Comment by nradov

3 months ago

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.