In the middle of an article in the Times about recruiting of air traffic controllers from among gamers, the following paragraph appeared:
“Under the Trump administration, the average processing time to onboard successful new recruits had been cut in half, from 13 months to about six and a half, she noted. The administration also improved the washout rate, from about a third of new trainees failing to graduate from air traffic control school to about a quarter.”
In other words, about one in twelve who started the school and would have washed out under the old administration are now being passed and all of them get only half as much training as they used to. I am curious what people familiar with flying, in particular @LSLGuy and @Broomstick think about this.
I’ve stated this before in the past, but I’m surprised Trump (or anyone anyone on the right, or any politicians at all, for that matter) would do anything that would make air travel more dangerous. They travel far more than most of us and are much, much more likely to have issues due to ATC shortages and/or poor training than most other Americans. This would’ve been a good place to spend money, even if it’s just for “selfish” reasons.
I know, even if you own your own super party jet you still fly in and out of public access airports. One dud controller, no matter how oligarcically right you are, dead is dead.
When you have the attitude that reality is what you say it is, then you tend to ignore the consequences of your behavior; consequences are for other people. Recall that billionaire who got crushed in his own submarine? It’s the same attitude applied to air travel.
That’s not true, though these sorts of flights certainly do get priority and often fighter escorts and such. But even AF1 is flying in the same national airspace as everyone else. I’ve flown government officials up to the speaker of the house. Above that it’s a military mission, but it’s just not possible to fly across the country and remain within military airspace. A lot of military airspace is actually usable by civilians anyway (look up MOAs).
I don’t know a great deal about ATC training except that it definitely takes a long time to spin up new trainees. It’s a complex job, very stressful and has a low retirement age. We would probably need to know more to judge this action by the Trumpers, though I would be very surprised if it turned out to be a thoughtful and nuanced decision.
If Air Force One flies into O’Hare or LAX or LaGuardia they use the exact same air traffic controllers as everyone else there - civilians ones. The US government doesn’t adequately support even the one ATC system we have, why would they have two set up in complete parallel?
It’s rather like saying that if the president’s motorcade drives through Manhattan it uses “military traffic lights”. It uses the traffic lights already there.
Even more so when AF1 flies aboard - if the PotUS is visiting, say, France, the pilots would use French ATC, not “military ATC”.
Conversely, when civilian pilots fly through “military airspace” - and there is a LOT of military airspace over the US - they talk to “military ATC”. Can’t speak for the big guys, but for us little folks in airplanes the experience from our end is indistinguishable from the civilian side.
I mean, Reagan fired all those air traffic controllers in the 1980s. Either he didn’t fear the consequences for his own air travel, or knew he’d rely on military ATCs for Air Force One.
This doesn’t apply to all politicians because some of them do fly the airlines with us unwashed masses, but the folks with enough wealth to either fly charter jets or own their own aircraft have the freedom to fly to smaller airports that don’t have “scheduled air service” i.e. airlines which have significantly less traffic. They might not even have an ATC person. This can sound frightening to the uninitiated but to a pilot it’s about an “scary” as merging on and off the freeway when there is little to no traffic around.
So… for the class with that level of money they may just not care about ATC. That’s something for the “little people”. They may view it as something optional and a waste of “their” tax money.
When the president’s motorcade drives through Manhattan does it use “military traffic lights”?
When Air Force One flies through civilian airspace it uses civilian ATC. Because military ATC doesn’t cover those areas. See post #8
I vaguely recall from that time discussion of using military ATC people to provide ATC service for everyone and that didn’t work … because there weren’t (and aren’t) enough ATC people in the military to cover all the needed slots.
We’ve had ATC staffing problems since Reagan, but that was 45 years ago and the crisis situation has come to be seen as “normal”. One reason the job is so high stress is because so many ATC facilities are understaffed, which means more work for the folks who remain. The recent government shutdowns, where people in high-stress, critical jobs were asked to work without pay for weeks made a number of folks say “F-this - I’m outta here”. That just makes the situation worse.
I was an air traffic controller in the Air Force, and we received about 18 weeks of initial training at Keesler AFB, MS. Training included VFR tower operations, GCA (ground controlled approach), and radar center. Upon graduating, we knew the theory of ATC but not real-life application. My first assignment was a VFR tower, and it involved about 3 to 4 months of training to familiarize myself with the three positions of coordinator, ground controller, and local controller. Local controller is the most challenging in handling inbound/outbound traffic. At that stage, I would be considered a novice controller needing more seasoning. For a new controller, I’d estimate about 1 year of initial training and OJT before being basically qualified but still requiring some supervision. I believe 6 1/2 months to qualify is insufficient.
Transferring from an existing to a new facility requires additional learning of new procedures, air space, etc., but the learning curve is much shorter.
Finally, I left the AF after my first tour, having no desire to go with the FAA due to the high stress of the job and after having read an article in Time Magazine on controllers. The article summarized the health and lifestyle of controllers as suffering from ulcers, high divorce rate, drinking problems, heart attacks and even analyzing stool samples revealing poor nutrition absorption. That did it for me.
My opinion is the more ATC the better, since a lot of the incidents of airline crashes that were the fault of the ATC were a result of being overworked with one person handling too might flights on their own.
I’d rather have 2 75% ATC working together than 1 100%.
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That is a misunderstanding of what was written - recruits are onboarded more quickly into ATC training, they are not graduating in half the time. The length of training has not changed. All recruits must go through the ATC training program in Oklahoma City and it takes ~3 months, depending on if the controller will do enroute or terminal. If they pass, there is further training at their assigned location, and it’s a considerable amount of time before they’re fully trained.
Source: I know multiple people that work in that program in OKC.
Apparently I misunderstood what onboarded meant. Although it seems like an obvious misunderstanding. I guess it is the time between applying for training and entering training. Still, it seems they have lowered their requirements at least somewhat.
We have seen two accidents in the past year caused by too few ATCs, not by undertrained ones, so it is even conceivable that the change is positive.