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.
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.
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.
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.
I assume it the same that also allows for age cut off for military. If I remember correctly, I enlisted young, got out and no plan to go back. 32 is the age cut off to enlisting. Prior service gets like a 2-3 year extension. What is surprising is that the cut off doesn't match the military's cut off.
Personally, I think safety-critical roles like ATC should be restricted to those who don’t take recreational psychoactives of any kind, alcohol included. This includes in their off hours.
Also from startup land. I only have points 1 and 3. The salary is laughable unless you have no other option. I can make more or less a personality test seem however I want it to seem so they're about as useful as Rorschach tests and polygraphy. The no ADHD or depression requirements: well fuck me, I'll stick to failing at foolish things rather than bother with an antiquated, potentially dangerous, soon to be automated orchestration process rife with opportunities for human error, and instead take a train or ship. It's arguably safer and definitely greener.
>and instead take a train or ship. It's arguably safer and definitely greener.
I'm pretty sure that cruise ships are definitely NOT greener than airplanes for intercontinental travel. (And trains are useless for such.)
Some kind of ocean-going passenger ship optimized for per-passenger fuel economy probably could beat jumbo jets, but we don't have those kinds of ships. And they wouldn't be very nice: they wouldn't have swimming pools, spas, nice restaurants, etc., and instead would put people into 3-high bunk beds in shared dormitory rooms.
>The salary is laughable unless you have no other option.
If it was just 100K would place one in the 77th percentile in the US.
The 135K mentioned is 87 percentile.
So hardly "laughable unless you have no other option".
Maybe "laughable unless you can have a job in software engineering" or in some similar bubble.
>The no ADHD or depression requirements: well fuck me, I'll stick to failing at foolish things rather than bother with an antiquated, potentially dangerous, soon to be automated orchestration process rife with opportunities for human error, and instead take a train or ship
> The controllers I know are PISSED about this because this was grossly ATC’s fault.
I'm personally terrified every-time I get on a plane. If you go to a restauraunt, your order coming out right and not making you sick depends on like, 3-4 systems/employees/supply chains/whatever. I'd say it's like 80% fine most of the time.
How many supply chains does a plane go through? 80% fine most cuts it for like... mild tech production incidents, screwed up food orders
Commercial air travel is the safest form of transportation in the history of the planet. If you’re terrified every time you get on a plane, you shouldn’t be using that intuition as a guide to policy.
I see and hear about the mistakes that my coworkers make that don't make the news, and I still have no problem flying. There are many layers of safety including the systems and pilots onboard the planes, and statistics still show it is still safer than driving.
Lowering standards is definitely the wrong way to go. Increasing pay to attract and keep good controllers is the better route.
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.
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.
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.
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 $100k a year, and business travelers comprise 75% of profits.
Oh, and it doesn't help that AOPA screams blue bloody murder any time anyone so much as suggests phasing out incredibly expensive, outdated technologies.
There are about 45.000 flights a day [1] in the US or 16 million a year, and that's just commercial, not including GA the 2010 dataset [2] is the newest I could find, it assumes 1/3rd for commercial, 1/3rd charters and the rest for GA, military and cargo, and I assume that this ratio has been roughly the same in the last decades.
So, a surcharge of 100 dollars per flight to fund FAA controllers would lead to a whopping 1.6 billion dollars a year while only adding less than 50 cents in ticket costs per passenger (assuming an average of 200 people per flight). Further income could be made with a lower surcharge for cargo and charters (let's say 50 dollars), and a very small one (let's say 10 dollars) for GA - assuming the above roughly 1/3rd split, you'd have an additional 800 million dollars from charters and cargo, and 160 million from GA, leading to a total of about 2.6 billion dollars.
Increase the fees to 200 dollars for commercial flights and you'd get 4.2 billion dollars - an about 20% increase of the FAA's current 19.8 billion dollars. That's a lot of money that even the most price-sensitive, high frequency fliers will not really feel. Assuming some rich executive flying twice a day for 250 working days a year, he'd pay 1000$ 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.
> A hobbyist pilot with his PPL needs a minimum of 24 hours and a checkride every two years
Citation needed on the first part. (The second part is also not a checkride, but rather a biennial flight review, for which a checkride will replace the need for, but a BFR will suffice.)
> 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.
The FAA is in fact a part of the US government, which self-funds its operations via taxes, such as the surcharge you've just suggested (and if you ever look at your flight tickets past the airport codes and flight times, you might notice that passengers already pay several taxes that fund the Department of Transportation and airports themselves).
The FAA has plenty of problems, but they are far from the only aviation regulatory body. I work on avionics and we have to deal with many authorities from around the world. I think the problem runs deeper than any single organization.
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.
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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.
If you don’t mind me asking while you’re here, how is the technology you’re working with? Do you feel you have all the technological advantage reasonably and safely possible for doing your job as comfortably as possible?
How much of the job relies on visual line of sight from the tower? Could any of the job be done remotely using information displays & high quality video feeds?
Link to the recent memo from FAA administrator Mike Whitaker, which includes links to a recent report on the risks introduced by controller fatigue, and other related documents.
Implementating ten hours between our shifts will cause our shifts to be worse overall, introducing more controller fatigue.
Large/busy facilities are 24/7, to accomplish staffing and give everyone regular schedules, we use what's called a "rattler": the controller starts their work week off with a late shift and ends their week with an early shift or midshift. Either we go opposite of that which gives us ZERO weekends, or we have weeks of straight days followed by weeks of straight mids which totally destroys our life outside of work.
The only way the ten hour down time could be reasonably implemented is if they make our shifts 6 hours instead of 8, and we work 30-hour weeks, but then the FAA would use that to say we shouldn't get a raise because we're working less.
The only reasonable way to fight fatigue is to increase the pay which will help staffing (attract tallent that does not washout of training, and keeps people from quitting or retiring early).
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Readit News
In particular:
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_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.
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.
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.
Let that sink in.
I wonder what legal exception allows this to be a requirement. This would never fly on a tech job posting.
given how popular weed has become in legalized states, this is quickly becoming a major issue for all of these lines of work
I'd rather my ATC is not smoking weed before arriving at the job (or worse, between breaks)...
Lots of studies of how it impairs reaction times, executive function, and motor control
(Of course the same goes for medicinally subscribeb anything that functions like that, including all kinds of pills)
I'm pretty sure that cruise ships are definitely NOT greener than airplanes for intercontinental travel. (And trains are useless for such.)
Some kind of ocean-going passenger ship optimized for per-passenger fuel economy probably could beat jumbo jets, but we don't have those kinds of ships. And they wouldn't be very nice: they wouldn't have swimming pools, spas, nice restaurants, etc., and instead would put people into 3-high bunk beds in shared dormitory rooms.
If it was just 100K would place one in the 77th percentile in the US.
The 135K mentioned is 87 percentile.
So hardly "laughable unless you have no other option".
Maybe "laughable unless you can have a job in software engineering" or in some similar bubble.
>The no ADHD or depression requirements: well fuck me, I'll stick to failing at foolish things rather than bother with an antiquated, potentially dangerous, soon to be automated orchestration process rife with opportunities for human error, and instead take a train or ship
Yeah, commercial flying isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Neither is ATC personnel.
And good luck getting to Europe or Latin America with a ship from the US. At least you'll have enough time to learn new hobbies.
Am I wrong to feel personally that lowering the hiring standards for ATC controllers is a step in the wrong direction?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjoDn8zQgb8
One of the top comments:
> The controllers I know are PISSED about this because this was grossly ATC’s fault.
I'm personally terrified every-time I get on a plane. If you go to a restauraunt, your order coming out right and not making you sick depends on like, 3-4 systems/employees/supply chains/whatever. I'd say it's like 80% fine most of the time.
How many supply chains does a plane go through? 80% fine most cuts it for like... mild tech production incidents, screwed up food orders
How does it work out for airplanes/ATC?
Lowering standards is definitely the wrong way to go. Increasing pay to attract and keep good controllers is the better route.
How many supply chains does your gallon of milk go through? Are 20% of gallons of milk spoiled, rotten, undrinkable, causing illness?
Nope.
Your entire arguments flies in the face of a mountain of empirical evidence of the safety of modern scale systems.
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-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"?
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.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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 $100k a year, and business travelers comprise 75% of profits.
Oh, and it doesn't help that AOPA screams blue bloody murder any time anyone so much as suggests phasing out incredibly expensive, outdated technologies.
So, a surcharge of 100 dollars per flight to fund FAA controllers would lead to a whopping 1.6 billion dollars a year while only adding less than 50 cents in ticket costs per passenger (assuming an average of 200 people per flight). Further income could be made with a lower surcharge for cargo and charters (let's say 50 dollars), and a very small one (let's say 10 dollars) for GA - assuming the above roughly 1/3rd split, you'd have an additional 800 million dollars from charters and cargo, and 160 million from GA, leading to a total of about 2.6 billion dollars.
Increase the fees to 200 dollars for commercial flights and you'd get 4.2 billion dollars - an about 20% increase of the FAA's current 19.8 billion dollars. That's a lot of money that even the most price-sensitive, high frequency fliers will not really feel. Assuming some rich executive flying twice a day for 250 working days a year, he'd pay 1000$ 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
[2] https://sos.noaa.gov/catalog/datasets/air-traffic/
[3] https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2023-03/F...
Citation needed on the first part. (The second part is also not a checkride, but rather a biennial flight review, for which a checkride will replace the need for, but a BFR will suffice.)
The FAA is in fact a part of the US government, which self-funds its operations via taxes, such as the surcharge you've just suggested (and if you ever look at your flight tickets past the airport codes and flight times, you might notice that passengers already pay several taxes that fund the Department of Transportation and airports themselves).
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/us/faa-to-increase-time-off-b...
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.)
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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.
How does "putting up with it" maintain or improve safety? Sounds like at best it would be a collateral effect.
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/statement-faa-administrator-mik...
Large/busy facilities are 24/7, to accomplish staffing and give everyone regular schedules, we use what's called a "rattler": the controller starts their work week off with a late shift and ends their week with an early shift or midshift. Either we go opposite of that which gives us ZERO weekends, or we have weeks of straight days followed by weeks of straight mids which totally destroys our life outside of work.
The only way the ten hour down time could be reasonably implemented is if they make our shifts 6 hours instead of 8, and we work 30-hour weeks, but then the FAA would use that to say we shouldn't get a raise because we're working less.
The only reasonable way to fight fatigue is to increase the pay which will help staffing (attract tallent that does not washout of training, and keeps people from quitting or retiring early).
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Even airports with “unlimited” space have parallel runways and resulting taxiways.
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.
Hard to train new pilots when they refuse to fly due to distrust in ATC.