If there is one thing I've learned in the past few days, acutely so, is that the vast majority of people do not understand the sheer complexity of what it takes to have an aviation industry.
I think “sense of urgency”, “trouble shooting”, “understanding what is influencing other people’s actions” and even the ability to run a sort of “run a mental simulation and anticipate second order effects” are uncommon skills.
I worked with a good technical support team that worked on some high end equipment, and regardless of education the ability to troubleshoot could be found regardless and … in spite of education.
In my current coding role I find myself saying “I don’t care if he used an html tag wrong, he anticipated a problem with several tickets and avoided them.” Just the will / ability to do that is so valuable.
Some of the best troubleshooters I’ve ever met were comparatively uneducated factory workers in Mexico who just assumed they were diagnosing for diagnosing and fixing everything from forklifts to PBX systems.
A former truck driver was one of the best troubleshooters I ever met. We also had a guy who worked on as a carpenter, a lady who was a former bank teller.
Also very loyal / hard workers.
In every job I’ve had since then their resumes would have been tossed in the bin by HR, but they were hired in the late 90s when companies were desperate for warm bodies.
Redneck problem solving. I saw it growing up in Georgia too. People with 6th grade educations just knowing intuitively how to accomplish things without actually knowing the science behind it.
I do mean long term - unless you've got experience with dealing with complex tasks as you grow up, is there any chance at all that you'll be good at that? (Research link welcome)
ATC here (opinions are my own, not of the FAA, etc)
I agree those uncommon skills help make someone be a good controller.
Unfortunately I don't think the FAA is testing for that, of course the hiring process tests have changed since I was hired on.
(I hope someone from the FAA is reading this and tells CAMI. I was disappointed when there was no free text response on the survey they gave out a few weeks ago.)
> those uncommon skills help make someone be a good controller
Societies hiring norms are broken.
Everyone spends years at school before (a) being filtered by experts for aptitude, or (b) filtering themselves for fit. It is so sad to see teachers, lawyers, engineers, everyone waste years to discover they don't like a job or the job doesn't like them. The cost to society is percentage points of GDP.
Even worse is that nobody encourages us to quickly test different disciplines and discover unobvious fits. Internship or volunteer is the closest and requires me to do a lot of high-risk heavy lifting. Maybe I'd love being a teacher and maybe I'd be great at it. Who knows?
When I think of the “uncommon” hires (former truck driver, bank teller) who I encountered who had those skills I mentioned and thrived… they would never be hired today.
After going through the hiring process (application, test, drug screen, medical screening), they give you an academy start date and whether you'll be Terminal or En Route.
People who pass the Terminal training at the FAA Academy are given a list of low-level (lower pay) towers to choose from that are seemingly-random. It could be that there's a spot at a tower in your home town, but that spot is reserved for the class that graduates one week after your class, which means you can't go there, you have to take from the list you're given or quit (and some people do quit at this point).
I like to think of myself as a good troubleshooter and would probably have made a good police inspector or FAA analyst. I usually have good intuitions and find root causes pretty fast.
But -- I don't think I would survive two minutes as an air controller even if my life depended on it. This is the job I probably feel the least able to do and the one that impresses me the most. Not just the pressure, but the ability to hold so much information in one's head at the same time, and hold a conversation with many different people talking to you from moving objects which you need to understand the exact location of, switching context constantly -- that's crazy.
Kind of like being an instant translator in multiple languages at the same time and if you make but one mistake, hundreds of people die.
So if I struggled through education, got my degree, I have a few jobs, but I don't have IT, I'm screwed?
No, I don't want to be management. No, I don't want to have a hard job. I want to be a NEET basically. If I work I just work and go home anyway and watch YouTube.
This is all true. But I don't think in London, Paris or Amsterdam you have military helicopters doing training flights at night, across the landing and departures tracks of a busy civilian airport. Specially when they dont even share the same frequencies and have to rely on visual cues...
Of course I agree with you, but is it that complicated?
There’s a cynical, non actionable POV: “people want immediate gratification” or “it’s all marketing” or “security theatre” or whatever.
Another is: “what design for airline safety gives laypeople the aesthetic experience of safety that also aligns with real safety?”
That’s hard! You can’t just rely on the invisible hand of a market to create that. Someone still needs to go and do it.
I’ve never once read a suggestion for an alternative to the TSA for example. I’m sure people have written whole PhDs about this. Give them a voice. You’re already talking to a very literate audience. Go for it.
I worked with a good technical support team that worked on some high end equipment, and regardless of education the ability to troubleshoot could be found regardless and … in spite of education.
In my current coding role I find myself saying “I don’t care if he used an html tag wrong, he anticipated a problem with several tickets and avoided them.” Just the will / ability to do that is so valuable.