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And you can't even get hired -- by law -- if you're over 30 years old. It's absurd. The FAA is complaining that they don't have enough ATCs, but have done absol
by otterley 2y ago
And you can't even get hired -- by law -- if you're over 30 years old. It's absurd. The FAA is complaining that they don't have enough ATCs, but have done absolutely nothing to broaden the hiring pool.
"We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"
- tjohns 2y agoThe 30 year maximum age for hiring is there to make sure controllers have enough time working to earn pension benefits before mandatory retirement. Hiring someone older would be setting them up for a very bad time later in life.
- jjk166 2y agoIf you can make an exception to the rules to force them to retire early, you can make an exception to the rules to let them earn pension benefits faster.
- Dylan16807 2y ago> Hiring someone older would be setting them up for a very bad time later in life. If they spend 20 years there, and get 20 years worth of pension, what's the problem? They can combine it with whatever savings and pensions they had before being hired at 36. Unless you're saying they don't get any pension, in which case stop screwing people over that way and cut the pension qualification to 5 years or less.
- photonbeam 2y agoThats logic doesn't fly for any other profession
- tjohns 2y agoIt's because no other profession has the combination of (1) forcing people out of a highly trained role so young (with no options to reuse those skills in any other roles - forcing folks to go have to go back to square one and get a new professional education to move anywhere else), along with (2) the peculiarities of a government pension. Unless you overhaul the way government workers earn retirement, or we decide that it's safe to employ older air traffic controllers, any other choice would be highly exploitative.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- light_hue_1 2y agoYes that logic applies. Any federal law enforcement position has this. For example, for the FBI or the secret service, you must enter by 37 and retire by 56.
- otterley 2y agoShouldn't it be up to the individual to determine whether they want to take that bargain? What about those people who did well enough in their previous careers for retirement not to be a concern and desire a new technical challenge that serves the public?
- TeaBrain 2y agoI've heard that the bottleneck is apparently the the number of students that can be admitted to the FAA Academy to be trained, not the number of applicants.
- QuarterReptile 2y agoI don't know what the state of the art is, but in the 2010s there was a huge mess where a 'biographical evaluation' test was required of ATC applicants, with the timing such that you took it after the FAA prep courses. The evaluation was thinly veiled racism, utterly uncorrelated with ATC performance, and one of the big outcomes was that anyone taking the prep courses was very likely to get weeded out by the biographical evaluation and thus suffer a total loss of his time and financial investment in the course. So ,that was another problem they were causing themselves in manning. Edited to add documentation: https://kaisoapbox.github.io/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/ https://kaisoapbox.github.io/projects/faa_biographical_asses...
- watwut 2y agoThe real reason is that pilots work in shitty conditions and their education is expensive. And skills are not transferable making it all pretty bad deal.
- otterley 2y agoWe're discussing ATCs, not pilots. (And pilots are frequently hired after the age of 30.)