One of the biggest problems with ATC hiring is that location assignments happen after trainees pass the academy. A lot of the academy graduates quit when they get an assignment they don't like. It's not like the military where they can force people. The trainee pay also sucks so the prospect of getting sent somewhere undesirable and then barely being able to afford it just isn't attractive. If they would hire based on location like they used to graduates wouldn't quit as often.
The other big problem is Obama changed the hiring test from testing intelligence to testing personality in a bid to increase diversity. There was a lawsuit over this. The effect was academy failure rates soared and because class sizes are fixed there was a shortfall in the number of graduates making it to towers to train.
There's a wave of ATC retirements now because they were all hired at the same time when Reagan fired the ATCs. Bad policy can have long lasting effects.
Most of the job is exceptionally routine to the point of being boring. In busier airspaces the most common stress is just associated with maintaining timing. Ironically the ground controllers face more of this problem than anyone. The further you get from the airport and it's class B airspace the easier it all gets.
Until an emergency or a conflict suddenly occurs. There's often very little you can do here other than quickly and clearly provide the necessary information and instructions to aid pilots in averting the disaster. The pilot is in full control during emergencies and you're simply there to give them anything they need. In a severe emergency and in an ATC center they're going to dedicate you to the emergency and bring another controller on to manage other planes in that airspace.
As the technology became available to give planes the ability to see and avoid each other with Traffic Advisories and automated Conflict Resolutions we made it mandatory equipment for passenger transports. We made it mandatory for pilots to obey this system with _higher priority_ than any prior or new instructions from ATC.
So you want people who think ahead, constantly prepare for conflicts, and have a reliable level of vigilance. So when the emergency happens they're situationally well prepared and capable of managing all available resources that their stress levels barely increase. A bad weather day with lots of cancelled flights and closed airports should be the highest stress factor they face in their careers.
The actual, as another poster provided, was a racist hiring procedure hidden in a test and apparently designed to rug-pull all the trainees paying their own way in training.
Apart from that, the intelligence is certainly needed, but with a heavy dose of spatial reasoning. the right kind of 'calm under pressure' is an excellent command of the details of ATC; anything else here is just lethal apathy.
Donald Trump is, indeed, personally signing the executive orders instructing the US government to do a lot of questionable things. Obama, by contrast, did not sign an executive order directing the FAA to hire unqualified air traffic controllers.
Of course, bureaucrats do stupid shit when they are attempting to please their masters, and this is a prime example. But that does not absolve them of their responsibility in dreaming it up and executing it.
This is a great post that lays it out. I suggest putting tribal politics aside and reading it, you can see in black and white that the FAA, under Obama, consciously weighed diversity over performance, and royally screwed the ATC hiring pipeline. "Pobody's nerfect"
Eh. The lawsuit is still ongoing (for 9 years now!). The article summarizes the plaintiffs' argument and conjecture as if it was a finding of fact which is a bit disingenuous.
> The other big problem is Obama changed the hiring test from testing intelligence to testing personality in a bid to increase diversity. There was a lawsuit over this.
It was even worse than that. What they actually did was write up a phony “personality test” and distribute the answer key to applicants who were members of preferred racial organizations.
In the actual OIG report, it seemed the person who gave "answers" to the test didn't actually have the behavioral test or the answer key.
He stated he stressed things like answering questions like an air traffic control "and we’re alpha personalities, we’re dominating, we don’t take no for an answer." He also mentions that he got calls, from multiple people, saying they failed the behavioral test.
So it seems that while he did coach answers, they weren't the literal test answers, but rather advice one could have gotten from public sources with enough research or presumably, talking to some FAA air traffic controllers.
In the end, the report stated the findings in the investigation did not warrant a referral to a federal prosecutor.
Another problem you haven't mentioned is the level of union control in the industry. Which is great as far as protecting jobs and salaries for existing controllers but it makes getting a desirable position difficult for a new graduate. From your comment it sounds like they just get dumped with the least desirable location until they've climbed high enough up the totem pole to get a good job.
U.S. ATC here. I don't think you know what you're talking about: the union is doing nothing for our salaries. The union has no say on where new graduates get placed.
Our union is a joke. They send emails saying they're "monitoring the situation" instead of talking with the media stating our case for better working conditions.
Our salaries have not kept up with the industry. Do not use this to try to push an anti-union agenda.
Most ATCs spend their whole career at one or two towers. 'Desireable' in the case of graduates is usually wherever they or their family was living when they got hired. The union doesn't have any say in tower assignment.
>> a desirable position difficult for a new graduate.
These generally are not positions that people compete for across the nation. Once in a particular airspace, controllers will generally stay in that airspace. An outsider unfamiliar with an airspace would be at significant disadvantage to any local.
> >> a desirable position difficult for a new graduate.
This is an interesting example of a mangled quote. It's a perfectly grammatical English string. But in the phrase "a desirable position difficult for a new graduate", what's difficult for a new graduate is the position. In the sentence you pulled the quote from, what's difficult for a new graduate is the getting, a word omitted from your quote.
Something similar has happened with "nullius in verba", which is purported to be a quote from Latin, but is actually a selection of unrelated words from a larger sentence in Latin.
I really want to like unions. They make all the sense in the world in principle. But in practice they always seem to end up centered around this "pay your dues" climb the ladder bullshit.
I am sure the attempts of hiring for government jobs will go well, after all the indiscriminate firings experienced by many government agencies thanks to the DOGE and company.
“Yes, it’s true 95% of the forests in CA are prone to wildfire and many have recently burnt, but trust me my house in the forest is safe, it isn’t in a forest that has burned yet!!! Would you like to buy my house?”
So nearly every org in our government has been decimated twice over, including many critical ones, under staffed ones, and efficient ones. Is it far fetched that people would now be incredulous about the well being of the few departments not yet decimated twice over?
While the incentives are a step forward, officials caution that hiring alone won’t resolve the deeper problems.
The nation’s air traffic control infrastructure is aging, with 51 out of 138 systems currently labeled as unsustainable — some using components more than 50 years old.
An announcement regarding technology upgrades and infrastructure improvements is expected next week.
Haven't they been trying to modernize air traffic control since forever?
I wonder what announcements they're going to make.
I haven't been able to find it since but at one point I came across a quote saying that NextGen was the "greatest failure in the history of organized labor." Or something to that effect. A bit of an overstatement but I have to admit I found the parts I could see circa 2010 ridiculous.
Based on what I read earlier, I wouldn't be surprised if it was based on AI that Musk recently purchased. I sincerely hope I'm wrong though. I also hope whatever it is, it doesn't make the ATC system dependent on some proprietary monopoly.
This discussion of ATC makes me nervous, as mandated sudden adoption of new, often proprietary tech nationwide has created a lot of nightmares in other fields like healthcare. Instead of learning lessons from that, we seem to be repeating it over again but even more so.
The US Government is not interested in hiring outside of law enforcement so they won't be able to find people to fill positions outside of law enforcement.
Maybe federal government which hasn’t grown much (they contract everything). State and especially local government employment has been growing consistently for years, or growing very fast if you count education
ATC should probably be private like it is in Canada, where it functions very well, and also better lines up with how the federal gov operates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nav_Canada
A lot of services are provided by contractors, including a few hundred control towers, the weather briefing system, the vast majority of flight and medical examiners, etc.
"The nation’s air traffic control infrastructure is aging, with 51 out of 138 systems currently labeled as unsustainable — some using components more than 50 years old."
this is okay for the post office or DMV, but probably not as okay for air traffic control infrastructure.
FAA, but not ATCs. I think a lot of the FAA folks were also offered their jobs back, like with other agencies. As a consequence of court decisions and "oh shit, those are actually important jobs".
Would tend to make recruitment more difficult, though. "Yeah, we just had a bunch of people fired by some weird Twitter idiot, but you should totally train for years to come work for us, that couldn't possibly go wrong."
I'm not sure how "we want ultra-high non-woke pure-meritocracy hiring standards and we'll aggressively filter out anyone who even smells like they won't pass those standards" is compatible with "we need butts in seats doing this work immediately." I also am not at all surprised that people do not want to begin working for a government which has made it clear it despises all of its workers. You really can't have it both ways. (And plenty of perfectly capable/qualified people, myself included, read all this "anti-DEI" stuff exactly the same way that the anti-DEI people read DEI itself, as a means of preselecting who is entitled to compete for jobs.)
The solution is not to "de-wokify" anything - nor is it to "wokify" anything. All of that stuff is a sideshow. The solution would be to offer massive incentives in order to get highly competent people to see ATC as a good career choice. That means big salaries, very flexible training timelines, and in general, willingness to spend a lot of money on the program to make it attractive. ATC is an intense job being done by people who are under a lot of strain. It doesn't sound appealing to most. That would need to change.
What incentives could possibly exist to go to work for government at this point? It used to offer job security but that’s no longer the case. All I see is low pay, poor benefits, no job security, lack of employer diversity and significant regulatory risk that is tied to whatever administration happens to be in office.
Can any controller or person who otherwise works in this area comment on the tracingwoodgrains blog post? I always see it linked on HN, but never mentioned anywhere else. Seems like there would be a huge scandal with lot of commentary and links if it were true.
U.S. ATC here: opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect that of the FAA. But to be safe: no comment. Otherwise, if I knew something was untrue, I could say that.
It would be great if actually needed, demanding government jobs could pay a market rate. And even better, we could somehow pay better people more. And even even better - fire poor performers. The more-less lockstep pay scales across the US government are bizarre, as well as government unions, negotiating with politicians. As FDR said:
> All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.
> Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.
> … Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.”
Easier firing would increase the market rates for every role. At least unless combined with generous unemployment benefits, as in Denmark. It could make the government more efficient in the long term, at the expense of higher spending (and therefore higher taxes) in the short term. Which many voters would not like.
The issue with unions negotiating with politicians is mostly a consequence of an excessive number of political appointees. Many things would be cleaner with more career civil servants in top positions. Top officials would have fixed-term appointments, and they could not join unions or be fired without a criminal conviction. They would run their departments, while political appointees would only set the goals and directions with little direct control. And then the rest would be more like ordinary employees who just happen to be working for the government.
Government employees are a mostly irrelevant category anyway. Depending on the time and place, the exact same job can be performed by an actual government employee, outsourced to a private contractor, or done by an employee of a company fully owned by the government. What the employee can or cannot do should depend more on the actual role than on the administrative structures above them.
The limits on government salaries seems entirely counterproductive.
I am all for evaluating things in an effort to establish more government efficiency.
But that means you need smart people who understand that domain evaluating, and you need to be able to bring smart people on board to do the work…. not artificially low wages/ arbitrary cuts…
If managers could set arbitrary salaries, the employees could just agree to cut their manager in on 10% of their raise.
This probably happens outside of government, but it's just the private org who loses money, so it's up to them to stop it. But in the case of the government, it's the taxpayers who lose.
I think that’s right - more discretion creates more room for corruption.
Although there are other ways to limit corruption risk, namely process and transparency. In the Australian government you can pay someone higher than standard pay through an Individual Flexibility Agreement (IFA). But in order to do so there’s a whole process the manager has to go through where they have to justify the higher salary on a limited set of grounds (e.g. higher market value of role) and then get it all signed off by someone higher up the chain.
That’s the process side. On the transparency side you could publish everyone’s salaries and then it becomes obvious when a manger is paying their second cousin way above normal for some strange reason.
Government salaries are based on objective measures today -- years of service and job role. There is no "merit" part or anything subjective.
To move to a system where "good people make more money", someone has to decide who the "good" people are. That person is susceptible to corruption. Moreso than in a private enterprise and with wider consequences, because government is not a business. So overpaying people doesn't have the same consequences as doing it privately.
NSPS was an attempt to push towards something more merit based (still pay band structured, NSPS bands spanned 2-3 GS grades). NSPS was rolled back in 2010 or so because the requirement was that everyone had to be on it by 2009 (early 2010?) and that didn't happen.
There are various *demo (lab, acq, I think some others) that are basically the same as NSPS (in principle) and ostensibly merit based. But they're also capped because of the correspondence to GS grades. Pay can increase much faster, in theory, than under GS but also you can be denied any raise except the general pay increase (below inflation, so a real pay cut even if a nominal pay raise) if your performance is poor.
GS pay raises are only time-based in-grade, called steps. Each grade has 10 steps [0] and if you start at step 1 it can take up to 18 years to reach step 10 (less if you have good performance because then you can get a bonus step increase). Most people don't start at step 1, though, so maxing out typically takes less time.
There are some jobs that will push you through grades on some regular cadence (usually 6-12 months in each grade), but those are usually "internships". New hires getting brought in at $50-60k/year GS-5 or GS-7 positions and moved up over 2-4 years into a GS-11 or GS-12 position. After that, they're back to competing for positions again for anything higher than GS-11/12 or whatever their target grade was.
[0] Technically there's step X, which means you're paid above step 10 for that grade. This is relatively rare, but when it happens they only get half the general pay increase each year until step 10 catches up to them and then they are step 10.
Most managers even in the private sector couldn’t really pull this off because they would need someone to approve the requested salary. You’d have to have a whole pyramid scheme of kickbacks going all the way up to the top executives, but the top executives have no incentive to cooperate because they’re already pulling a similar scheme against the shareholders for their salaries.
If the limits are to prevent corruption, why do they have to be so far below market rates? I don't think anyone is objecting to there being limits. Every company out there has level based limits. The issue is where those limits are set.
Then the question is, “how do we prevent politicians from hiring their family and friends on excessive salaries”?
Then it’s, “how do we quantify success without the profit motive for something society needs, but doesn’t earn a profit”?
Then I would conclude, the solution is a small government with a hyper-competitive process for providing public services, with actual democratic feedback on the success of such provided services with teeth to remove bad private sector contractors.
The US can easily fill in gaps by taking the Special Operators Combat Controllers (CCTs) who are actually all certified Air Traffic Controllers.
Furthermore, the Air Force could additionally take the Terminal Air Control Party (TACPs) - think of them as a Radio/Strike guy that coordinates Air Strikes, that accompany tactical platoons and cross train them into Air Traffic Control, further augmenting their ability to perform this role.
It would be great to help keep CCT skills fresh and current - rotate them around with 'deployments' to civilian facilities. It'd be a win all the way around.
It takes 1-3 years of facility based training in order to qualify as an ATC for a specific tower. A military enlistment is only 4 years. CCTs would end up doing their entire enlistment at one facility leaving no time to train as a CCT. You'd have to hire another person who's job is 100% CCT, at which point, why not just hire an ATC?
As for not falling out of the sky or hitting other aircraft, I think the U.S. still has the safest airspace. If you're referring to immigration/law/customs/etc, I can't help you there.
Even flying (commercially?) in other countries is still probably safer than driving.
One of the biggest problems with ATC hiring is that location assignments happen after trainees pass the academy. A lot of the academy graduates quit when they get an assignment they don't like. It's not like the military where they can force people. The trainee pay also sucks so the prospect of getting sent somewhere undesirable and then barely being able to afford it just isn't attractive. If they would hire based on location like they used to graduates wouldn't quit as often.
The other big problem is Obama changed the hiring test from testing intelligence to testing personality in a bid to increase diversity. There was a lawsuit over this. The effect was academy failure rates soared and because class sizes are fixed there was a shortfall in the number of graduates making it to towers to train.
Damn Obama!
He keeps reaching out from the past to cause all our present troubles!
There's a wave of ATC retirements now because they were all hired at the same time when Reagan fired the ATCs. Bad policy can have long lasting effects.
Why the hell would you test for personality or intelligence. Surely the key skill here is calm under pressure and stress?
It was just an artificial way to select the 'right' color of candidate. The link has the full details.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
You got an actual source or just the ramblings of a guy who uses AI to generate what seems to be a large part of his blog?
https://mslegal.org/cases/brigida-v-faa/
https://www.travelpulse.com/news/airlines-airports/lawsuit-a...
https://simpleflying.com/faa-air-traffic-controller-applican...
Most of the job is exceptionally routine to the point of being boring. In busier airspaces the most common stress is just associated with maintaining timing. Ironically the ground controllers face more of this problem than anyone. The further you get from the airport and it's class B airspace the easier it all gets.
Until an emergency or a conflict suddenly occurs. There's often very little you can do here other than quickly and clearly provide the necessary information and instructions to aid pilots in averting the disaster. The pilot is in full control during emergencies and you're simply there to give them anything they need. In a severe emergency and in an ATC center they're going to dedicate you to the emergency and bring another controller on to manage other planes in that airspace.
As the technology became available to give planes the ability to see and avoid each other with Traffic Advisories and automated Conflict Resolutions we made it mandatory equipment for passenger transports. We made it mandatory for pilots to obey this system with _higher priority_ than any prior or new instructions from ATC.
So you want people who think ahead, constantly prepare for conflicts, and have a reliable level of vigilance. So when the emergency happens they're situationally well prepared and capable of managing all available resources that their stress levels barely increase. A bad weather day with lots of cancelled flights and closed airports should be the highest stress factor they face in their careers.
> Surely the key skill here is calm under pressure and stress?
... which is personality.
Not trying to defend or not defend what actually happened, but there's growing use of personality measures in various vocations for this very reason.
The actual, as another poster provided, was a racist hiring procedure hidden in a test and apparently designed to rug-pull all the trainees paying their own way in training.
Apart from that, the intelligence is certainly needed, but with a heavy dose of spatial reasoning. the right kind of 'calm under pressure' is an excellent command of the details of ATC; anything else here is just lethal apathy.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
This is indeed a thing that happened, but blaming "Obama" personally for it is absurd, it was entirely the FAA's fuckup.
Is Donald Trump personally carrying out all the acts he's condemned for?
Is it really unreasonable to say that pushing for diversity was a notable goal of the Obama administration?
Based on the signed executive orders yes.
Donald Trump is, indeed, personally signing the executive orders instructing the US government to do a lot of questionable things. Obama, by contrast, did not sign an executive order directing the FAA to hire unqualified air traffic controllers.
Of course, bureaucrats do stupid shit when they are attempting to please their masters, and this is a prime example. But that does not absolve them of their responsibility in dreaming it up and executing it.
It actually is though, I would go ready about it.
The FAA under Obama. So Obama.
This is a great post that lays it out. I suggest putting tribal politics aside and reading it, you can see in black and white that the FAA, under Obama, consciously weighed diversity over performance, and royally screwed the ATC hiring pipeline. "Pobody's nerfect"
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
Eh. The lawsuit is still ongoing (for 9 years now!). The article summarizes the plaintiffs' argument and conjecture as if it was a finding of fact which is a bit disingenuous.
I think the FAA slide which discusses "how much adverse performance are we willing to sacrifice for diversity" is pretty damning
> The other big problem is Obama changed the hiring test from testing intelligence to testing personality in a bid to increase diversity. There was a lawsuit over this.
It was even worse than that. What they actually did was write up a phony “personality test” and distribute the answer key to applicants who were members of preferred racial organizations.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
In the actual OIG report, it seemed the person who gave "answers" to the test didn't actually have the behavioral test or the answer key.
He stated he stressed things like answering questions like an air traffic control "and we’re alpha personalities, we’re dominating, we don’t take no for an answer." He also mentions that he got calls, from multiple people, saying they failed the behavioral test.
So it seems that while he did coach answers, they weren't the literal test answers, but rather advice one could have gotten from public sources with enough research or presumably, talking to some FAA air traffic controllers.
In the end, the report stated the findings in the investigation did not warrant a referral to a federal prosecutor.
The FAA investigated itself and found no misconduct.
Sorry, I don’t buy it. The evidence from the still-in-progress lawsuit is pretty clear.
Another problem you haven't mentioned is the level of union control in the industry. Which is great as far as protecting jobs and salaries for existing controllers but it makes getting a desirable position difficult for a new graduate. From your comment it sounds like they just get dumped with the least desirable location until they've climbed high enough up the totem pole to get a good job.
U.S. ATC here. I don't think you know what you're talking about: the union is doing nothing for our salaries. The union has no say on where new graduates get placed.
Our union is a joke. They send emails saying they're "monitoring the situation" instead of talking with the media stating our case for better working conditions.
Our salaries have not kept up with the industry. Do not use this to try to push an anti-union agenda.
Most ATCs spend their whole career at one or two towers. 'Desireable' in the case of graduates is usually wherever they or their family was living when they got hired. The union doesn't have any say in tower assignment.
Ronald Reagan is laughing at the notion of a powerful ATC union (PATCO 1981 Strike)
>> a desirable position difficult for a new graduate.
These generally are not positions that people compete for across the nation. Once in a particular airspace, controllers will generally stay in that airspace. An outsider unfamiliar with an airspace would be at significant disadvantage to any local.
> >> a desirable position difficult for a new graduate.
This is an interesting example of a mangled quote. It's a perfectly grammatical English string. But in the phrase "a desirable position difficult for a new graduate", what's difficult for a new graduate is the position. In the sentence you pulled the quote from, what's difficult for a new graduate is the getting, a word omitted from your quote.
Something similar has happened with "nullius in verba", which is purported to be a quote from Latin, but is actually a selection of unrelated words from a larger sentence in Latin.
I really want to like unions. They make all the sense in the world in principle. But in practice they always seem to end up centered around this "pay your dues" climb the ladder bullshit.
Works in Denmark. No statutory minimum wage, wages determined by collective bargaining agreement.
I am sure the attempts of hiring for government jobs will go well, after all the indiscriminate firings experienced by many government agencies thanks to the DOGE and company.
How bad were the firings in ATC?
“Yes, it’s true 95% of the forests in CA are prone to wildfire and many have recently burnt, but trust me my house in the forest is safe, it isn’t in a forest that has burned yet!!! Would you like to buy my house?”
So nearly every org in our government has been decimated twice over, including many critical ones, under staffed ones, and efficient ones. Is it far fetched that people would now be incredulous about the well being of the few departments not yet decimated twice over?
Non-existent as far as I've heard (source: am ATC)
While the incentives are a step forward, officials caution that hiring alone won’t resolve the deeper problems.
The nation’s air traffic control infrastructure is aging, with 51 out of 138 systems currently labeled as unsustainable — some using components more than 50 years old.
An announcement regarding technology upgrades and infrastructure improvements is expected next week.
Haven't they been trying to modernize air traffic control since forever?
I wonder what announcements they're going to make.
I haven't been able to find it since but at one point I came across a quote saying that NextGen was the "greatest failure in the history of organized labor." Or something to that effect. A bit of an overstatement but I have to admit I found the parts I could see circa 2010 ridiculous.
I feel like I've been hearing about NextGen for decades.
Just looked it up and I'm not far off. NextGen started in 2007 and is still ongoing.
Based on what I read earlier, I wouldn't be surprised if it was based on AI that Musk recently purchased. I sincerely hope I'm wrong though. I also hope whatever it is, it doesn't make the ATC system dependent on some proprietary monopoly.
This discussion of ATC makes me nervous, as mandated sudden adoption of new, often proprietary tech nationwide has created a lot of nightmares in other fields like healthcare. Instead of learning lessons from that, we seem to be repeating it over again but even more so.
The US Government is not interested in hiring outside of law enforcement so they won't be able to find people to fill positions outside of law enforcement.
Maybe federal government which hasn’t grown much (they contract everything). State and especially local government employment has been growing consistently for years, or growing very fast if you count education
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_employees_in_the_Un...
ATC should probably be private like it is in Canada, where it functions very well, and also better lines up with how the federal gov operates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nav_Canada
Canadian ATC has serious issues, and the whole air travel system is much, much more expensive than the US.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-ai...
A lot of services are provided by contractors, including a few hundred control towers, the weather briefing system, the vast majority of flight and medical examiners, etc.
"The nation’s air traffic control infrastructure is aging, with 51 out of 138 systems currently labeled as unsustainable — some using components more than 50 years old."
this is okay for the post office or DMV, but probably not as okay for air traffic control infrastructure.
Didn't DOGE just lay off a number of probational employees (new, promoted or transferred) in the infrastructure division?
https://apnews.com/article/faa-firings-trump-doge-safety-air...
FAA, but not ATCs. I think a lot of the FAA folks were also offered their jobs back, like with other agencies. As a consequence of court decisions and "oh shit, those are actually important jobs".
Would tend to make recruitment more difficult, though. "Yeah, we just had a bunch of people fired by some weird Twitter idiot, but you should totally train for years to come work for us, that couldn't possibly go wrong."
I'm not sure how "we want ultra-high non-woke pure-meritocracy hiring standards and we'll aggressively filter out anyone who even smells like they won't pass those standards" is compatible with "we need butts in seats doing this work immediately." I also am not at all surprised that people do not want to begin working for a government which has made it clear it despises all of its workers. You really can't have it both ways. (And plenty of perfectly capable/qualified people, myself included, read all this "anti-DEI" stuff exactly the same way that the anti-DEI people read DEI itself, as a means of preselecting who is entitled to compete for jobs.)
The solution is not to "de-wokify" anything - nor is it to "wokify" anything. All of that stuff is a sideshow. The solution would be to offer massive incentives in order to get highly competent people to see ATC as a good career choice. That means big salaries, very flexible training timelines, and in general, willingness to spend a lot of money on the program to make it attractive. ATC is an intense job being done by people who are under a lot of strain. It doesn't sound appealing to most. That would need to change.
What am I missing here?
What incentives could possibly exist to go to work for government at this point? It used to offer job security but that’s no longer the case. All I see is low pay, poor benefits, no job security, lack of employer diversity and significant regulatory risk that is tied to whatever administration happens to be in office.
Of economy becomes bad enough, those jobs will be desirable again.
That’s the point, just hire private industries to do everything instead.
they'll never prioritize money over safety. nope, never.
And the government doesn't?
More context - https://viewfromthewing.com/diversity-in-the-skies-faas-cont...
Can any controller or person who otherwise works in this area comment on the tracingwoodgrains blog post? I always see it linked on HN, but never mentioned anywhere else. Seems like there would be a huge scandal with lot of commentary and links if it were true.
I'm not qualified to evaluate that post, but there was some critique of it and the suit's merits in a thread a few months ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42874983
U.S. ATC here: opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect that of the FAA. But to be safe: no comment. Otherwise, if I knew something was untrue, I could say that.
It would be great if actually needed, demanding government jobs could pay a market rate. And even better, we could somehow pay better people more. And even even better - fire poor performers. The more-less lockstep pay scales across the US government are bizarre, as well as government unions, negotiating with politicians. As FDR said:
> All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.
> Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.
> … Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.”
- FDR, 1937 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-the-resolut...
Easier firing would increase the market rates for every role. At least unless combined with generous unemployment benefits, as in Denmark. It could make the government more efficient in the long term, at the expense of higher spending (and therefore higher taxes) in the short term. Which many voters would not like.
The issue with unions negotiating with politicians is mostly a consequence of an excessive number of political appointees. Many things would be cleaner with more career civil servants in top positions. Top officials would have fixed-term appointments, and they could not join unions or be fired without a criminal conviction. They would run their departments, while political appointees would only set the goals and directions with little direct control. And then the rest would be more like ordinary employees who just happen to be working for the government.
Government employees are a mostly irrelevant category anyway. Depending on the time and place, the exact same job can be performed by an actual government employee, outsourced to a private contractor, or done by an employee of a company fully owned by the government. What the employee can or cannot do should depend more on the actual role than on the administrative structures above them.
The limits on government salaries seems entirely counterproductive.
I am all for evaluating things in an effort to establish more government efficiency.
But that means you need smart people who understand that domain evaluating, and you need to be able to bring smart people on board to do the work…. not artificially low wages/ arbitrary cuts…
The limits are there to limit corruption.
If managers could set arbitrary salaries, the employees could just agree to cut their manager in on 10% of their raise.
This probably happens outside of government, but it's just the private org who loses money, so it's up to them to stop it. But in the case of the government, it's the taxpayers who lose.
I think that’s right - more discretion creates more room for corruption.
Although there are other ways to limit corruption risk, namely process and transparency. In the Australian government you can pay someone higher than standard pay through an Individual Flexibility Agreement (IFA). But in order to do so there’s a whole process the manager has to go through where they have to justify the higher salary on a limited set of grounds (e.g. higher market value of role) and then get it all signed off by someone higher up the chain.
That’s the process side. On the transparency side you could publish everyone’s salaries and then it becomes obvious when a manger is paying their second cousin way above normal for some strange reason.
I don’t think managers (even without limits) could just set salaries… it’s not like they all just pay the max at manager discretion now.
Government salaries are based on objective measures today -- years of service and job role. There is no "merit" part or anything subjective.
To move to a system where "good people make more money", someone has to decide who the "good" people are. That person is susceptible to corruption. Moreso than in a private enterprise and with wider consequences, because government is not a business. So overpaying people doesn't have the same consequences as doing it privately.
NSPS was an attempt to push towards something more merit based (still pay band structured, NSPS bands spanned 2-3 GS grades). NSPS was rolled back in 2010 or so because the requirement was that everyone had to be on it by 2009 (early 2010?) and that didn't happen.
There are various *demo (lab, acq, I think some others) that are basically the same as NSPS (in principle) and ostensibly merit based. But they're also capped because of the correspondence to GS grades. Pay can increase much faster, in theory, than under GS but also you can be denied any raise except the general pay increase (below inflation, so a real pay cut even if a nominal pay raise) if your performance is poor.
Years of service is a form of corruption, since years of service isn't a proxy for performance
GS pay raises are only time-based in-grade, called steps. Each grade has 10 steps [0] and if you start at step 1 it can take up to 18 years to reach step 10 (less if you have good performance because then you can get a bonus step increase). Most people don't start at step 1, though, so maxing out typically takes less time.
There are some jobs that will push you through grades on some regular cadence (usually 6-12 months in each grade), but those are usually "internships". New hires getting brought in at $50-60k/year GS-5 or GS-7 positions and moved up over 2-4 years into a GS-11 or GS-12 position. After that, they're back to competing for positions again for anything higher than GS-11/12 or whatever their target grade was.
[0] Technically there's step X, which means you're paid above step 10 for that grade. This is relatively rare, but when it happens they only get half the general pay increase each year until step 10 catches up to them and then they are step 10.
corruption is a word with a meaning
Most managers even in the private sector couldn’t really pull this off because they would need someone to approve the requested salary. You’d have to have a whole pyramid scheme of kickbacks going all the way up to the top executives, but the top executives have no incentive to cooperate because they’re already pulling a similar scheme against the shareholders for their salaries.
If the limits are to prevent corruption, why do they have to be so far below market rates? I don't think anyone is objecting to there being limits. Every company out there has level based limits. The issue is where those limits are set.
Then the question is, “how do we prevent politicians from hiring their family and friends on excessive salaries”?
Then it’s, “how do we quantify success without the profit motive for something society needs, but doesn’t earn a profit”?
Then I would conclude, the solution is a small government with a hyper-competitive process for providing public services, with actual democratic feedback on the success of such provided services with teeth to remove bad private sector contractors.
> with actual democratic feedback on the success of such provided services
The Chicago political machine is calling. They want your jobs. All of your jobs.
Wait until you’re doing a great job but have the wrong political take on a situation.
Make sure you’re regularly doing favors for people and giving out what freebies you can so you stay in office during the next cycle.
It sounded great in the post, but democracy is hard so don’t expect an easy answer.
Is that the concern? Hiring family?
But they don’t because of the salary limit?
I don’t think that’s the case.
Not a surprise after the reputation they've built - https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
The US can easily fill in gaps by taking the Special Operators Combat Controllers (CCTs) who are actually all certified Air Traffic Controllers.
Furthermore, the Air Force could additionally take the Terminal Air Control Party (TACPs) - think of them as a Radio/Strike guy that coordinates Air Strikes, that accompany tactical platoons and cross train them into Air Traffic Control, further augmenting their ability to perform this role.
It would be great to help keep CCT skills fresh and current - rotate them around with 'deployments' to civilian facilities. It'd be a win all the way around.
It takes 1-3 years of facility based training in order to qualify as an ATC for a specific tower. A military enlistment is only 4 years. CCTs would end up doing their entire enlistment at one facility leaving no time to train as a CCT. You'd have to hire another person who's job is 100% CCT, at which point, why not just hire an ATC?
This doesn’t solve anything because the military still needs those people.
I would currently be very afraid flying to the USA for a multitude of reasons. It doesn't help that I'm afraid of flying.
Air travel is insanely safe, even in the shittiest countries.
you only hear about the dozen or so crashes every year. You don't hear about the 30-40 million other flights that don't have issues in a year.
As for not falling out of the sky or hitting other aircraft, I think the U.S. still has the safest airspace. If you're referring to immigration/law/customs/etc, I can't help you there.
Even flying (commercially?) in other countries is still probably safer than driving.