Comment by throwaway2037
3 months ago
> about money
Some light Googling tells me that median pay is about 100K to 120K USD per year. Most people here would say that is not outstanding for such highly skilled work.
Why don't other highly developed countries have the same issues finding employees? You never read about "ATC hiring crisis" in other countries. Why only the US?
> The real need is new and modern technology that automates much of the mistake-prone, human-centric tasks. But nobody wants to risk introducing changes to such a fragile system.
This sounds like a Catch-22. The current system is "fragile", but so fragile that we cannot improve it with new technology? This argument reads like a tautology. Repeating my previous point, why don't we hear the same about ATC systems in other highly developed nations/regions (Japan, Korea, EU, Canada, AU/NZ, etc.)?
The link that shared is excellent. When I looked under the medical requirements area, and section "Eye", I see:
> Applicants must demonstrate distant and near vision of 20/20 or better in each eye separately. The use of bifocal contact lenses for the correction of near vision is unacceptable.
Is it possible to get a job without 20/20 near vision?
"Why don't other highly developed countries have the same issues finding employees?"
Baumol effects. Our economy is incredible, extremely high productivity along with full employment. Its why we have ordering kiosks at fast food restaurants, pay 225k for bucee's managers and 20 dollars/hour to flip burgers at fast food restaurants. ATC is a low productivity growth job, technology hasn't increased the number of planes or amount of airspace one ATC can manage. As other jobs and sectors of the economy improve in productivity, people migrate to those sectors from low productivity sectors like ATC because on average high productivity sectors can pay more. The salaries of ATCs rise because there is more competition for the limited pool so you end up paying more but getting the same or worse outcomes over time.
As I understand, the primary limiting factor for airport runway throughput (arrivals and departures) is wake turbulence from the engines. I remember, as a kid in the 80s/90s, that there were some accidents related to smaller planes taking off into the wake of larger planes. I am pretty sure that regular passenger jets (say, A320/B737+) are limited to one takeoff every 2 mins from a runway. (Or it might be 1 min.) That said, improving ATC technology might help to reduce delays and maximise runway throughput.
Loosely related: I cannot remember the website now, but someone posted here in the last 3 years an insane website that showed (visually!) the new approaches to London Heathrow Airport (world's busiest two runway airport). It was batshit crazy. I am sure they spent months designing the new approaches. It looked like multiple DNA helix'es where planes circle to wait for landing slots.
I cannot find the original article about new arrival flight paths for London Heathrow, but I found this: https://www.heathrow.com/company/local-community/noise/opera...
> technology hasn't increased the number of planes or amount of airspace one ATC can manage
which should put pressure on the entity managing the ATC to increase an ATC's productivity via tech. And yet this hasn't happened. So why is that?
I say at a guess, that capitalism isn't working for the entity that manages ATC, because that entity is immune to the pressures of capitalism - ala, federal gov't doesn't care that these ATC isn't as "profitable".
In a scenario where different ATC zones are managed by separate, private entities that are looking to make a profit (e.g., the higher number planes in a single ATC zone, the more they profit) would spend to improve ATC's individual capacity.
You can look at contract towers to see how private entities handle ATC duties. They under-staff to the point that single controllers are handling the entire airspace without so much as coverage for the bathroom sometimes for the full length of their shift. Service is significantly worse in all aspects - the controllers aren't as well trained, they can't handle as much traffic as safely, and they're both less pleasant and less clear on the radio (phraseology, etc - not voice clarity)
> You never read about "ATC hiring crisis" in other countries. Why only the US?
The UK has a controller hiring/retention problem at the moment, too. The less lucrative airports keep losing controllers to the bigger players and can’t replace them. Periods of service reduction are common.
To add to this - it's just generally not a very interesting story internationally, so naturally we would, even if it were an exactly equal problem in every country, hear about it from the US most and UK secondarily due to our reading English-language sites like HN. If the polish media were constantly talking about about lack of ATCs in Poland, would we ever notice?