Air Traffic Control

https://computer.rip/2025-05-11-air-traffic-control.html

125•1317•1d ago

Comments

_whiteCaps_•5h ago

Re WWII use of radio:

My grandfather flew Typhoons, and they operated 'cab rank' as part of the 2nd Tactical Air Force. The Army would radio in coordinates of German tanks or fortified positions, and the Typhoons would come in with their rockets / bombs / cannons. I wish he was still around so I could ask him how that was done. A central dispatcher? Or did they talk to the Army directly? Not sure.

zitterbewegung•4h ago

Forward air control would get a map grid or other description of the target from Infantry and Aircraft would be dispatched to the target . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_air_control_operations...

01HNNWZ0MV43FF•1h ago

And before GPS they'd reckon their position off of landmarks and terrain?

_whiteCaps_•1h ago

Yup, and there were apparently fake towns set up with lights that the German night bombers would hit instead of the real populated areas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_site

caycep•1h ago

As an aside, wasn't there some HN post a few months back about how carrier warfare in the Pacific led to more and more complex schemes of ATC, aka "Fighter Directors", including early Naval computers devoted to figuring out where to put airplanes in the right place at the right time right time?

smdyc1•29m ago

I read in A Bridge Too Far, the Hawker Typhoons that attacked German positions at the start of the Operation (called in by the Forward Air Comtroller), flew under the opening barrage and one Typhoon disintegrated as it was hit by a shell. I've often wondered if there was any system in place to prevent that sort of thing.

smdyc1•27m ago

I also read there was some difficulty in target designation as the pilots had different maps, so the grid coordinates were off.

lmm•23m ago

Hitting an aircraft in flight was hard enough if you were aiming at it, I doubt they felt any need to take countermeasures against such a rare occurrence.

dilap•3h ago

"maybe airplanes got too woke"

I don't think there's any debate that ATC staffing is a major issue right now, and the FAA really did blow up its hiring pipeline to further DEI goals

Cf https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...

kevingadd•3h ago

When your hiring pipeline is so obliterated that you decide to fire about 400 of your employees. Makes sense.

seliopou•3h ago

Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42944203

Rebelgecko•3h ago

That sample hiring quiz (https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment) is batshit insane, to the point I can hardly believe it's real (but it seems like it is?)

blackguardx•2h ago

I read through the list. It seems to be standard Meyers-Briggs type questions. I don't think that this is that useful a metric, but I have been given similar questions by private sector companies and was also given a weirder one by the patent office in 2006.

gs17•43m ago

If you look at how they're scored, it's worse than Meyers-Briggs. Wanting a specific personality type for the job makes a lot more sense than many of these. Most don't give any points, many have labels that increase in number but the points aren't logically related to them (unemployed for 3-4 months before this job? No points for you! 1-2 or 5-6? Have a lot of points!). Even ignoring the rest of the story, it's a very flawed test.

viraptor•2h ago

Questions about school, personality and experience? That's... just about normal to fill out for corp jobs. It's questionable if it's useful, but it's very common, far from batshit insane.

gs17•41m ago

The insanity is in the scoring for it. You should try out the quiz and see how many questions are graded in a way that you expect. Although I did pass, purely due to being bad at history in college.

viraptor•11m ago

I've seen worse tests. It's stupid, but it's weird how aggressive people seem about it now compared to this topic getting lots of attention in the industry over decades now. Even this year WSJ mentions astrology, numerology, graphology in business https://archive.is/ZvJKX

So why is this specific case something that seems to get people out with pitchforks? There are thousands of other cases and they should've been all laughed at until nobody proposes a personality test again. It's all bad and the attention on this one case makes me doubt people genuinely care about profiling and broken hiring in general. (Rather than joining the dei-bad bandwagon)

yujzgzc•3h ago

That questionnaire looks bad but from these links I didn't see a clear evaluation of impact on hiring number. It doesn't sound like recruitment was going great to begin with?

buckle8017•1h ago

The answers to the questionnaire were given to black candidates in a phone call by the people who wrote the thing.

It's Jim Crow Uno Reverse.

The entire hiring pipeline for ATC was autists who love planes, not white people, not Asian people, autists.

icehawk•2h ago

Given the previous discussion on that very thread has 703 comments, your, "I don't think there's any debate that [...] and the FAA really did blow up its hiring pipeline to further DEI goals" is pretty provably false.

ryandrake•2h ago

Handwavey claims of “DEI” and “woke” are going to be the go-to vague scapegoats for everything, for the next four years at least.

icehawk•2h ago

Given the fact that I went from +3 to -2, for a very factual statement (the standard deviation of comments on the front page at the time was 65.0) yeah.

RandomBacon•1h ago

While there was over 10 times as many applicants as there were spots, there were people that went to college and studied ATC who weren't able to become Air Traffic Controllers because of the Biographical Questionnaire.

You can't say an opinion is false - it's an opinion.

The fact is though, that the Biographical Questionaire affected hiring. Did it make a noticeable difference though? Who knows. We just know for certain that people who studied for this job didn't get in.

spinf97•21m ago

When you say "I don't think there is a debate" and then someone points out there is a debate, you are sorta proven wrong!

mitthrowaway2•1m ago

That would really depend on the comments.

dullcrisp•2h ago

This seems like it was pretty bad, but I worry we may be doing the same thing to every federal agency now.

comeonbro•1h ago

This involved a completely nonsensical and arbitrary biographical screening test, which:

1. was designed to statistically select for members of favored identity groups and against members of disfavored identity groups, and not in any way to measure ATC job aptitude, resulting in highly-scored questions like "The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was" where the only correct answer was "Science", and failing the test disqualified you permanently

2. then-current FAA employees distributed the exact answer key to outside racial identity organizations to give to their members

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4542755/139/24/brigida-...

-----

Example questions with the score given for each answer:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.182...

    15. The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:
    A. SCIENCE (+15)
    B. MATH (0)
    C. ENGLISH (0)
    D. HISTORY/SOCIAL SCIENCES (0)
    E. PHYSICAL EDUCATION (0)

    16. Of the following, the college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:
    A. SCIENCE (0)
    B. MATH (0)
    C. ENGLISH (0)
    D. HISTORY/POLITICAL SCIENCE (+15)
    E. DID NOT ATTEND COLLEGE (0)

    29. My peers would probably say that having someone criticize my performance (i.e. point out a mistake) bothers me:
    A. MUCH LESS THAN MOST (+8)
    B. SOMEWHAT LESS THAN MOST (+4)
    C. ABOUT THE SAME AS MOST (+8)
    D. SOMEWHAT MORE THAN MOST (0)
    E. MUCH MORE THAN MOST (+10)

titanomachy•41m ago

Is this real? Has the person responsible for this been fired yet?

viraptor•31m ago

This story has really annoying results, because while there were dumb decisions made about the hiring process, people are also blowing some things out of proportion.

There's lots of terrible personality tests in recruitment and they're sometimes abused for various purposes. This one is just mildly bad compared to for example corpos hiring people to analyse the signature/writing style of the candidate. But handing out the key to that test was just terrible.

Then there's another one where people reacted strongly to someone handing out highly scoring words for the resume... where the words would be included in any basic coaching like "leader", "ownership", "delivered", etc.

It's hard to even talk about this when people have kneejerk response to a few key phrases here.

ilamont•2h ago

Kind of curious how air traffic control evolved in other countries, and how the international flight system works with handoffs between countries, particularly in Europe and the Caribbean where national borders tend to be relatively small.

linschn•44m ago

This was indeed normalized very early on in post WWII european construction:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocontrol

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Air Traffic Control

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