> The ad also highlights the salary on offer to controllers, saying it is $155,000 (£115,000) after three years of work.
Unless the US government shuts down again, at which point you stop being paid, you are required to keep working, you have no right to strike[0], and the competences you've built across this job are largely hard to directly make use of elsewhere so the incentive to job-hop is low.
This is why shutting down the right to strike is a short term approach: you can't make people choose to start or keep working in your sweatshop, so eventually you run out of staff.
What you can do, at state scale, is pass everybody through a services training filter and sit them under the sorting hat after three months to winnow out skills and potentials of interest.
Some are clear rejects, some are good for getting up early and walking perimeters, others would suit the motor pool. An occasional few will gel for traffic control, signal intell, etc.
The trick then, for a state, is to incentivize with carrots, sticks, patriotic abstractions like duty, etc. the ones they want for the jobs they have.
You can draft a doctor, from pool of doctors. You can't draft ATC, because there is no pool of spare ATCs. It would be like drafting air defense operators - there is no pool of them outside military.
I'm pretty sure some of the air traffic controllers for military airfields in WWII were draftees, just like many air defense operators were draftees before the military became an all-volunteer force in 1973.
If the recent news about moving lots of soldiers from EU Nato installations back home is true, they'll have a ton of trained active military ATC's available to use in the US soon.
I know this is culture-war stuff, but on the balance I think it's true that the FAA deprioritised applicants from the AT/CTI programmes, that is training courses speficically to become ATCs.
My main source is https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa..., and I'm assuming in particular that the screenshot of the letter in footnote 1 is genuine. In the section ended by footnote 16, there is a claim than in 2014 the FAA sent out just short of 3k job offer letters whereas in 2019 that had dropped to below 1k.
That sounds like cutting off your own recruitment pipeline.
It's also evidence that the FAA did not drop the standards for qualification and certification, which is reassuring.
What video game on Steam allows me to practice air traffic control? How can I determine if I have a skill at the logistics of managing planes on a radar screen? Where can I join a multiplayer lobby where at game start we're assigned to either give radio commands to planes, or interpret radio commands and respond on behalf of planes, with at least two players for each? How does anti-griefing work in that environment?
Ten years ago the FAA was disqualifying candidates because the didn't say their worst subject in high school was science and today they're struggling with recruitment. Seems like a catastrophe of their own making.
> The Xbox one logo appears at the start of the video before dissolving into a montage that cuts between images of men playing various online computer games and people, including women, in air traffic control towers looking at their own computers.
> "You've been training for this," the ad says.
Wow looks like Microsoft were not kidding with their 'this is also an xbox' ad campaign. Also really console gamers is who you target for this role? USG is becoming a joke
AI should be able to handle the bulk of this work. "14,663 active controllers" is too much when you could have a single gamer + AI combo running it for multiple airports.
57 comments
> The ad also highlights the salary on offer to controllers, saying it is $155,000 (£115,000) after three years of work.
Unless the US government shuts down again, at which point you stop being paid, you are required to keep working, you have no right to strike[0], and the competences you've built across this job are largely hard to directly make use of elsewhere so the incentive to job-hop is low.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...
If you're a government, you can; it's called a draft. The US seems to be preparing for it.
Some are clear rejects, some are good for getting up early and walking perimeters, others would suit the motor pool. An occasional few will gel for traffic control, signal intell, etc.
The trick then, for a state, is to incentivize with carrots, sticks, patriotic abstractions like duty, etc. the ones they want for the jobs they have.
Now its time for levelling up training.
Doctors need to pass a lot of exams.
We know from the PATCO strike there is a pool of spare ATCs, including "military controllers, and retired personnel who temporarily returned to service". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...
Thus, retired civilian personnel is a possible draft pool for a skilled job like ATC which require passing a lot of exams.
That pool is small, certainly, but it was enough to break PATCO.
Jump to minute 18 for a discussion on floppy disks or, appropriately, to minute 25 for an "honest recruitment ad".
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YeABJbvcJ_k&t=1539
My main source is https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa..., and I'm assuming in particular that the screenshot of the letter in footnote 1 is genuine. In the section ended by footnote 16, there is a claim than in 2014 the FAA sent out just short of 3k job offer letters whereas in 2019 that had dropped to below 1k.
That sounds like cutting off your own recruitment pipeline.
It's also evidence that the FAA did not drop the standards for qualification and certification, which is reassuring.
If that game existed, I would try it.
Does it?
https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/trumps-transportation-secretary...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9MczWfLpBcw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeABJbvcJ_k
> The Xbox one logo appears at the start of the video before dissolving into a montage that cuts between images of men playing various online computer games and people, including women, in air traffic control towers looking at their own computers.
> "You've been training for this," the ad says.
Wow looks like Microsoft were not kidding with their 'this is also an xbox' ad campaign. Also really console gamers is who you target for this role? USG is becoming a joke
THEME TRAFFIC CONTROLLER
>
The ad also highlights the salary on offer to controllers, saying it is $155,000 (£115,000) after three years of work.IIRC they are understaffed and must do like 60hs per week, so it's like $103K in a sane work position.