Even flying (commercially?) in other countries is still probably safer than driving.
you only hear about the dozen or so crashes every year. You don't hear about the 30-40 million other flights that don't have issues in a year.
The nation’s air traffic control infrastructure is aging, with 51 out of 138 systems currently labeled as unsustainable — some using components more than 50 years old.
An announcement regarding technology upgrades and infrastructure improvements is expected next week.
Haven't they been trying to modernize air traffic control since forever?
I wonder what announcements they're going to make.
Just looked it up and I'm not far off. NextGen started in 2007 and is still ongoing.
This discussion of ATC makes me nervous, as mandated sudden adoption of new, often proprietary tech nationwide has created a lot of nightmares in other fields like healthcare. Instead of learning lessons from that, we seem to be repeating it over again but even more so.
Furthermore, the Air Force could additionally take the Terminal Air Control Party (TACPs) - think of them as a Radio/Strike guy that coordinates Air Strikes, that accompany tactical platoons and cross train them into Air Traffic Control, further augmenting their ability to perform this role.
ATCs regularly go TDY to support other locations.
You’re conflating ATC training with a location
And to add on what others have said: yes CCTs represent a pool of proven ATC candidates, but depleting that pool just to knee-jerk a short term-ish solution creates an equal problem for the military -- and it's a hell of a lot harder to recruit adequate candidates for CCT. For example, they have to do like, lots of pushups...
It would fit in well with the present administrations policy orientation, both toward militarization and toward making th country weaker and more fragile in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_employees_in_the_Un...
ATC should probably be private like it is in Canada, where it functions very well, and also better lines up with how the federal gov operates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nav_Canada
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-ai...
The other big problem is Obama changed the hiring test from testing intelligence to testing personality in a bid to increase diversity. There was a lawsuit over this. The effect was academy failure rates soared and because class sizes are fixed there was a shortfall in the number of graduates making it to towers to train.
These generally are not positions that people compete for across the nation. Once in a particular airspace, controllers will generally stay in that airspace. An outsider unfamiliar with an airspace would be at significant disadvantage to any local.
This is an interesting example of a mangled quote. It's a perfectly grammatical English string. But in the phrase "a desirable position difficult for a new graduate", what's difficult for a new graduate is the position. In the sentence you pulled the quote from, what's difficult for a new graduate is the getting, a word omitted from your quote.
Something similar has happened with "nullius in verba", which is purported to be a quote from Latin, but is actually a selection of unrelated words from a larger sentence in Latin.
Our union is a joke. They send emails saying they're "monitoring the situation" instead of talking with the media stating our case for better working conditions.
Our salaries have not kept up with the industry. Do not use this to try to push an anti-union agenda.
Essentially the USA made a political choice to negotiate with and on occasion criminally prosecute Mafia-related leadership in national labor unions, instead of "allowing" the uncertainty of committed socialist labor leaders.
It was even worse than that. What they actually did was write up a phony “personality test” and distribute the answer key to applicants who were members of preferred racial organizations.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
He stated he stressed things like answering questions like an air traffic control "and we’re alpha personalities, we’re dominating, we don’t take no for an answer." He also mentions that he got calls, from multiple people, saying they failed the behavioral test.
So it seems that while he did coach answers, they weren't the literal test answers, but rather advice one could have gotten from public sources with enough research or presumably, talking to some FAA air traffic controllers.
In the end, the report stated the findings in the investigation did not warrant a referral to a federal prosecutor.
Sorry, I don’t buy it. The evidence from the still-in-progress lawsuit is pretty clear.
There’s no other reasonable explanation for the biographical questionnaire and its utterly arbitrary scoring criteria.
You ever worked in an organization that had an OIG and met the folks that work there? They wear the same uniform you do, and their behavior betrays that fact.
Of course. I've also seen them first-hand nearly ruin multiple careers and marriages over allegations that were easily disproven at the onset of the investigation (Person wasn't even on base when incident allegedly occurred in this case).
By the time the investigations had cleared the accused of wrongdoing they were already passed up for a promotion and nearly ready to retire after 4 years of needless investigation. Part of the 'punishment' is the investigation itself. In my experience OIGs are political beasts because they're made of up humans which are inherently tribal/political.
I was saying nothing to the veracity of alternative theory.
This is a straw man.
Is it really unreasonable to say that pushing for diversity was a notable goal of the Obama administration?
https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/president-signs-order-promote-...
It is okay to admit that leaders you agree with are also imperfect. Of course Obama didn't deliberately want to destroy the ATC pipeline, but clearly it was an unintended consequence. I think it's important to understand where people who disagree politically are coming from.
Believe me, when Trump spouted all that schlock after the crash, it was humbling to find the element of truth to it. I don't think it caused that crash: it was a disaster waiting to happen in that airspace. But when I saw in black and white a slide from the FAA discussing how much performance they were willing to sacrifice for diversity, do I really disagree with those who think the answer should be "none"?
I see no reason to buy that framing though and plenty of reason to think it's bunk. Even liberals can fall into the trap though, because policies to promote diversity are explicitly stated while it's been a bit (although not all that long in the grand scheme of things) since the biases that can lead to prioritizing white men are actually written down. That's how the "tradeoff" ends up in things like the FAA slides. It's unclear what factual support that slide had, but clearly the author just took it as a given, as do a lot of other people.
I believe one of the comment threads on the post summed it up best. There's an issue with the water pressure, and we're attempting to fix it by mucking about with the faucet rather than upstream at the source (https://open.substack.com/pub/tracingwoodgrains/p/the-full-s...)
The author provided various footnotes backing up his assertions
> Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” ... On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute. When they tested alternative measures like biographical data, they found that the test scores predicted 27% of variance in performance, while the “biodata” predicted only 2%. It just didn’t do much.9
See also e.g. https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1754214242956235132
I don't think that's a wild take at all and actually agree with you. But I also don't think it's a wild take to think there may be barriers to attracting or hiring good minority candidates independent of whether or not there is also a pipeline problem, and there is no reason you'd have to pick just one or the other. The water pressure analogy only works if you presuppose the water pressure issue is exclusively upstream, and of course in the real world faucets can be the source of waterflow problems as well.
I should also add that I'm not defending the particular case discussed by the blogger, although I'm less sold on the idea that it was clearly bad than a lot of other people seem to be. But even a bad example would not strongly support the idea that an EO or other push to promote diversity and equal opportunity must inevitably lead to lower performance.
But I do think it's an easy trap. I think in general it's that rock/hard-place that comes from almost any measurement, aka Goodhart's Law / McNamara fallacy, familiar to probably anyone who has worked their way through a performance review with metrics/OKRs.
There's a fine line separating "the Government-wide Plan shall highlight comprehensive strategies for agencies to identify and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity that may exist in the Federal Government's recruitment, hiring, promotion, retention, professional development, and training policies and practices" (which does not on the face of it require any lowering of standards -- but evidently they concluded that aptitude test was such a barrier) and "we want to change the fact that X% of ATCs are white men" -- what if they find and remove any significant barriers, but the percentage still remains for other reasons (e.g. the "earlier in the pipeline" thing), but there's still pressure to equalize?
I'll give a different-but-related example from my own experience. A few years ago they changed the employee referral bonus program: going forward, if you referred a female candidate that got hired, you'd get twice the referral bonus vs. a male candidate*. Well-intentioned, now we've introduced a direct financial incentive to get the right gender for the job instead of the right person for the job...
*If, like me, you find this astonishing and question the legality -- apparently it's the "neutral" policy that may be discriminatory! Because of the base rate: https://hrdailyadvisor.com/2015/07/19/referral-bonuses-diver...
By the way, short story by Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron
They've done studies on this, but I think even without the studies it's just obvious to everyone:
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-...
I'm not saying that other racism doesn't exist. But I am saying that complaints from white people on account of their whiteness is pathetic at best and willfully ignorant at worst. At the end of the day, white people, which includes me, are advantaged in virtually all areas of modern society.
It would be easy to say that I got where I am based purely on my own skill and intellect. It would also not be true. The zip code I was born in, the schools I went to, and the overall landscape of modern America have an incalculable influence in my success.
How much do you think "white privilege" rhetoric resonates with, say, French-speaking Mainers? Who also had the experience of "your name got you scorned from jobs or spit on in school" https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/us/longscorned-in-maine-f...
Humans are racist because humans are tribal. Yes, we should work on improving as a society, but don't be surprised that making broad pejorative racial statements doesn't do it.
This is a far better argument:
> The zip code I was born in, the schools I went to, and the overall landscape of modern America have an incalculable influence in my success.
I would also add to that, "the values, attention, nutrition, and opportunities provided by my parents in my formative years"
> > The zip code I was born in, the schools I went to, and the overall landscape of modern America have an incalculable influence in my success.
Right, this is a very good argument. That's the argument behind CRT, lol.
What you're missing is that what I described is tangibly and undeniably intertwined with race. Most of the US is still segregated. Why do you think I mentioned zip codes? For fun? Do you truly believe that has nothing to do with race or demographics? Even you could not be so ignorant.
While it's easy and fun to believe race is just something that exists outside of our world, it's just not true. It's linked with crime, with homelessness, with drug use, with school funding, with opportunities, with healthcare outcomes, with pedestrian deaths, with access to medicine, with access to DMVs, with access to voting, and on and on. And those are all tangible.
You can say that I got where I was based not on my race, but rather on my zipcode. Sure. But my zipcode is directly associated with race, so in reality, you agree with me.
I think I'm going to head out for now, but give me a holler when this strategy brings someone over to your point of view
> so in reality, you agree with me
Just so! You aren't actually arguing with what I said, which was basically, "I don't think your framing of this is effective", which is what I meant by "this is a far better argument"
"The difference between cannibals and liberals is that cannibals eat only their enemies" - LBJ
Look, I'm a white man. The unfortunate truth is that white people pretty much always have an advantage, because of unconscious bias.
White people don't need formal systems that advantage them because they're already advantaged and have been for a long time.
Critical race theory is a real area of study and there are multiple studies backing this up. The systemic advantage white people face is so painfully real and obvious that, if you deny it, you are delusional.
> Your shahada is not shared by everyone else.
It's not "shahada", it's science. Just because it makes you feel slightly uncomfortable doesn't mean it's not real. I encourage you to find a box of tissues, and get over it.
A lot of people work backwards. They don't like the conclusions drawn by CRT and social studies so they work backwards and conclude that it's based on things that aren't real. But these areas of studies work forwards. Meaning, they identify obvious, real, and undeniable racial systems, such as redlining, and then study the long-term effects of that.
If you think something like, say, preventing black Americans from owning property, has no long-term effects on the demographic then you've probably just never thought about it. This isn't a TV show, this isn't a picture perfect depiction of a country. Our institutions are old, and things don't just - poof - get fixed. Integration was messy, and it took decades. Reconstruction wasn't linear, it progressed and then regressed. Segregation never disappeared - to this day, most cities are segregated. To just conclude "well that doesn't matter", based on zero research or understanding, is intellectually lazy.
Of course, if you do start to do research into it, congratulations, you have re-discovered the discipline of CRT. Because that's all it is. So, you have no choice but to stay ignorant, because otherwise you threaten your entire belief system. And we can't have that, can we?
Just don't proselytize, the rest of us find it as annoying as the jehovash witnesses.
With that out of the way, let me go back to this:
> If you show up to the interview and you're white, congratulations, you're 50% of the way there.
This is where we have the difference of "base rate" vs "lived experience". My example is gender as opposed to race but it generalizes: I have an expensive and difficult hobby that is largely male-dominated. As such there are various scholarships and mentor groups for women. As I open my pockets and overcome challenges, seeing these posters around telling me that if I were a woman, I would have money and mentorship laid at my feet, it is not difficult for me to see why the rhetoric of privilege doesn't land easily.
Going back to race, at my employer there are various employee groups for LGBTQ, Connected Black Professionals, Asian Heritage, and so on. How privileged does a regular white guy without any particular connections feel? (Assume he then goes home and tries to help his high-achieving white teenage son strategize on college applications)
To reiterate, I am not disagreeing with the underlying "stacked deck", but I also don't blame those for whom it doesn't land, because at the very least: the marketing sucks
See also: the blue-collar worker who barely graduated high school and worked in a factory before we shipped it off to China, without which the community has become poor and run-down and ravaged by drug addiction. How privileged do you think he feels? (Is it any wonder he voted for who he did?)
Of course, bureaucrats do stupid shit when they are attempting to please their masters, and this is a prime example. But that does not absolve them of their responsibility in dreaming it up and executing it.
https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/president-signs-order-promote-...
... which is personality.
Not trying to defend or not defend what actually happened, but there's growing use of personality measures in various vocations for this very reason.
Apart from that, the intelligence is certainly needed, but with a heavy dose of spatial reasoning. the right kind of 'calm under pressure' is an excellent command of the details of ATC; anything else here is just lethal apathy.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
Until an emergency or a conflict suddenly occurs. There's often very little you can do here other than quickly and clearly provide the necessary information and instructions to aid pilots in averting the disaster. The pilot is in full control during emergencies and you're simply there to give them anything they need. In a severe emergency and in an ATC center they're going to dedicate you to the emergency and bring another controller on to manage other planes in that airspace.
As the technology became available to give planes the ability to see and avoid each other with Traffic Advisories and automated Conflict Resolutions we made it mandatory equipment for passenger transports. We made it mandatory for pilots to obey this system with _higher priority_ than any prior or new instructions from ATC.
So you want people who think ahead, constantly prepare for conflicts, and have a reliable level of vigilance. So when the emergency happens they're situationally well prepared and capable of managing all available resources that their stress levels barely increase. A bad weather day with lots of cancelled flights and closed airports should be the highest stress factor they face in their careers.
So nearly every org in our government has been decimated twice over, including many critical ones, under staffed ones, and efficient ones. Is it far fetched that people would now be incredulous about the well being of the few departments not yet decimated twice over?
this is okay for the post office or DMV, but probably not as okay for air traffic control infrastructure.
https://apnews.com/article/faa-firings-trump-doge-safety-air...
Something like the FAA or FDA would never be conducted by the private sector. Because they're money sinks, and knowing how safe something is, is bad, actually. The private sector would much rather be blissfully unaware. Less liability that way.
The only time something like the FDA "fails" is when they give too much plausible deniability to the private sector. Like when they like J&J handle their asbestos BS in the 70s. And then... we got 50 years of asbestos baby powder. Oops! Should've never trusted them.
The solution is not to "de-wokify" anything - nor is it to "wokify" anything. All of that stuff is a sideshow. The solution would be to offer massive incentives in order to get highly competent people to see ATC as a good career choice. That means big salaries, very flexible training timelines, and in general, willingness to spend a lot of money on the program to make it attractive. ATC is an intense job being done by people who are under a lot of strain. It doesn't sound appealing to most. That would need to change.
What am I missing here?
monero-xmr•3d ago
> All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.
> Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.
> … Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.”
- FDR, 1937 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-the-resolut...
duxup•3d ago
I am all for evaluating things in an effort to establish more government efficiency.
But that means you need smart people who understand that domain evaluating, and you need to be able to bring smart people on board to do the work…. not artificially low wages/ arbitrary cuts…
jedberg•3d ago
If managers could set arbitrary salaries, the employees could just agree to cut their manager in on 10% of their raise.
This probably happens outside of government, but it's just the private org who loses money, so it's up to them to stop it. But in the case of the government, it's the taxpayers who lose.
duxup•3d ago
jedberg•3d ago
To move to a system where "good people make more money", someone has to decide who the "good" people are. That person is susceptible to corruption. Moreso than in a private enterprise and with wider consequences, because government is not a business. So overpaying people doesn't have the same consequences as doing it privately.
Jtsummers•3d ago
There are various *demo (lab, acq, I think some others) that are basically the same as NSPS (in principle) and ostensibly merit based. But they're also capped because of the correspondence to GS grades. Pay can increase much faster, in theory, than under GS but also you can be denied any raise except the general pay increase (below inflation, so a real pay cut even if a nominal pay raise) if your performance is poor.
ThunderSizzle•3d ago
Jtsummers•3d ago
There are some jobs that will push you through grades on some regular cadence (usually 6-12 months in each grade), but those are usually "internships". New hires getting brought in at $50-60k/year GS-5 or GS-7 positions and moved up over 2-4 years into a GS-11 or GS-12 position. After that, they're back to competing for positions again for anything higher than GS-11/12 or whatever their target grade was.
[0] Technically there's step X, which means you're paid above step 10 for that grade. This is relatively rare, but when it happens they only get half the general pay increase each year until step 10 catches up to them and then they are step 10.
QuadmasterXLII•3d ago
spangry•3d ago
Although there are other ways to limit corruption risk, namely process and transparency. In the Australian government you can pay someone higher than standard pay through an Individual Flexibility Agreement (IFA). But in order to do so there’s a whole process the manager has to go through where they have to justify the higher salary on a limited set of grounds (e.g. higher market value of role) and then get it all signed off by someone higher up the chain.
That’s the process side. On the transparency side you could publish everyone’s salaries and then it becomes obvious when a manger is paying their second cousin way above normal for some strange reason.
philwelch•3d ago
fallingknife•3d ago
monero-xmr•3d ago
Then it’s, “how do we quantify success without the profit motive for something society needs, but doesn’t earn a profit”?
Then I would conclude, the solution is a small government with a hyper-competitive process for providing public services, with actual democratic feedback on the success of such provided services with teeth to remove bad private sector contractors.
fn-mote•3d ago
The Chicago political machine is calling. They want your jobs. All of your jobs.
Wait until you’re doing a great job but have the wrong political take on a situation.
Make sure you’re regularly doing favors for people and giving out what freebies you can so you stay in office during the next cycle.
It sounded great in the post, but democracy is hard so don’t expect an easy answer.
duxup•3d ago
But they don’t because of the salary limit?
I don’t think that’s the case.
jltsiren•3d ago
The issue with unions negotiating with politicians is mostly a consequence of an excessive number of political appointees. Many things would be cleaner with more career civil servants in top positions. Top officials would have fixed-term appointments, and they could not join unions or be fired without a criminal conviction. They would run their departments, while political appointees would only set the goals and directions with little direct control. And then the rest would be more like ordinary employees who just happen to be working for the government.
Government employees are a mostly irrelevant category anyway. Depending on the time and place, the exact same job can be performed by an actual government employee, outsourced to a private contractor, or done by an employee of a company fully owned by the government. What the employee can or cannot do should depend more on the actual role than on the administrative structures above them.