If 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.
They won't cut traffic for the same reason they are understaffed: money. Raise pay until you have enough staff.
It's not always that simple, but sometimes it is. Not everyone could do it, but a lot of people could. You just have to pay them to attract them from more lucrative jobs (which includes training them to do it).
Instead they'll pay as little as they can, and occasionally pay to replace an aircraft.
ATC here (opinions are my own, not of the FAA, etc)
Pay is a huge part of it, so it really is that simple.
Qualified people are choosing not to even apply anymore because the pay is no longer competitive with other high-paying jobs that don't destroy you mentally and physically, or have a complicated hiring process like ATC does.
I don't know for sure, or what the official policy is. There are people that took stimulants as kids (due to parents getting them an ADHD diagnosis) but have stopped by their early 20s. And that is probably way more common now than when I was a kid in the 80s, when not even the obviously hyperactive kids appeared to be getting any meds.
Maybe if they apply for ATC they just don't disclose that, but I imagine if they do, it will be scrutinized.
Median pay is higher than my pay, and it looks like equal to median dev pay. But why would I want the stress and lower flexibility? I hate my current job and still wouldn't be interested in ATC for the higher pay.
The sense of doing something useful? Maybe it gets lost, but I think that going home knowing that you were part of safely getting people and aircraft where then need to go would be fulfilling. Also very stressful though, knowing what the consequences of a mistake can be.
Developers can always fix their mistakes. Very, very few would even even possibly result in the loss of life. I'd think pay for controllers should be much higher, but like anything it is subject to economics. If people are willing to do it for $X, then that is what it will pay.
Frankly the pay should be comparable to commercial pilots in the current market. Or more.
Funding sadly is probably better handled as a tax on the people rather than the industry simply because ATCs protect more than just commercial crew and passengers, and more than just their home country.
Which pilots? Rookie controllers already get paid more per hour than most general aviation flight instructors, or first officers in regional airlines. Pay for captains at major airlines is quite good, but few pilots ever reach that level.
I think you’ve found the root issue. There is no short term fix. And our current governmental setup isn’t capable of handling medium to long term problems. It has been this way for quite a while, so this issue isn’t new.
Long-term political will isn’t there, so if the problem can’t be fixed quickly, it’s as if there is no possible solution.
This may be true, but it's not properly reflective of this particular situation. While it's true that it takes 2-3 years to fully certify, the initial academy (a few months long) still has limited spots.
ATC staffing problems did not just appear this week. The FAA is limited by Congress in how to deploy its budget towards recruitment.
We've known since the initial post-COVID travel bump that the FAA was short on controllers - these could have been addressed potentially as early as late 2022.
Infact a 2-3 year timeframe is absolutely short enough to count as "short term". Thats within an election cycle.
The set of active controllers isn't static: people come and people go. If you raise pay right now, current, skilled controllers will be more inclined to stay, while new controllers who've been training for the last 2.9 years join. Raising pay helps combat attrition, which increases the population.
You can't neglect something, then turn down fixes because they won't happen fast enough. Fast enough wasn't a concern during the period of neglect, so a sense of urgency is playacting. The optimal solution is to pay properly, and if temporary things have to be done (rewarding people for not retiring, paying a premium to develop/import some controllers quickly) then so be it.
What a "3-year training process" and the fact that accidents come at random does is create a grace period for profiteering. They would neither get a fast enough return on investments in staff, nor see fast enough losses from disasters resulting from staffing neglect, to see any problem with both not investing in staff and with finding savings in neglect.
Problems during the transition period between starting to do the right thing and when you will see the effects of that thing are good problems to have. They go away by themselves.
> Fast enough wasn't a concern during the period of neglect, so a sense of urgency is playacting.
I can’t agree with that at all. I would never treat a crisis as less urgent because other people in the past did not treat the contributory factors urgently enough.
Lack of urgency in the past is a sunk cost. It’s silly to evaluate urgency today on that basis.
So I think if the US gave out good secondary benefits, a green card and good pay for experienced candidates, the lead time would be far shorter.
Sure, you'd need to train such foreign candidates in US regulations, but that ought to be a far shorter route. And I'm sure the US could afford to get half of the ATCs from $FOREIGN_COUNTRY with such a proposition. (For countries where a desire to live in the US is common, that is).
While that is totally not done wrt that foreign country: 1. Money+employment conditions could alleviate the problem significantly; 2. something flamebaity.
If it is 3-year training process is it not the previous administration that is to blame? Surely they would have trained enough people. And it is not like huge amount of controllers were fired just now?
And while controllers were not fired (we think), apparently most/all of them got an email saying they may be laid off at any time without notice, so they should accept buyouts and quit[1], which might impact absenteeism and commitment.
Pay isn't enough, you also have to give the plausible impression that their job will still exist in a few years, and they won't be laid off on the whim of a shadow president.
I'm not sure how relevant that is to air traffic control. They don't work from home, they are heavily performance and standards based to even get a chance at joining, and there is no clear reason to assume to automatically exclude the air traffic control portion of the FAA from what's described in #3.
The US federal government is one of the largest employers in the world (or the largest, depending exactly how you decide to measure), what is relevant to one area isn't necessarily going to be relevant to every area.
Getting rid of the WFH is just the easy thing. They are planning to gut the federal workforce generally.
That may be less sledgehammer-like when it comes to people whose jobs are obviously critical. But everyone else is on the chopping block, including quite a few whose absence will be noticed when people die.
I'm not sure I'm any less concerned than you about other areas of government, I'm asking why we should think these cuts apply to the people working in airport towers instead of the kinds areas Trump usually focuses on.
I voted for Jill Stein, so don't mistake me here, but the head administrator resigned a full week prior to this memo (rather than wait a few weeks to presumably be replaced normally) and an acting administrator has been put in since the memo. How is it this is evidence the memo will affect things when the exact opposite order of operations has occurred around it?
If one wants to complain about the perceived impacts the current administration as a whole will be having... well sure, there's always room for that. I'm talking about why the memo linked above doesn't seem related to the conversation it's in reply to though.
> How is it this is evidence the memo will affect things when the exact opposite order of operations has occurred around it?
The FAA workers received this memo the morning after the DC crash: I'm sure it wasn't great for morale.
The FAA administrator that got pushed out my Mush was one year into a five year term: I'm not sure why he had to go. (Though he was in charge when the FAA fined SpaceX $600k for safety violations: related?)
That's never going to happen. Americans have reached the "drown it in a bathtub" phase of their contempt for government. All of the air traffic controllers will be replaced by ChatGPT agents before more are hired, much less paid a cent more. And if the planes crash, they crash.
Or 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.
They accept public comments so all of the armchair aviation experts on HN should probably send them an email and explain how they can solve all the problems by connecting ChatGPT to a controller console.
To modernize a running system, you have to duplicate everything so that you can someday do a switchover.
For commerce tech, you switch, see what breaks, switch back and adjust for next try. You may have lost some sales. But probably just inconvenienced people.
When doing travel systems, something breaking is likely a lot of deaths.
A wide variety of decades-old aircraft, and even newer aircraft are often modernized versions of ancient aircraft models. All of them built and operated with the motto "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", because every change brings risk (and costs money).
There was also a lot of resistance to the idea that every aircraft should broadcast its position, heading, etc. because of privacy concerns. And as long as there are holdouts the tower can't rely on the information being available
Large infrastructure projects always take decades.
Look at the railroad development in EU for example. You have to invent a lot of tech (signaling, communication between trains, interoperability with old systems), build a lot of infrastructure, train a lot of people and roll it out at scale with the goal of zero accidents.
Yeah, but some of the next generation upgrades have already been successfully tested at some facilities and it's just a problem of updating the rest. Sure it will take years, but it shouldn't take a decade after successful testing in the field.
So AI has come a long way since NextGen was conceptualized. Training an AI on the historical flight activity for an airport seems .... doable? Would it be better than human controllers? We know it would not be subject to fatigue or emotional stress, and the domain is so limited that hopefully hallucinations would not be a problem.
How realistic is it to have ATC performed by an AI?
> How realistic is it to have ATC performed by an AI?
Not very. For safety-critical systems, you probably want something deterministic, and doesn't break when faced with novel situations.
Solvers are probably a better solution than ML approaches, but they can't capture every possible constraint, such as airplane that can only make left-handed turns because of equipment failure.
> For safety-critical systems, you probably want something deterministic, and doesn't break when faced with novel situations.
Humans are not deterministic and can break for many reasons. It's not plausible that an AI could handle "route this aircraft for landing without any right turns" ?
I'm not sure this is something that is solved by tech. It sounds like they simply don't have enough staff, whether that a budget problem or hiring problem IDK. The article mentions they have a 50% reduction in new hires which either says it's hard to be competent, the job is too demanding, or both.
They had 1 tower with 1 operator and no redundancy at a fairly busy airport, which is definitely concerning.
Your comment assumes the current system can be scaled indefinitely. But you also acknowledge that we can't currently fill the staffing. I also explicitly called out that the modernization might not be tech changes but procedure changes (realistically it would likely be procedure changes made possible through tech).
Doing something to distribute information differently could result in redundancy such that if the commercial craft have a 1-3 mile ADS-B view around them, they can check that ATC isn't giving them bad instructions and that others are following directions.
> Your comment assumes the current system can be scaled indefinitely.
Why couldn't it be? We need fewer ATC than we need pilots, by a long shot. The actual requested new hires for ATC is in the range of 2k (with 1k expected to stay on staff).
With roughly a 120k salary, and assuming all 2k stay on-board that's what, an additional $200mil needed to fully fund?
Meanwhile, the airline industry had a $30b net profit, so it doesn't look like this is even something that'd bankrupt the industry if we taxed them to cover the costs of ATC. It's a 1% tax that's needed.
Even with a super duper fancy modernized system, we'd still want towers staffed sufficiently. Having just 1 person there is a problem even if everything is super modernized. When an issue comes up that the system can't or isn't handling well that's 1 person to make all the calls. Hopefully 2 things aren't happening and hopefully they don't need or want a second opinion.
As for hiring competent people, the DC metro has 6.3 million people. I find it really hard to believe there's not 3 more in the area that could handle being an ATC operator.
And it's not like we don't already have 99% of the existing buildings, infrastructure, and computers already setup. It's literally just the personnel that's lacking.
"I find it really hard to believe there's not 3 more in the area that couldn't handle being an ATC operator."
They might be capable, but why would they want to?
"Why couldn't it be?"
Things like coordination and communication in high traffic environments don't scale well. Finding efficiencies in the procedures and systems can eliminate potential miscommunication and missed handoffs.
"And it's not like we don't already have 99% of the existing buildings, infrastructure, and computers already setup. It's literally just the personnel that's lacking."
Actually only some airports have been upgraded while others are waiting. Do you think another person would have prevented this incident? From the recordings and facts so far, it doesn't seem like it.
In the leaked ATC recording, the display is showing a collision alert before the impact. It just doesn't have any capability to do anything about them, it has to rely on the air traffic controller to resolve the issue.
You could argue that helicopters, being very nimble craft, should have ADS-B receivers and provide display and sound their own collision warnings to their pilots. That's perfectly possible, I just don't think it's mandated
This is a nearly perfect problem for tech. We solve and automate very similar problems in other contexts at scale but FAA is extremely conservative about tech.
The 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.
They're working on multiple technical upgrades already, and some airports have been upgraded. I think better information distribution is one thing. Large craft could have ADS-B (or ATC's view) tracking of a 1-3 mile bubble displayed to them. This would add a check to being blindly told what to do and blindly trusting that others are doing what they're told. You could change certain procedures such as the military having one pilot use NVG while the other not when flying in high traffic and high illumination airspace. No reason we can't add better sensors to planes when you think about all the collision detection we are adding in cars. I'm sure there are many other things that can be changed as well. Some of it's the pace. Stuff that's already been piloted and shown to be effective is still taking forever to roll out at the other airports.
> Large craft could have ADS-B tracking of a 1-3 mile bubble displayed to them. This would add a check to being blindly told what to do and blindly trusting that others are doing what they're told.
TCAS shows nearby aircraft on a map. It generates a Traffic Alert (TA) to warn of nearby aircraft when certain parameters are met. If they get closer then it generates a Resolution Advisory (RA) which gives climb/descend instructions to avoid a collision. RAs are disabled below 1000 feet.
So there's already tracking on a map that's available to the pilots. During landing, pilots are looking outside and not glued to their instruments.
The real issue is trying to cram too much aircraft in such a small space and time.
Yeah, so similar to what I said, the transponder didn't work with that system as that article speculates the UH-60 didn't have it. My suggestion was that you could display what ATC has, hence the data distribution part of my comment. But I guess we could just accept what the article tells us that it would be too dangerous to display that info at lower altitudes and allow pilots to make the call and that we just have to live with these incidents then...
What led you to that belief? Air travel is one of the safest ways to get from here to there, and it’s widely enough used that clearly not very many people think it is too dangerous to use.
For this kind of staff, it is not just a matter of "training", it is way more demanding.