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Over 90% of U.S. airport towers are understaffed, data shows
- tayo42 2y agoFeel like I'm having deja vu in away. Didn't this exact problem blow up a couple years ago?
- bobthepanda 2y agoAir traffic controllers have basically been in shortage for the better part of two decades. The current situation is also because a large clump of controllers were hired after the Reagan administration broke the ATC strike in 1981, and that giant clump of people is now reaching retirement age at the same time.
- trashface 2y agoThat group has already retired. The retirement age for ATC is 56, so a 55 year old still working today would have been 11 in 1981. Certainly they were not hired at that time.
- bobthepanda 2y agoLike I said, the problem has been ongoing for the better part of two decades, and they never quite finished backfilling all of those.
- perihelions 2y agoThere's been a lot of reporting in their vein over the last couple years—both on the ATC staffing shortage, and the large number close-calls at airports (which some observers link to ATC staffing). I.e., https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/21/business/airline-safety-close-calls.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/21/business/airl... ("Airline Close Calls Happen Far More Often Than Previously Known" (2023)) - "But the most acute challenge, The Times found, is that the nation’s air traffic control facilities are chronically understaffed. While the lack of controllers is no secret — the Biden administration is seeking funding to hire and train more — the shortages are more severe and are leading to more dangerous situations than previously known." - "As of May, only three of the 313 air traffic facilities nationwide had enough controllers to meet targets set by the F.A.A. and the union representing controllers, The Times found. Many controllers are required to work six-day weeks and a schedule so fatiguing that multiple federal agencies have warned that it can impede controllers’ abilities to do their jobs properly." ... - "“The staffing shortage is beyond unsustainable. It has now moved into a phase of JUST PLAIN DANGEROUS,” one controller wrote to the F.A.A. last year in a confidential safety report that The Times reviewed." - "“Controllers are making mistakes left and right. Fatigue is extreme,” the report continued. “The margin for safety has eroded tenfold. Morale is rock bottom. I catch myself taking risks and shortcuts I normally would never take.”"
- hwillis 2y agoA couple years ago the transportation secretary tried to get funding to hire 2,000 more controllers. Congress said no https://thehill.com/regulation/transportation/4617992-buttigieg-us-needs-air-traffic-controllers/ https://thehill.com/regulation/transportation/4617992-buttig...
- rsanek 2y agowhy is this even something that the gov needs to worry about directly? why don't they just force airports / airlines to have to pay for these guys like in UK, Canada, or Germany?
- hwillis 2y agoAll 3 of those countries have separate organizations employing the air traffic controllers. DFS is 100% owned by the government, NATS is formerly a public service and now half privately owned, and Nav Canada was established by the ANS act. The FAA has a $5.20 tax per flight segment per passenger and a 7.5% ticket tax. The budget set by congress limits how much the FAA can spend on air traffic control, and the surplus (there is a surplus) goes into the AATF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_and_Airway_Trust_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_and_Airway_Trust_Fund This is a direct cost of American austerity.
- tomohawk 2y agoHundreds of qualified applicants were denied jobs through a "Biographical Assessment" that you can take yourself: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/ https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/ Spend a bit of time taking it and it's clear what at least one reason for this shortage is.
- n1b0m 2y agoIt was dropped in 2018
- perihelions 2y agoThen it's topical for understanding the makeup of ATC controllers right now, isn't it? The impact of hiring decisions in 2018 would continue through their retirement age in the 2050's. We still talk about Reagan's mass-firing of ATC controllers, and that event was in *1981*. The impact is multi-generational and is still very visible.
- fzeroracer 2y agoI'm pretty sure what's more topical is Trump telling all ATC controllers to leave, immediately. Rather than a shitty test that was used for a few years and then phased out.
- BowBun 2y agoThis is disengenious. They received the same deferred resignation email that every other federal employee got. They weren't told to 'leave immediately' nor was anyone else, they were offered an option to leave or stay on for 9 months, with pay. I'm getting frustrated at 'my people' seemingly just making things up on this topic. Edit: Also linking another comment where ATC was literally told they're not in the offer... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42899944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42899944
- 2y ago
- sylware 2y agoIf they are understaff (namely giga honest, super solid competent people for air traffic ground control), you have to reduce air traffic as it is way too dangerous. For this kind of staff, it is not just a matter of "training", it is way more demanding.
- giantg2 2y agoOr you modernize the system (not just tech but potentially the procedures). Kind of stupid to increase air traffic and traffic density over decades and just expect the old systems to scale.
- taeric 2y agoModernizing a system while it is in use is high risk. Absurdly high risk. Might still be needed, but is not a cheap or quick thing.
- robocat 2y agoThe implication is some sort of greenfield change-everything-at-once idea? There is no choice but to do the alternative: modify and modernise all our critical systems piecemeal over decades while they are running, covered by the business cliche "We are building the plane, while flying it." We all naively desire (especially politicians) the software concept of the big rewrite, the version 2, project phoenix, Second-System Syndrome. With development experience we learn both the psychological pull of the concept and we learn why it is so hard to do successfully. It always seems so simple how to fix societal systems we have no experience with. Successful systems slowly improve, slowly introduce and prove new ideas, slowly accrete changes: we accept the costs of vestigial path-dependent aspects and technical debt. One of the incredible learning experiences of developing software systems is that it is a huge melting pot of different techniques that are iterated quickly (fast parallel evolution and proving) and the knowledge diffuses between people and teams and organisations. The waterfall model is rarely used! I believe we are now seeing those skills and techniques be applied to other system domains - especially high growth businesses.
- Avicebron 2y agoOk? So we have tons of US citizens who want to be in high-skilled high-paying professions, bring more people into training programs and staff them? I assume people working high skilled high wage professions spend more on things like housing and food and other things -> economy boost. Where is the hangup?
- thoroughburro 2y agoThe hangup is that the current administration is asking them to resign en masse, not hiring more.
- Avicebron 2y agoAvoiding politics completely, so the FAA has been systematically understaffed for decades because of this current administration?
- fzeroracer 2y agoThe current admin no, but the current party yes. Politics cannot be ignored because this is the result of downstream effects from the Reagan era. Firing everyone during the 1981 strike fucked up hiring for a decade. Rehiring a bunch of people all at once meant that they all would have the same general retirement timing (20-30 years). The bush era had some fucking around with the FAA as well. COVID accelerated retirements and now Trump is demanding the fee that remain retire as well. So naturally the end result is a complete lack of staffing and a poor training pipeline for a job few people want to do.
- throw0101a 2y ago> Avoiding politics completely, so the FAA has been systematically understaffed for decades because of this current administration? The former FAA administrator was pushed out (by Musk) after one year of a five-year term. FAA employees were encouraged to resign (https://www.opm.gov/fork https://www.opm.gov/fork). The current (or previous) administration is not to blame for the current situation, but the current administration is certainly causing a lot of uncertainly and chaos unnecessarily.
- devit 2y agoSeems like it can be at least mostly automated.
- nradov 2y agoIt only seems that way to people who know nothing about aviation.
- tuatoru 2y agoNow generalise this to education, and healthcare, and logistics.
- brookst 2y agoI don’t disagree with your implication, but let’s be honest that the incidence of totally novel, urgent, life-or-death situations is a lot lower in education than air traffic control. At least outside the US.
- magwa101 2y ago[dead]
- PapaPalpatine 2y agoYou’re probably right. I’m sure we can at least mostly automate way our judges too. /s Not every field needs automation.
- rsanek 2y agowith mandatory minimum sentencing, judges have in many cases already been automated
- lawn 2y agoJust replace them with an LLM and reap the reward!
- greenie_beans 2y ago
- cozzyd 2y agoThose personnel numbers don't really make sense to me. Like, sure I believe O'Hare has 57 trained ATC staff, but Kalamazoo has 47 while La Guardia has 29, all at comparable percentages of trained staffing. Something is off... It's good to see that both Chicago airports are at full staffing though (when counting staff in training ).
- kevin_b_er 2y agoKalamazoo is the result of consolidation. The graph incorrectly just lists them as "Kalamazoo Tower", but its also a TRACON facility. They're handling multiple airports remotely. In 2016, this was planned to be Grand Rapids, Lansing, Muskegon, Flint, and Saginaw, though I'm not sure all of them were consolidated.
- mikeyouse 2y agoI believe just Flint, Saginaw, Lansing and Kalamazoo were consolidated when I last looked in 2022. For people who are unaware, Kalamazoo has one of the most substantial aviation programs in the country in town at WMU so centralizing there with a large staff is a great opportunity to cross train.
- blantonl 2y agoIf there is one thing I've learned in the past few days, acutely so, is that the vast majority of people do not understand the sheer complexity of what it takes to have an aviation industry.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 9283409232 2y agoPeople don't understand the complexity of anything and why it cost so much, including the moron trying to make cuts.
- staplers 2y agoA society accustomed to "magic pills" tends to think this way. Feels like a marketing/PR issue where every complexity or downside is hidden.
- brookst 2y agoAlso speaks to a society more focused on blame than improvement. Why fix things when every problem further proves your opponents are bad people?
- duxup 2y agoAnd it applies to just suddenly hiring a bunch of people. There’s no magic solution.
- duxup 2y agoI think “sense of urgency”, “trouble shooting”, “understanding what is influencing other people’s actions” and even the ability to run a sort of “run a mental simulation and anticipate second order effects” are uncommon skills. I worked with a good technical support team that worked on some high end equipment, and regardless of education the ability to troubleshoot could be found regardless and … in spite of education. In my current coding role I find myself saying “I don’t care if he used an html tag wrong, he anticipated a problem with several tickets and avoided them.” Just the will / ability to do that is so valuable.
- martythemaniak 2y ago[flagged]
- mrbombastic 2y agoI remember when we just used to call “mind viruses” ideas
- ImHereToVote 2y agoMemes are ideas that spread for the benefit of the meme.
- ModernMech 2y agoNo the word we used to have for mind virus was “cult”.
- rightbyte 2y ago> flagging and/or downvoting this idiotic comment will make it disappear from this site You can enable 'Show dead' in settings.
- brookst 2y ago[flagged]
- cubano 2y agoI find it almost completely mind boggling that with all the breathless new coverage on the "incredible shortage of qualified tower personnel", I have yet to hear even one mention of what I find to be the elephant in the room. Uhhh...why not use AI to start controlling the airports and airplanes? Talk about an app that, to me at least, seems an almost trivial use of its abilities and I'm sure that an AI could be trained in a very short period of time that could outperform a roomful of overaged, distracted humans...right? Yes of course there is no way I'm the first to think of this...but just the fact that here it is day 3 or so, and literally NOT ONE MENTION ANYWHERE in the media about the potential for AI to safely land and direct all these flying things.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- seattle_spring 2y agoMaybe because it'd be unwise to put an algorithm in control of human safety when it can't even tell that 9.9 is larger than 9.11?
- eCa 2y agoWould you say handling air traffic control is easier than setting up a LAMP server?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- linuxftw 2y agoIt seems like there are shortages in every field according to the media. Shortage in tech workers, shortage in doctors and nurses, shortage of air traffic controllers. Shortages all around. Here's how to instantly cure shortages of ATCs: Each airline is responsible for staffing N ATCs per scheduled flight at a given airport, calculated on a yearly basis.
- esalman 2y agoThis is a bad idea. If implemented airlines will shut down services to small and less profitable airports and routes. It will only negatively affect passengers.
- linuxftw 2y agoAirlines already shut down service to small and less profitable airports, nothing is preventing them from doing just that. Of course, other Airlines are free to step in and schedule flights there. The average cost per seat might go up, but so will the number of ATCs.
- esalman 2y agoThe government already pays the airlines to keep services alive where it's not profitable. Airlines have even less incentives to take responsibility for ATC staffing.
- Groxx 2y agoSo the solution is "infinite money" or "shut most of them down". I agree that both will solve the staffing problem, but neither seem particularly practical.
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoWe could just triple ATC training in the military and take leads from there. Airlines don’t have the correct incentives especially at airports which have light commercial and heavy educational traffic
- buckle8017 2y agoIt would probably have helped if they didn't turn away thousands of qualified white male candidates. Instead of simply biasing their hiring based on race. The FAA brilliantly denied anybody who scored too low on their "compatibility" matrix, presumably as a legal dodge. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/faa-embroiled-in-lawsuit-alleging-it-turned-away-1000-applicants-based-on-race-despite-staffing-woes/ar-AA1ybHmH https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/faa-embroiled-in-lawsuit-a...
- quest88 2y agoThanks for the article, it provides no evidence of anything you said.
- brookst 2y agoThanks for saying that. I kept looking through the article and wondering where the evidence was.
- buckle8017 2y agoIt's the same thing as Jim Crow era voting tests.[0] Here take the test yourself and tell me it's not rigged. https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/ https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/ [0]https://allthatsinteresting.com/voting-literacy-test https://allthatsinteresting.com/voting-literacy-test
- quest88 2y agoI have no idea what your argument is at this point. You claimed one thing without any evidence, and now you're saying it's like something else. Please state your point with evidence.
- russdill 2y agoWhat I get from this article is that becoming a flight controller is a very rigorous selective process.
- gotoeleven 2y agoPlease just entertain a hypothetical: If it turns out that the FAA was hiring much more slowly than it needed to be because it was unable to reach its DEI goals, can we all agree that we should stop doing DEI for important things?
- brookst 2y agoSure, if you’ll also entertain a non-hypothetical that DEI does not mean hiring quotas where you refuse to fill open spots, it means proactively reaching out to find talent in non-traditional areas (e.g. doing a job fair at an urban vocational school in addition to the usual ones at mostly-white colleges). And, if for some reason it turns out that the FAA was doing a terrible job of DEI and somehow was trying to meet quotas, can we agree that we should fix the implementation, not just throw up our hands and say “I guess these jobs are whites-only”?
- tredre3 2y ago> if you’ll also entertain a non-hypothetical that DEI does not mean hiring quotas where you refuse to fill open spots I'm sure this is true about the FAA, I have no reason to doubt you, but quotas are a very real part of DEI in other sectors and slots do stay open until they find a suitable quota-fitting candidate.
- beej71 2y agoI don't doubt that some quotas exist somewhere. I just don't know where and have never encountered them in any of my jobs and they're probably illegal. Our DEI training at my current work is "always hire the most qualified person for the job". And that's what it was at my previous job, as well.
- brandonmenc 2y ago> DEI does not mean hiring quotas where you refuse to fill open spots, it means proactively reaching out to find talent in non-traditional areas I've worked at companies that do exactly this with quotas of a minimum number of underrepresented candidates who must be interviewed before filling the position, even if the positions all end up going to white or asian men. It can take a very long time to fill a position under those rules. I don't think this is a bad policy in principle, but an unintended consequence is often understaffing in the short to medium term.
- verzali 2y agoThe big question every one seems to be ignoring is whether air travel in the US should now be considered dangerous. If ATC is understaffed or filled with unqualified people, then how is any flight safe? Why would anyone get on a plane unless they really have to and have no other option?
- gruez 2y ago>whether air travel in the US should now be considered dangerous Air travel is orders of magnitude safer than the alternatives. According to the first result on google: "In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles" Even if the current administration's cuts made planes several times dangerous, it'd still be preferable than the alternative. The same applies to the recent panic about 737 MAX.
- citadel_melon 2y agoAccording to your own figures, if plane travel gets even just 200x less safe, it would become less safe than driving. I mention this not because I know how much less safe flying is going to become, but because you don’t either. 200x less safe may be relatively easy for us to achieve if flying fatalities are as low as I believe they are. Moreover, I’m not sure if I give into the framing of your figures. According to google, a plane ride on average goes 500 miles, while an average car trip is 11 miles. I am not sure if I’m doing the math correctly, but I’m pretty sure an average plane ride is thus less safe than an average car trip. Sure, you can argue that a road trip is less safe than the same flight distance as a plane — and I don’t think I would even disagree with making that the standard — but I think saying flying is safer across the board would require narrowing yourself to a more subjective definition for “safer” than your comment suggests.
- Levitz 2y agoBecause air travel is ridiculously safe. The incident with the helicopter and the plane is making the rounds precisely because of how insanely improbable it is, and even then from what we know, chances are the error was in the helicopter, not the tower.
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoWhy are they not being trained for free after passing aptitude tests? It sounded like people still needed to pay for their college to even get to the ATC specific training.
- RandomBacon 2y agoI'm not sure I understand your comment. ATC is paid - they receive on-the-job training. College degrees specializing in ATC are not required.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- silexia 2y agoThe far left air traffic controllers union has negotiated many ridiculous restrictions and absurdly high pay rates, causing a major problem in staffing.