Comment by RandomBacon
3 months ago
> I also don't think there is a magical amount of money where you are going to suddenly double your pool of candidates willing to do this kind of work.
There would be more people interested in aviation choosing to be ATC than a pilot if our pay matched that of major airline pilots.
There are people going through the training and then quiting when they realize that can't get an opening in their hometown because that spot is reserved for a random person one week behind them in the FAA academy, and the pay won't make it worth moving away from their family.
There are more examples, and appropriate pay would fix most of them.
(Opinions are my own and not necessarily that of the FAA.)
> at a certain point you are just going to be cannibalizing other talent pools
I don't think any sane person would be against raising ATC wages. But to refer back to my post, the situation might be different if it there were not also a massive pilot shortage as well! If these two pools of talent mostly overlap raising wages on one will probably just pull from the other.
It's probably a combination of raising wages and putting more money into recruiting teenagers considering vocational programs.
Because we are an aged society, with such an incredibly low birth rate, this will only get worse.
There are only so many competent people in our society, and that talent pool is being spread thin across all sectors of society which require such candidates.
There are looming doctor shortages, too. Professionals of all stripes.
The birth rate thing is a bit of a canard in this context. There are something like 100 million Americans under the age of 30.. we’ll have some demographic problems in a generation or two but there are plenty of people to staff the physician and ATC roles.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the...
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A doctor shortage cannot be solved with more money, sadly! It needs to be solved with political / regulatory means, allowing more people go through the hospital training / practice programs and become doctors.
Ofcourse it would. Capitalism is all about dealing with shortages in exchange for money.
So clearly someone just doesn't want to pay up.
I think there’s a catch, which is lag time. Even under pure capitalism, if the market doesn’t believe the money will last, prospects aren’t going to risk their careers given the training lead time required.
In the US, ATC are federal employees, aren’t they? So they are regularly furloughed, too. In the current political climate, facing the wrath of politicians doesn’t seem that unlikely, either.
The US has form in this area, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...
Even if the federal government were to “pay up”, they cannot be relied upon to honor favorable contract terms since they also have the ability to change the law.
Conversation about how there’s a critical shortage of ATCs is at least a decade old, and likely older. “Best time to plant a tree” and all that.