So are we just going to ignore COVID as an impact on the most recent staffing issues?
Of course not. Multiple things can be (and are) factors at the same time. I'm not asking people to ignore COVID, I'm asking them to not ignore this.
Readit NewsTraceWoodgrains commented on The FAA’s Hiring Scandal tracingwoodgrains.com/p/t... · Posted by u/firebaze
TraceWoodgrains commented on The FAA’s Hiring Scandal tracingwoodgrains.com/p/t... · Posted by u/firebaze
I'm going to assume you mean "academy" attrition for sake of conversation.
You have a wave of much higher attrition after 2013 because....You have a lot more trainees on fewer trainers.
That means more load is placed on fewer trainers resulting on page 45 where you spike from 20% to 25% ratio.
Combine that with the very valid point that this is not CIT folks but qualifying citizens being admitted, you can see the impact of having a 56% higher attrition rate!
Here's a bunch of plans to comb through for the full numbers. I don't have a spreadsheet off hand.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...
https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2021-11/FAA-Controll...
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...
Alas - my key point is this: the statement
> Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages? Likely yes."
may have been highly attributable in 2018 timeframe but the real culprit is just as likely the 2013 sequester - I'd caution to say any one cause is the reason but rather there is a combination between a shift in applicant pool, having to deal with a slight burst in retirements, recovering from sequester and revamped training processes. Heck - maybe even not having an administrator from 2017-2018 might have caused issues.
In the cold light of 2025 with impacts from COVID still reverberating, I'd doubt hiring practices as much as any other arbitrary reason.
When the methods of selection aren’t selective at all (the “qualified” bar on the AT-SAT only eliminated some 5% of candidates), “qualifying citizens” is a bit misleading.
Yes, academy attrition.
I don’t disagree that the 2013 sequester played some role, but to radically change hiring practices in the wake of the sequester and then blame radically higher washout rates primarily on the sequester doesn’t pass the sniff test.
My basic case is simple: when articles and reports considering the reasons haven’t even mentioned this massive change in hiring practices as one contributing factor, shifting to including this as a contributing factor is a genuinely major change, and while it would be convenient for people if it didn’t impact anything I don’t think you can disrupt the pipeline that much and then shrug and attribute all issues to other things. That just doesn’t make sense.
TraceWoodgrains commented on The FAA’s Hiring Scandal tracingwoodgrains.com/p/t... · Posted by u/firebaze
Here ya go:
Academy attrition on page 38.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...
This is really helpful. I take something different from it than you do (it looks like attrition starkly increases after 2014, in ways I'd strongly argue it's reasonable to attribute to the new hiring methods), but I'm grateful you posted it. Do you know if more complete/precise numbers are available anywhere (hiring counts, hiring+attrition, etc?
I'm aware of this but it leaves attrition to be inferred. https://www.natca.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/FY23-Staffi...
TraceWoodgrains commented on The FAA’s Hiring Scandal tracingwoodgrains.com/p/t... · Posted by u/firebaze
Those two questions are cherry-picked to imply the questionnaire was specifically designed to only let people pass who preformed badly academically. However there are several other questions that specifically ask for the applicant's average grades and anything less than an A grade will not give you any points.
The problem is that the test is completely arbitrary with no rhyme or reason to it, not that it was designed to select for candidates who preformed badly academically. Thus leading to the allegations it was designed specifically to only let people pass who were given the answers beforehand.
To clarify, I picked those two questions not to imply a focus on bad academic performance but because they are both a) absurd/arbitrary and b) the highest-weighted questions by far.
Hm, I'm disappointed that this was flagged. This is my third article that's been flagged here recently, after my FAA article a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39184451) and my deep dive into the backstory of a fight several months before that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37390961).
My older articles didn't get flagged and were often quite successful on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=tracingwoodgrains.med...https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32898573
I don't submit my own articles here but always appreciate when they reach the HN audience. I admit I find the system here quite opaque and have a hard time understanding what gets flagged and why. Is it because my articles often explore controversies and might get undue attention over some of the more technical content here? Is there some way I could reach out to someone for more info on why my articles keep getting flagged?
The author and I have discussed this elsewhere, but we had dramatically different experiences with competitive math, and I think part of the key is that he experienced it as a part of the college admissions grind, while I experienced it as an escape from the classroom to go do cool puzzles.
My major takeaway from his article was "The things we do in the high-stakes holistic admissions structure we've set up are insane" more than anything to do with competition math in specific.
How long until this gets flagged off the front page? Currently 07:34 San Francisco time, posted 21 minutes ago.
I’m always happy when my writing gets noticed here, but culture war–connected content has a natural edge in environments like this, so I respect the site’s commitment to manually deweighting things like this to keep the overall focus more technical. It looks like this article has had further spread on HN than the initial hoax, which is all I personally was really hoping, so I’m more than satisfied.
His name is public and visible on the archive page etc, but he is not prominent and at least deleted the thread rather than letting it continue to spread. I’d rather not unilaterally make this the defining moment in his public life long-term, so I’m keeping the name out of a Google-able permanent article.
Could this be a grievance studies[0] sort of arrangement? Was 'Mohamad' a real person or was he a sockpuppet for fringe research?
He’s real enough to have appeared as the first author on a couple of apolitical peer-reviewed publications in his field. I don’t know what possessed him to do this but he definitely looks to be real.