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The Air Traffic Controller Crisis is Real in America
The aviation industry is enormously complex and requires the skilled labor of thousands of professionals each day to function smoothly. A major sector, though, is facing a pile-up of potentially catastrophic challenges that could threaten the stability of the industry into the future. (aeroxplorer.com) More...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
FAA needs to be recruiting from high schools and work with local trade schools to find and train controllers early. College won't be as important as aptitude, intelligence and decision-making ability. If you run them through a specifically designed 2-year trade school program similar to Air Force or Navy training, then 2 years training OTJ at small, controlled airspace airports side-by-side with mentors, you'd find controllers young. And dump the checkbox mentality. When it comes to aviation, the focus has to be getting the best.
Why are there not FAA-approved courses at the college level where ATC is being taught? There's nothing like on-the-job training, but if some aviation colleges can teach how to be good controllers, and use simulators for initial training I am sure that staffing can get back to acceptable levels. Even the FAA has admitted that 99% of towers are understaffed. Seems like most of the problems are with tower controllers, and not nearly as much with the approach and departure control centers.
The idea seems attractive and has already been tried in Canada in some specialized schools but has not yielded the expected results for the simple reason that these schools did not have the means to support the human, technical and financial infrastructures required to simulate an air traffic control unit to bring candidates to an interesting enough level of proficiency for the “final” employer. When we refer to “Flight simulation”, we generally refer to ONE simulator, ONE or 2 pilots depending on the type of aircraft and ONE instructor (who usually plays the role of ATC for radio exchanges). The reproduction of an air traffic control unit requires a large number of connected consoles with an equally large number of trainees to allow the simulation of a significant traffic flow with all the coordination/interaction that this implies. In the background, you need a proportional number of actors/pilots (feeders) to enter the flight controls data in the computers, the controllers' instructions, and give the radio feed-back. The selection and training of these feeders is not straightforward in the sense that they must already be skilled and fast enough to understand and correctly enter the data corresponding to the controllers' instructions that often arrive at them in bursting sequences. During high-density exercises, a feeder can hardly represent more than one aircraft. This means that an exercise with 20 aircraft in flight simultaneously will occupy more or less 20 feeders. In addition, they must be familiar with the phraseology of air traffic control and aviation in general and, last but not least, familiar with the characteristics of the type of aircraft they simulate so as not to accept clearances/instructions outside the actual flight capabilities of the aircraft in question. So, it cannot be an ad hoc workforce. It must be a group of permanent employees who will receive training and periodic refresher classes. Maybe this is an area where AI could bring significant improvements. It should also be remembered that if you simulate a unit with radar consoles, communication lines, etc., these devices will require the same level of maintenance as those in the real environment, otherwise your simulator will soon or later come to a halt. Finally (as I have been told once as an instructor at the national school), training in ATC as one primarily purpose: skim from the start candidates who do not have the potential to later occupy a position in a large unit, minimize long-term investments and free up places for more promising candidates.
Interesting and probably accurate assessment. But, the Government subsidizes everything else, so why not include training for ATC controllers? Stop sending so many of our taxpayer dollars to prop up foreign interests and start putting some of those dollars to better use at home. I don't think it would be out of the realm of reality to build several ATC training centers [including realistic control towers] Some of those things could actually be set up at real airports and possibly have video feeds tied into the training that shows real-time action. My opinion only.
Sorry you didn't have the "privilege" of working with me and 4 other re-hires at Bay TRACON in '95. All of us were certified within 6 months, so please don't paint with so wide a brush. After 3 years there, I went to SoCal and worked the LA finals for 10 more years. I've been a contract instructor there for the last 15 years and would say that only in the last 3 or 4 years has my working speed declined.
Another way to do this is to take ATC operations out of the hands of the government. i.e., go private. The gov remains the watchdog for quality and compliance but recruiting, training, staffing, equipment selection and implementation, etc. goes private. In the 90, the Chrétien's administration (1993-2003) in CDA wanted to reduce the gov deficit to zero and they froze all civil servants’ salaries/increments fro more than 7 years despite collective bargaining agreements. Controllers’ salaries plummeted from a 7th rank to somewhere around 17th worldwide. If you had the years behind you, you could consider retiring as early as 45 (with some penalties of course) but given the situation, a lot of controllers were considering their options. That's when the gov realized that the 45+ age group represented 40% of its highly qualified workforce and their massive retirement would create havoc in the system. Nav Canada, an NPO, was created in 1996 and controllers were offered to move freely to the new business. For those who didn’t want to make the move, the gov promised to do everything possible to find them another job in the public sector within a year. Some were offered to stay as experts to supervise the operations of the new company. The point is: Nav-Can was not subject to the salary restrictions of the public service and as a controller's pension is based on his 6 best salary years, Nav-Can was not very reluctant to negotiate attractive conditions to obtain 6 more years of its most experienced employees... Whether they have learned from that and put the school in high gear, I don’t know, I didn’t stay around. At age 50 minus 1 minute, I left and took my pension with me.