it's frightening because those are the moments when something has gone wrong and normalcy no longer applies, and you need to apply collected knowledge, wisdom, and experience to save your life and the lives of your passengers.
    - petermcneeley 2y ago
      It is actually not like self driving at all. In the self driving case the nominal situation requires hard AI. In aircraft the nominal situation does not require hard AI, only the emergency situation. If aircraft did not have mechanical failures the nominal situation is really well defined. The ATC job is even more nominal since they are not actually dealing with the mechanics of the plane. I would guess that you could make a video game that covers 99.999% of all ATC jobs and you could undoubtly with enough effort also program an AI to cover this.

deleted 2y ago

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ggernov 2y ago

Just stop hiring incompetent people in maintenance departments. Planes are falling out of the sky primarily because of bad maintenance and poorly developed procedures to conduct maintenance. Pilot standards also need to be increased. Everyone doesn't "deserve" to be a pilot. I don't care about their race or gender, I just care that they can pilot the plane in stressful conditions without error compared to pilot quality when we had the safest flight records.

tnmom 2y ago
What incidents are you looking at that make you think pilot standards are too low? In the US?

chasingthewind 2y ago

I'm hesitant to comment because while I'm an aviation fan I really know very little. I subscribe to VAS Aviation and Blancolirio where a lot of these incidents are reported and analyzed and one thing that continually strikes me is that the architecture of airport runways seems like an incredible arsenal of footguns. The way the runways intersect each other and parallel each other creating the need for complex and sometimes dangerous intersections seems like such an unfortunate and possibly unsolvable problem. Airports are forced by economic and logistical necessity into spaces that are really too small to solve these issues with better layout and that means the solutions "have" to be found in process or technology. I've encountered constraints like this so often in software but mercifully I've never worked on anything with life or death consequences.

bombcar 2y ago
The parallel nature is caused by the realities of wind; you don’t want to be doing crosswind activities unless forced to. Even airports with “unlimited” space have parallel runways and resulting taxiways.
dghlsakjg 2y ago
Being a pilot: not that hard in reality. There are even uncontrolled airports with intersecting runways. Cars have a way harder time handling red lights than ATC does dealing with runway crossings, at least from a number of dead people point of view.

Slava_Propanei 2y ago

[dead]

financetechbro 2y ago

Listening to the radios is an eye opening experience. There was a case in NYC recently where one pilot was given clearance for takeoff and right after three different planes were given permission to cross the same runway, forcing the pilot to abort the takeoff. Pretty wild stuff

meowster 2y ago
> three different planes were given permission to cross the same runway Four planes. As someone else said: if it was too foggy for the pilot to see the traffic, it would have been an unfathomable disaster. Although I wonder if the momentum would have dissipated by the time it got to the fourth plane.

piloto_ciego 2y ago

Aviation is fine. I was a pilot for for a living during my 20s. Aviation is extremely safe, it’s a good model for safety (checklists, no fault error reporting, etc). The problem is the push to put more airplanes through the system, and the bottlenecks to the system. Every few weeks you see a video about some near miss in at EWR or LGA. We need to simply tolerate less efficiency or hire more people. Also, and this is a really controversial take, as an AI adjacent person now that I’m not in the cockpit, I think LLMs and AI are a natural solution to some of these problems… I see ATC getting automated before SICs are.

BWStearns 2y ago
One thing that stands out to me is that most (all?) of the near-incidents people are worried about are aircraft are Part 135 ATP ops. GA will always be mildly dangerous, and increasingly they'll just not let you near a Class B in your clapped out 150, and that's fine. It's too expensive to retrofit the trainer fleet. But the big guys _all_ have working ADSB/other safety equipment and have operators that would be able to add new mandatory equipment in a reasonable time period. I wonder if they could pick up the pace in terms of safety tech adoption for 135s to relieve the bottlenecking.

asne11 2y ago

> the air traffic control system is not inherently governmental. Doing what Paul did for 30 years is not an inherently governmental activity. It's safety critical. That's absolute nonsense, I'm wondering what angle she's playing here. If it's safety critical, such as ambulances and functioning stoplights, that's what makes it governmental. > You can't make those kind of investments if you're a government agency, you have to pay for things up front, nor can you make the kind of incremental improvements that air traffic control needs. Sure you can. Look at healthcare.gov, or TSA.

NoNameHaveI 2y ago

Related: https://dailyegyptian.com/117259/news/set-up-to-fail-air-traffic-control-shortage-casts-clouds-over-siu-aviation-program/ https://dailyegyptian.com/117259/news/set-up-to-fail-air-tra... Hard to train new pilots when they refuse to fly due to distrust in ATC.

paulddraper 2y ago

"Aviation system" = "Air traffic control" Which...is a subset.