Comment by pbalau
3 months ago
I think this is a naive way of looking at the problem. People that start working in banks, generally do that as a starting point. ATC is the end of the road for that career.
Working in a bank is the start of a quite lucrative career, working as an ATC is the end.
Indeed, we can offer more money to ATC, but there is not a lot, progression wise.
Honestly, how would a junior ATC look like, compared with a senior?
Look at how much a senior airline pilot makes, compared to a junior.
English might not be my native language, but I think we are not talking about pilots here.
ATC salary increases with experience. The better ones are promoted to supervisors.
Hahahahahaha....
ATC here, opinons are my own and not necessarily (definitely not in this case) that of the FAA.
Thank you for the laugh.
Out of the 10 supervisors I've had, one was amazing, one was average, and one I attended the funeral of after he drunk himself to death.
ATC salary only increases with the sub-inflation 2% or whatever presidential raise and 1.6% union-negotiated raise, each year.
No one is promoted, they have to apply, and the good controllers don't apply because if they hate it and go back to controlling, they lose their seniority (this is the union's rule). The bad controllers apply to be supervisors so they don't have to really control (they do the minimum 16 hours a month on a empty sector in the morning). Maybe this is a feature - a way to get bad controllers away from traffic.
promoting someone to their level of incompetence i see?
Technical jobs should not be promotion driven at all. It should be a combination of seniority, and technical expertise/experience. Their metric should be something like number of accidents under their tenure, vs accident free hours under operation.
A supervising position might not see problems as fast as someone actually doing said job, which wastes the experience acquired by said supervisor!
The vast majority of aviation mishaps are entirely due to pilot error or mechanical failure. It would be stupid to count those when evaluating controllers. But the FAA does already have a rigorous process to deal with controllers who make safety errors.
What job have you ever held where the management was consistently better than ICs?
Hopefully they don’t throw juniors on to the busiest runways in the country
Where else would they learn how to handle that kind of environment?
By starting at smaller airports or less busy runways, getting comfortable, then stepping up to more demanding situations.
On submarines (still flying, just underwater), we don’t throw new underway buddies into the most difficult scenarios right away. We do give them a seemingly overwhelming amount of qualifications to achieve in a very short period of time, but we don’t make them practice the hard stuff until we’re sure that they understand the fundamentals. Because much like ATC, if you make a mistake hundreds of feet underwater (or thousands of feet in the sky), you’re gonna have a bad time.
…kind of. In reality, there is always a qualified individual ready to physically stop you from doing the wrong thing, and there are multiple independent safety systems, interlocks, etc.