[matthewkayin]

While modernizing ATC in the US may be overdue, the real issue here is that ATC in the US has been understaffed, underpaid, and overworked for a while now.

My father works ATC and his schedule has him working overtime, 6 shifts a week, including overnight shifts, meaning that there is literally not a day of the week where he doesn't spend at least some time in the tower.

If that's the reality for even half of the controllers, it's no surprise that we've been seeing more and more traffic accidents lately.

[bikelang]

Seems like everyone, everywhere is overworked, underpaid, and under supported. How much longer can we frogs survive the boiling?

[rstuart4133]

> Seems like everyone, everywhere is overworked, underpaid, and under supported. How much longer can we frogs survive the boiling?

I'm Australian. In Australia, if you are forced to work overtime the rate of pay goes up, by 50% or if it's extreme, double. As a consequence "underpaid" isn't a common complaint of people working lots of overtime.

This has some negative consequences of course. If labour is plentiful you can have lots of people on hand and pay them on an hours-worked basis. The same deal applies - if you go beyond 40 hours a week their rate of pay goes up, but that shouldn't happen if labour is plentiful and management is on the ball.

But if, as in this case labour isn't plentiful, then they are going to have to fix it some other way - like paying to train more staff. What the employers can't do is offload the problem entirely onto their employees, so there are forces compelling them to get their act together.

The OP makes it sound like the dynamic is very different in the US.

[jjmarr]

The USA has time and a half overtime above 40 hours as well under the FLSA. This applies to ATC.

Unfortunately, this is now priced into certain government jobs in the USA and people rely on it. Americans see the obscene amounts of money and hours as a challenge until they actually burn out.

ATC isn't even the worst offender. Law enforcement and prison guards can pull 100+ hours a week on a regular basis. This is how prison guards can pull $400k/year.

[FireBeyond]

> ATC isn't even the worst offender. Law enforcement and prison guards can pull 100+ hours a week on a regular basis. This is how prison guards can pull $400k/year.

There's definitely elements of that - but part of that is that many pensions are based on the two highest earning years of your career, so it's "common" among cops when they are planning to retire to spend two years working every possible piece of OT available, to maximize their pension income.

[SZJX]

Sounds like a weird incentivization for sure. Why not base the pension on the average over all the years worked as in many other countries? When you offer such incentives, people will naturally work in such a way.

[ralferoo]

Because you'll loose half a career's worth of inflationary salary rises that way. Also, women might work part time after having children which would skew the average annual salary down. Over a 40 year career, just from inflation alone, you'd be getting about half your final salary that way, even ignoring any increases later on from being better qualified or taking on more responsibility.

Mind you, in the UK, defined benefits pension schemes are very rare nowadays, but where they exist they are defined as a percentage of the final year salary with that company, so the highest 2 year thing seems a bit weird to me but for a different reason.

[tom_alexander]

In the US, social security is based on the 35 highest paying years. If that system is good enough for social security, I don't see why we don't do the same for government pensions.

[kelipso]

Much more obvious solution is to not include overtime pay in the pension calculation.

[Gravityloss]

But wouldn't it be cheaper for them to just hire more people to do the same amount of hours so that no overtime was used? And they would get better work output as well, since people would be rested.

[jjmarr]

Yes, but it's a local maximum since hiring more people is going to be expensive/difficult until overtime is fixed.

Some state prisons have escaped the overtime pit by offering huge sign-on bonuses and doing a hiring surge. But it takes longer to train ATC than a CO.

[gameman144]

It would, yes. There's large worker/union pressure in many of these fields to not take away overtime by reducing hours, though, since it is such a huge part of total compensation.

[jmalicki]

It would be cheaper.

But then you don't get to go on stage with a chainsaw and bragging about how you're downsizing government.

[Computer0]

Workers in these jobs in the US have less protections than the private sector as they are deemed imperative to operating the country. As such it is illegal for them to strike for better wages, but they do receive 1.5x wages during their mandatory overtime work, and have a base wage over twice that of the annual median income, before their significant overtime income. I think the burn out is a bigger cause.

[thaumasiotes]

> The OP makes it sound like the dynamic is very different in the US.

The obvious reason that US air traffic control has been understaffed for "a while now" is that, roughly a decade ago, the FAA caved in to political pressure to stop having so many white controllers by decommissioning any hiring practices that posed a risk of hiring white controllers.

This meant the size of the workforce froze, stressing the system.

Tracing Woodgrains went into a good amount of depth on the scandal: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...

[wahern]

That scandal exacerbated the problem, but there would still be a severe shortage had it never happened. The core issues, pay and grueling hours, predate that scandal by decades.

[jacquesm]

I've met truck drivers in the US that were driving 16 hours per day. I'm not sure if it is legal or not but it certainly wasn't considered exceptional. It's insane the kind of pressure some jobs put you under. Now ATC has obviously more potential for misery than a truck driver, still a passenger bus / truck collision isn't a small thing either.

[ics]

16 hours is generally not allowed unless there are severe adverse conditions, but it's only recently with ELD (Electronic Logging Device) mandates that these rules are being forced to a degree. Before that, many drivers would simply go as many hours as they humanly could to keep moving.

See: https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-...

[jcgrillo]

They would keep multiple overlapping logbooks so they could always present a "legitimate" log to DOT.

[ethbr1]

It's mostly around engineering whether you have enough downtime to "move" your "driven" hours into.

For long-haul it's probably a bit different, but other routes have a lot of annoying delays.

E.g. waiting at a port, waiting for a trailer replacement, waiting for receiving, etc.

Afaik, these are all classified as driving hours for logbook purposes.

It creates a situation where you legally have to park a truck on the side of the road when you hit your cap, even though 1/2 of your day might have been waiting around for something.

Imho, that's a bit ridiculous, and I'm sympathetic to shadow logbooks there.

For the 16 hours straight cross-country pounders, less-so. But long-haul is what autonomous trucking will likely eat first.

[chasd00]

I forgot about this, you're right. I remember some of my family members talking about this. (much of my extended family was in trucking)

[chasd00]

much of my extended family was in teh trucking industry one way or the other. Before the electronic books you had manual log books. Lying in your log book was a very big deal, i want to say you could get in trouble with the law in addition to getting fired. Before that though it was even more the wild west than it is now. My step-father knew my grandfather's "outfit" and he would joke that if they had a chain long enough to go around it they would haul it no questions asked.

This is from a popular 90s country song:

sleep would be best

but i just can't afford to rest

have to be in Denver at morning light

- much too young to feel this damn old

[jacquesm]

This was a while ago and I was absolutely shocked. In Europe they'd impound your truck.

[rabidonrails]

Truck drivers and the hours they're on the road need to be logged per law. Most of this is done (or perhaps MUST be done) electronically.

[markdown]

Things are quite DOGEy in the US.

[dangus]

I don’t think this statement is helpful because it effectively downplays the government mismanagement and industry-specific plight of ATC workers by expanding and generalizing the problem.

It’s analogous to this hypothetical conversation:

“XYZ Politician is a corrupt official who needs to be investigated”

“Well actually, corruption is everywhere.”

See how that downplays and changes the subject at hand?

Not everyone is overworked and underpaid like ATC workers. The US government needs to implement real reforms to rectify that situation.

[jacquesm]

That's true, but there are not that many jobs that have so many lives on the line as ATC.

[tdeck]

They tried.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...

[wartywhoa23]

Well, some critical mass of frogs must recognize and accept the fact we've been boiled, and then go after the cooks.

Instead, you find that this critcal mass is happy being boiled with their eyes wide shut.

[Sabu87]

True, few people managing lots of airplanes at the same time...

[wilg]

Not at all, the ATC situation is different. It doesn't help to try to jam a general (and wrong!) societal comment here, just diffuses responsibility.

[Gud]

Uhm, not everyone. There is a lot of people who live on passive capital income. They contribute absolutely nothing yet they control the economy.

[parasubvert]

Lots of people are overpaid and underworked too. Or in bullshit jobs, or both.

[ModernMech]

The point of the frogs boiling metaphor is the frogs in fact do not survive.

[Zambyte]

The point of using the metaphor is that something will have to give if we don't course correct.

[y1n0]

No it isn’t. The metaphor is that if you throw a frog into already boiling water it would attempt to jump out. If you start with tepid water and increase the temperature slowly enough they don’t. Sadly this was proven through experiment in the 1800s.

It’s an argument that if you make changes slowly enough people won’t notice.

[singleshot_]

In the experiment you mention, before they put the frog in the cool water, they removed its brain. Then they boiled the water. The frog did not jump out of the water because it had no brain. The experiment proved the opposite of what you are asserting.

[Schmerika]

If every wealthy country had a frog to represent their culture of taking care of workers (strong unions, workers rights, vacation days, not having healthcare tied to their employment, maternity and paternity leave, equitable pay etc), there is one particular frog which most would describe as having had its brain removed.

[ralferoo]

From the wikipedia article linked to just below this reply, it says that the first such experiment is as you described. But then goes on to say:

Other 19th-century experiments were purported to show that frogs did not attempt to escape gradually heated water. An 1872 experiment by Heinzmann was said to show that a normal frog would not attempt to escape if the water was heated slowly enough, which was corroborated in 1875 by German scientist Carl Fratscher.

I don't see the point of the experiment with the brain removed, but given that they did the experiment with intact frogs as well confirms their original hypothesis.

However, later on in the article, it's been disputed in recent years: as the water is heated by about 2 °F (about 1 °C), per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if it can. Earlier it also says that frogs put into already water just die (not mentioned, but presumably from shock) and so don't have a chance to start attempting to jump out. I imagine humans dumped into boiling water would have a similar response.

[jdlshore]

Not really the point, but that experiment was debunked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

[Zambyte]

Now apply it to the context of the conversation.

[gambiting]

In reality when these experiments were conducted the frog simply jumped out as soon as the temperature started to raise, frogs will not sit there in slowly boiling water and just die without trying to escape way before the water becomes dangerous.

[fwipsy]

Yep, in the experiment where they did not, their brains had been removed. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2009/07/guest...

[hsbauauvhabzb]

So not to dissimilar from modern society then.

[ModernMech]

We need to combine the crabs in the bucket with the frogs in the water and I think we'll have the right metaphor.

[aziaziazi]

Sadly most of us are hopeless lobster boiled by greater powers. Unlike the crabs through you still can save the other lobsters by refraining to eat them.

[adampunk]

Well, it works with humans just fine.

[Supermancho]

Except for when it doesn't. It's not clear to me as to what you are trying to say.

[adampunk]

None of us are jumping out of the pot. We will boil happily. An argument to the contrary needs to look outside.

[FarmerPotato]

I have disproved this at home. Frog gets in idle hot tub. I turned up the heater. Soon, frog climbs out.

[zippyman55]

You know the story about how the frogs, thrown into a hot pot will jump out. But, if you turn up the heat slowly, they just eventually die? Well, the other day, at work, we were called into a room to watch a mandatory video of frogs in this environment. I actually noticed that management had turned the thermostat up really high. I hopped out of that meeting very quickly.

[shermantanktop]

If it can also reverse a string on the whiteboard, extend an offer.

[FarmerPotato]

The frog failed the whiteboard test, but it could sing a hella Michigan Rag.

[GeorgeTirebiter]

yes, and, fortunately -- even the frogs have enough awareness they actually jump out before they are boiled.

[nine_k]

We as a society are both ATCs and plane passengers, and most often, the latter. And when an overworked ATC makes an error, we indeed may fail to survive.

[fHr]

As long as we're desperate for a job and we need to finance our lifestyle to impress the Johnsons.

[ExtraRoulette]

It's not even to impress anyone, we need to keep roofs over our heads and food in our family's bellies

[heraldgeezer]

Y'all can do with a bit less of that.

Overweight/obesity combined: ~73-75% (nearly 3 in 4 adults) in the US.

[munk-a]

It's quite a tired take that the obesity epidemic is because Americans have too much affordable access to good food. America has affordable access to terrible food and while people can keep their bellies full on that actually eating healthily is a luxury.

[fc417fc802]

You're misinformed. Cheap healthy options are readily available at the grocery store. If you don't want to spend time on food preparation you can substitute canned vegetables for fresh which is slightly less cheap but still cheap.

In the extreme case you don't even need a proper kitchen - a microwave, a rice cooker, and some large bowls will suffice. You can reliably find all of those things at thrift stores in the US. You also have the option to purchase dry staples in bulk (rice, oatmeal, pasta, etc) in 10, 25, or even 50 lb sacks if you can find a local place that stocks them (costco for example).

[phil21]

> actually eating healthily is a luxury.

This is provably untrue. It is such a tired trope to constantly refute. I guess I need to start a google doc with citations.

It is FAR cheaper to buy staples and cook your own food at home. And healthier. You do not need to eat farm to table veggies and local meat for this to happen.

Anyone who tells you it is cheaper to eat fast food and prepared junk foods is misinformed or outright lying with an agenda.

Just look at every single immigrant community that migrates here. They know how to prepare food for cheap.

Yes, it takes a time investment and skill. No, the trope of "single mother with 3 jobs" is not a thing. Those people are already feeding their family healthy foods for the most part since they have self-selected for caring and putting effort in. I lived in communities with many such folks, and the ones holding down three jobs in no way fed their kids fast food or microwaved meals on a regular basis.

If anything is a luxury it's being able to eat prepared fast foods for the majority of your diet. Growing up McDonalds was a twice a year treat for special occasions. Peeling potatoes and baking bread from actual flour and yeast was the daily chores.

[nxm]

People who can afford crappy fast food can afford chicken breast and rice with veggies store bought and made at home. Just easier to kick back with a Big Mac and fries after work. Personal responsibility is key

[heraldgeezer]

99% of people can do 48h water fast with no issues. Easy weight loss, no need for a gym or healthy food.

Try it!

Or don't. Feels good to mog people by just being normal weight.

[jewayne]

Oh, look whose family has a roof over their head and food in their bellies!

We get it, @ExtraRoulette. You're big pimpin'.

[jacquesm]

I think we now have the answer to your query:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046401

But I don't think we should extrapolate from it.

[jmcgough]

I thought it was the avocado toast that was keeping us from owning a house.

[EGreg]

It's simple... AI and automation will be gradually replacing everyone's job. The reason people are overworked is because they can't afford to lose their job.

I wrote this 12 years ago and it's even more true today: https://magarshak.com/blog/stop-wasting-our-time/

[QuarterReptile]

I wonder how much of this can be attributed to breaking the ATC training/hiring pipelines back in 2014.

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

[hedora]

I'd guess the randomly firing a bunch of air traffic controllers in 2025 without cause didn't help much either:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-begins-firings-o...

[jml7c5]

This shifted the race of trainees, but it doesn't seem to have changed the more important metric of how many people were actually hired. The author claims it had an effect, but as far as I can tell he's never quantified it.

The real issue is just insufficient slots.

[SamuelAdams]

It’s also hard to hire for. Candidates for job openings must be between the ages of 21-31 years old. Yes they are legally forbidden from hiring anyone older.

https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications

[khuey]

Since they have a mandatory retirement age of 56 (if they're not retired earlier for health conditions) it's not crazy to have an age cutoff for intake. Why put someone through a 2 year training with a high failure rate if after they make it through all of that you'll get at most 10 years of work out of them?

[urbandw311er]

Why are we discussing the issue being ATC workers when the recordings make it clear that they had identified the issue and ordered the vehicle to stop? Sound like the issue is whoever was driving the truck not doing what was asked of them for whatever reason. Unless of course it was equipment failure.

[krisoft]

> Sound like the issue is whoever was driving the truck not doing what was asked of them for whatever reason.

Hard disagree. The ATC initially cleared them to cross the runway. The truck started moving, and just then the ATC realised that they made a mistake and tried to fix it. Even their first attempt at that was unclear, and they only clarified who should stop on the second attempt.

People can’t react in zero second, trucks don’t stop immediately. The ATC mistake was clearing them to cross the runway, whatever happened after was out of their hands.

[jlawson]

The controller told the truck to proceed, before telling it to stop. That was a serious ATC error.

[ceejayoz]

If the timings on the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY are accurate, it had time to cross; it seems they dawdled a bit.

Controller probably should've told them to expedite the crossing or warned that traffic was about to land, but they were managing a lot at once; tower+ground by themselves and an emergency already.

[phil21]

I counted 8 seconds from clear to cross to first 'truck 1 stop' - along with it not being immediately clear the stop was for the truck, or for Frontier 4195 until 2 more seconds.

Add a few seconds for human reaction time on both ends, I don't think that's really "enough time to cross safely" - maybe if the stars align.

[markdown]

The poor guy was managing two runways and ground traffic, which is nuts.

[dghlsakjg]

This isn’t super unusual, it’s just that when they do this it’s normally at an airport in east bumfuck where a controller is barely needed.

Doing it at LaGuardia or any major airport is absolutely nuts.

[aeternum]

No that is not the issue. Runway incursions have always been a problem and many deaths have occurred.

There have been many attempts to change phraseology, teach pilots and controllers to always readback runways, etc. but nothing that actually prevents the issue from occurring entirely via automation.

[nine_k]

The incursion was by a fire engine which was hurrying to handle yet another incident. The weather was foggy, it was raining, and the incoming plane was already low, so it was pretty hard to tell it apart from many other lights shining from the fog in the distance. It's not easy to assess the speed of motion when a fuzzy ball of light is advancing right towards you.

The pilot was given the clearance to land before the fire engine was dispatched. Apparently there was not even enough time for the crew to max out the thrust and try to lift off the strip even if they managed to notice the lights of the incoming fire engine.

[aeternum]

Planes use a system called TCAS to prevent collisions in the sky, this system is independent of ATC and works even if ATC is not paying attention or if pilots have the wrong frequency tuned. It detects impending collisions and gives both pilots clear and automated alerts plus an action IE climb + turn to execute immediately to prevent a collision.

A similar system can and should be used for runways.

As a thought experiment, imagine how many car accidents there would be if instead of traffic lights, each person had a AM radio in their car and police officers called out over the radio which cars should proceed across the intersection. That is the unfortunate state of modern? aviation.

[ceejayoz]

TCAS disables below 1,000 feet because there’s too much stuff at an airport.

[oceanplexian]

I have ADS-B in my airplane and can see everything on the ground on a pretty map as if it were literally a video game. I can see landing aircraft in realtime while holding short or crossing a runway. The emergency responder should have had it in their fire truck.

The technology already exists. The problem has already been solved with an iPad and a $200 receiver. Almost certainly some BS regulation or rule was at least partially responsible here.

[ceejayoz]

Information overload is a thing, and there are a lot of ground vehicles at a place like LGA.

[aeternum]

Well imagine if we designed a TCAS-like system that did work below 1,000 feet!

[ceejayoz]

TCAS is mostly "how close to another plane am I?"

In flight, the answer really shouldn't ever be "less than 500 feet". During landing, the answer almost certainly will be "less than 500 feet"; a plane's queued up to enter the runway after you land, a ground vehicle is working on something near but not on the end of the runway, etc.

It's a surprisingly tough challenge to solve a) reliably and b) in a way that doesn't cause a whole bunch of false go-arounds wreaking havoc on the busy airport.

[FireBeyond]

Apropos of anything else, if you are operating an emergency vehicle on the road in "emergency mode", liability defaults to you unless demonstrably otherwise. I get that this is not a road, but...

Almost every fire department in the country has SOPs for operating in emergency mode that generally include coming to a stop at all intersections or at least being able to affirmatively clear the intersection.

This personal liability is not particularly appealing in the world of fire, where ~70% of US firefighters are volunteer (not that the story is better in career), so codifying it in SOP allows departments/governments to negotiate insurance policies for their members, saying that "if you were driving in emergency mode, but within SOP, the department's insurance will cover your personal liability".

I saw the video. The incoming engine didn't appear to slow until too late, either.

[rahimnathwani]

Don't air traffic controllers get paid at a higher rate for overtime than for their 'regular hours'?

If so, doesn't the understaffing (lower # of employees) result in each employee being overpaid (paid a higher hourly rate)?

EDIT: And it seems like air traffic controllers can retire after just 20 years and draw a defined benefit pension: https://www.faa.gov/nyc-atc

[travisgriggs]

It’s also the only industry that is legally allowed to practice ageism. You have to start before or up to 31 years of age. You’re out at age 56. This figures into how the benefits are structured.

You can still do contract ATC work after 56.

[userbinator]

Guess what happens to people's brains when they get old... the saying "teach an old dog new tricks" comes to mind.

[FireBeyond]

Certainly not all departments, but many fire departments have an upper hiring limit for new hires. Above that age you can only be hired as a "lateral" (transfer hire from another department).

[gerdesj]

The RNLI also has an age limit: 45 or 55 for inshore or all weather crew.

[renewiltord]

Doesn’t this seem like the common practice in high-pension systems? You don’t use the overtime in pension calculations so it’s way cheaper to hire P people and run them on a 2x duty cycle than it is to hire 2P people and run them on a 1x duty cycle because the post retirement cost is Q in the first and 2Q in the latter.

You can’t account for overtime in pensions because the employees will conspire to force overtime for retiring employees to bounce the pension up. Just a natural risk with an entity that can’t go bankrupt hiring people.

[lelandbatey]

Yes, when they work overtime they get paid more for that overtime than regular time.

The money doesn't somehow make it sustainable for the people burning out their lives. Working 7 days a week, including overnight shifts, for 20 years to collect a pension seems like WELL earned compensation.

That's seems unrelated to "we have so few" and "we enmiserate the one's we do have".

[bondarchuk]

I think rahimnathwani's point was not that they get extra pay so it's fine, but that it seems economically irrational to overwork fewer staff if it's actually more expensive.

[magicalhippo]

Here in Norway it's similar with doctors, they get paid a lot because they work crazy hours. But the doctors' association is fighting to keep it that way, as the old timers who didn't burn out along the way enjoys the high pay more than their spare time.

[markdown]

Air traffic controllers are NOT fighting to preserve the status quo.

[rahimnathwani]

Yes, exactly.

It's hard to argue you're underpaid if, as a result of short staffing, you're getting paid more (both in absolute terms and per unit of effort) than you signed up for.

[cenamus]

Nurses also get paid more for night shifts, doesn't mean they're 'overpaid'

[anigbrowl]

I think GP means if we're paying overtime for so many people we're wasting money vs hiring more people to work at regular pay scales.

The mystery to me is that AT shortages have been known fora. while now, so why haven't many more trainees been recruited?

[throwup238]

> The mystery to me is that AT shortages have been known fora. while now, so why haven't many more trainees been recruited?

ATC has been a shit career prospect for a while now so no one wants to enter training.

For one it requires uprooting your entire life to live near a training center, then they send you on an apprenticeship to a random airport in the country for a few years. And since there are only so many slots in the desirable metros, most people get sent to live somewhere “undesirable” to say the least.

For two, while trainees get paid they get totally fucked during government shutdowns. Many who make it to the funnel also quit at that point. Without fundamental structural changes to how they’re trained and paid at the political level, the number of trainees will remain small.

[munk-a]

The politicization of government budgeting has made inefficiency rife. Sometimes new allocations are done purely for brownie points and there's genuine wastage - other times cuts are made that save a penny but lose a pound in the guise of efficiency. Doge was an excellent example in just how many severance payouts for employees who were occasionally rehired due to staffing shortages it triggered.

[panick21_]

The problem is there is only one training school and they don't train enough people. So you can literally not heir more people. And that pipeline is not funded enough or the requirements are to high. Or their recruiting and eventual payments isn't good enough.

[zeristor]

Wouldn’t insurance go some way to mediating this?

If the ATC is under staffed they’d charge a far higher premium since the risk of accidents is higher.

I’m not sure who would be liable for this accident, I’m guessing ATC is a government provided industry, and I understand governments don’t insure.

[kaliqt]

That is not the real issue. Less people would be required if it was modernized.

[doctorpangloss]

Why do so many jobs have this failure mode? Thinking about this should illuminate for you that funding is not the whole story.

[jmalicki]

Okay, so then what is? Most jobs have this failure mode because there's a tendency to strip funding until disaster happens, even when it was clearly foreseeable.

[doctorpangloss]

this whole thing about funding and disaster is a big red herring. it tells me why we're talking about it, but it has nothing to do with how to solve the real, meaningful socioeconomic problem and why it keeps coming up in so many jobs. this is SO simple to understand but people resist it stubbornly. they WANT outrage. economic stuff isn't outrageous.

> tendency to strip funding until disaster happens

well there's a tendency to pass unfunded mandates too. They are two sides of the same coin. Here's another way I've heard it described, to show you that this is a "bipartisan" issue:

> the Daily Show problem. I love the Daily Show, and I think Jon Stewart is hysterical. But literally the answer to every single problem is “Congress should pass a new law.”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/marc-andreessen-in-c...

i don't think Marc Andreessen knows everything about everything the way that he thinks that he does. but he's not wrong. you are in the really lame "Congress should pass a new law" department - i guess to increase funding? - but you know, then it becomes, i don't see why it would be "enough" funding, we don't know, they could strike anyway...

personally, i believe the problem with guilded professions like "ATC guy" come about from complex but nonetheless finite incentives. so in a narrow sense, as long as some ATC controllers want to "work more, earn more," this problem will persist, it doesn't even have to be all ATC controllers, or even many, but the proportion of "work more, earn more" to "work less, earn less" personalities predicts the scale of the issues facing buyers of the guilded profession's services. other economists have talked about this and i'm sure someone will write great Causality Revolution paper about it for ATC.

broadly I think the problem has much more to do with the lack of economic opportunity in America, that there's minimum wage and everything else, and people are very risk averse like their peers in Europe or Asia but have less of a safety net so they are much more desperate. everyone is looking to guilds to solve their problem instead of demanding that their leaders support and deliver real growth, which makes me sound like Peter Thiel, and that should tell you everything you need to know about why this problem is so hard to solve. it's all politics, not a misunderstanding of the math about maintenance or disasters or whatever the fuck.

[jmalicki]

We recently had a lot more probationary ATCs cut because of specific action by Elon Musk's DOGE, which has since then resulted in two major air disasters due to poor ATC handling, which was virtually unheard of before.

This isn't some vague problem, it's a random asshole screaming "delete! Delete! Delete!" enlisting some random college dropouts to execute it for him, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives directly attributable to those short sighted changes.

This isn't a vague problem, it's a specific asshole who is killing people so he can appear on stage with a chainsaw.

[watwut]

Considering congress republicans are dead set to cause maximal damage, congress being between useless and harmful might just be correct diagnosis of the problem.

Also, ATC controllers are not the one in power here. It is not like they would made the decisions that lead to here.

[jjk166]

Inadequate funding seems like the common factor across the vast majority of jobs with these failure modes.

[nine_k]

When paying for a (rare) failure is cheaper than paying for the (constant) absence of failure, it's just natural. You know, the optimal amount of fraud in a payment system is not zero. The optimal amount of fatal aircraft incidents is not an exact substitute, bit the pressure is of the same kind, I'm afraid :(

[jjk166]

Did the FAA or some other agency release a statement saying they were relaxing safety standards because they deemed the increase in risk economically acceptable? Do you recall checking a box when booking your last flight acknowledging you would prefer a few cents off your ticket to a fully staffed ATC tower? Did safety technology suddenly get substantially worse, increasing the cost of preventing failure beyond a red line we set?

Failures will happen, and resources are finite. But the idea that this particular failure is an inevitable consequence of a rational economic decision, that we as a society got together and decided we would permit X fatal aircraft incidents per unit of time, and that there is no point in improving because perfection is impossible, is patently absurd.

No, we have been and currently are willing to pay for fully staffed air traffic control towers to prevent precisely this sort of accident. If you told someone at the airport there was a single controller doing double duty, there's a good chance they would choose to pay a premium to change flights to a time when the ATC was appropriately staffed. There is a reasonable expectation that when you book a service like a flight that you are paying for the appropriate staffing to provide that service. I'm paying for the person who maintains the engines, and the person who audits the paperwork to make sure the maintenance got done, and the engineer who checks that the latest revision won't cause the engine to explode in mid-air, and all the rest of the massive chain of people required for air travel to work as its supposed to. The airline is supposed to set the price such that they can afford to pay all these people. They don't get to make the decision that they can take my money and pocket what was supposed to be going towards engine maintenance because they don't value my life sufficiently. Likewise for air traffic control.

[smallerize]

Well, there was the time Ronald Reagan fired all the ATC workers [Edit: I had the reason wrong but I still blame Reagan.]

[gretch]

Why blame Reagan? He was president 35 years ago and has been dead for 20 years.

Why not blame any number of people who held the same office between then and now who have equivalent power to fix the system?

If we assign blame to this dead guy a long time ago, then there is no accountability to be had.

[eszed]

Reagan fired a bunch, and then (naturally) hired a bunch to replace them. ATC work, generally speaking, for twenty years (that's when their pension vests), so twenty years after the strike there was a "cliff", with a larger than usual number of ATC retirements. As I understand it, that was anticipated at the turn of the millennium, and hiring + training ramped up to compensate, without much disruption. The next "cliff", twenty years after that (ie, that millennium tranche retiring), coincided with 1) a less than forward-looking administration, and 2) COVID. We still haven't dug our way out from under the second wave of retirements.

You're absolutely right that solutions should have been taken, but it's also true that we're picking up the pieces of a decision taken forty years ago.

Source: /r/ATC. I highly recommend lurking there.

[coredog64]

They were already in a union (PATCO) and they were striking illegally which lead to their decertification.

[cogman10]

What's impressive is that if you look at the issues PATCO struck over, it was basically identical to the problems ATC faces today. The problem being that everything has only gotten a lot worse for ATC controllers.

The union pretty loudly and early on pointed out major problems with that job and the response of ignoring them for 4 decades is what's driven us to the current situation.

[kadoban]

Technically accurate.

A union that isn't allowed to legally strike when needed isn't a useful union though. The state that ATC has been in for the decades after that suggests to me that they were correct to strike.

[travisgriggs]

Huh. This seems selectively simplified. At least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_....

Multiple economic write ups have concluded that Reagan’s “stick it to the upstart guy” cost us tax payers way more than it would if they’d just acceded and maybe even thrown in a gracious bonus to say thanks.

Larger sociology say the intangible cost to labor balance laws actually were much more.

Reagan’s trickle down (great euphemism for “piss on”) movement was the beginning of the demise of the GOP IMO. Disclaimed: I voted both times for him and many GOP followers.

[anigbrowl]

striking illegally

How dare those peons use their economic leverage! That's only for the upper class

[twoodfin]

They were free to use it and did.

Their employer, the Federal government, was free to fire them, and did.

[anigbrowl]

I'm referring to the idea of striking being illegal, and the underlying attitude that motivates such legislative decision-making.

[lesostep]

and now the country of freedom is free to deal with ATC shortages that leave people managing two runaways and ground traffic by themselves in a a major airport

ah, truly a decision with no consequences

tl;dr just because it's a legally allowed decision, doesn't mean it's a right decision

[Auracle]

There’s a pretty big difference between “economic leverage” when it means your stores might be shut down for a couple of weeks vs. all of the people moving, shipping, etc. in an entire country.

[magnetowasright]

A strike being inconvenient? Workers leveraging how crucial they are? The stoppage of work having massive impacts across the country? Huh, maybe the powers that be should listen to the workers when they ask nicely for better conditions instead.

[sensanaty]

Isn't the "inconvenience" the entire point of a strike? A strike where nobody was affected in any way wouldn't be a very effective one, after all, so the larger of an inconvenience the more likely for the other side to relent to the unions demands.

[heraldgeezer]

Because we need to trust people and it is not sustainable to overstaff.

In my job we work 40h a week + oncall rotating. It works.

[thefounder]

Can’t this whole thing being automated and let only special/unexpected situations being handled by humans ?

[alistairSH]

This was a special/unexpected situation - one of the other passenger jets declared an emergency and needed to evacuate the passengers onto the ground (there were no free gates to return). The firetruck was on it's way to assist with the emergency.

[thefounder]

Yeah but why there was not red alert on all the monitors when both the airplane and the truck had green light on the same runway ? That’s the minimum of automation that I would expect, ideally sync-ed to all the participants(truck drivers, pilots etc). It would not have been hard for a system to predict the collision given it had all the data (positions of each participant + the route of each).

[pjc50]

Nowhere has automated ATC because errors look like this.

[alex43578]

That's like the argument about how we'll never (or should never) have self driving cars.

Clearly human-run ATC results in situations like this, so the idea that automated ATC could result in a runway collision and should therefore never be implemented is bad.

[mikepurvis]

It's not an argument for total automation but an argument for machine augmentation. It would be fascinating just as an experiment to feed the audio of the ATC + flight tracks [1] into a bot and see if it could spot that a collision situation had been created.

You obviously wouldn't authorize the bot to do everything, but you could allow it to autonomously call for stops or go-arounds in a situation like this where a matter of a few seconds almost certainly would have made the difference.

Imagine the human controller gives the truck clearance to cross and the bot immediately sees the problem and interrupts with "No, Truck 1 stop, no clearance. JZA 646 pull up and go around." If either message gets through then the collision is avoided, and in case of a false positive, it's a 30 second delay for the truck and a few minutes to circle the plane around and give it a new slot.

[1]: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/

[alex43578]

I'm not well-enough versed in HMI design or similar concepts, but I think this idea for augmentation could collide with alarm fatigue and the disengaged overseer problem in self-driving cars.

If we aren't confident enough in the automation to allow it to make the call for something simple like a runway incursion/conflict (via total automation), augmentation might be worse than the current approach that calls for 100% awareness by the ATC. Self-driving research shows that at level 2 and level 3, people tune out and need time to get back "in the zone" during a failure of automation.

[fc417fc802]

> could collide with alarm fatigue and the disengaged overseer problem

Depends both on the form the "alarm" takes as well as the false positive rate. If the alarm is simply being told to go around, and if that has the same authority as a human, then it's an inconvenience but there shouldn't be any fatigue. Just frustration at being required to do something unnecessary.

Assuming the false positive rate were something like 1 incident per day at a major airport I don't even think it would result in much frustration. We stop at red lights that aren't really necessary all the time.

[mikepurvis]

Valid concern. Ultimately, the ideal would be to have commentary from professionals in the space to say what it is that would be most helpful in terms of augments.

In doctor's offices it was easy, just listen to the verbal consult and write up a summary so doc doesn't spend every evening charting. What is the equivalent for ATC, in terms of an interface that would help surface relevant information, maintain context while multitasking, provide warnings, etc, basically something that is a companion and assistant but not in a way that removes agency from the human decision-maker or leaves them subject to zoning out and losing context so they're not equipped to handle an escalation?

[krisoft]

There is such a bot and it is installed in LaGuardia Airport. The system is called Runway Status Lights, and it was supposed to show red lights to the truck. And the truck was supposed to stop and ask the controller: “If an Air Traffic Control clearance is in conflict with the Runway Entrance Lights, do not cross over the red lights. Contact Air Traffic Control and advise that you are stopped due to red lights.” https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl

That is how it is supposed to work. How did it work in reality is an other question of course, and no doubt it will be investigated.

[Atotalnoob]

Truck 1 took too long to go through the runway. They had time to

[ErroneousBosh]

> That's like the argument about how we'll never (or should never) have self driving cars.

The reason we won't ever have self-driving cars is that no matter how clever you make them, they're only any good when nothing is going wrong. They cannot anticipate, they can only react, too slowly, and often badly.

[alex43578]

They absolutely could anticipate, and arguably with more precision than people. The common occurrence of collisions when making left turns at an intersection shows that people's ability to anticipate is fallible too: people can't even anticipate that car driving towards them will continue to do so.

Self driving cars' reaction times aren't slowed by drugs, alcohol, or a Snapchat notification pulling their attention.

Current systems haven't been proven in all weather conditions and all inclement situations (ie that tesla collision with a white semi-trailer), but it's crazy to say that self-driving cars won't match or exceed human drivers in terms of safe miles driven. Waymo has already shown an 80 to 90% reduction in crashes compared to people.

[fc417fc802]

> Waymo has already shown an 80 to 90% reduction in crashes compared to people.

Compared to unsafe people. It's an important caveat though I agree with the larger point you're making.

[mememememememo]

We automated some of the flight, we automate train signals.

We can probably semi automate runway crossing. Someone mentioned red lights when you definitely cannot cross

[gosub100]

There's exceptions all the time. They turn back because a warning light came on. They saw a deer on the runway, a passenger got up to the bathroom. There's no way that could be automatic, plus they often need atc to look at their jet to see if it's damaged.

My suggestion is to restrict the use of smaller jets like crj and turboprops. I know airports like LaGuardia can't handle the big jets either, but they could reduce the slots and require a jet that holds, say, 150 people or more. This would result in fewer flights per day to some airports, but reduce overall congestion while still serving the same number of passengers.

[cj]

Imagine it were 90% automated. Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.

You're left with a bunch of planes in the sky that can't stay there forever, and not enough humans on the ground to manually land them.

Now image the outage is also happening at all airports nearby, preventing planes from diverting.

How do you get the planes out of the sky? Not enough humans to do it manually.

Now imagine the system comes back online. Does it know how to handle a crisis scenario where you have dozens of planes overhead, each about to run out of fuel? Hopefully someone thought of that edge case.

[alistairSH]

This.

Remember when all the Waymos were confused by a power outage? Now do that, but with airplanes that will fall thousands of feet and kill hundreds instead of park in the middle of the street.

I'm not saying we shouldn't automate things. We should. But, it's not easy. If it was, we would have done it already.

[tanseydavid]

> Remember when all the Waymos were confused by a power outage?

I remember.

Do you remember (before Waymo existed) what happened to traffic in SF anytime the power went out?

I remember. It was pretty much the identical situation.

Traffic goes to hell when the traffic lights stop working properly (without Waymo and also with Waymo).

[bluedel]

I think the point they're making is that the failure mode of a waymo and automated air traffic control could look the same from an angle, but would have very different consequences.

[alistairSH]

I think you missed the point. But sure, traffic goes to crap when the lights go out.

[gretch]

It should not be automated but it should be heavily augmented.

One of the failure modes should not be “guy forgot thing”.

[ApolloFortyNine]

That's what everyone screaming 'funding' doesn't seem to understand here. If your failure mode for potentially hundreds of people dying is one controller over radio forgetting something, then it'll happen eventually. And has happened, there's plenty of videos on youtube of near miss radio recordings. When a plan is landing at over 100mph simple good luck can take care of things the majority of the time.

It just feels wrong that the primary form of control in 2026 is voice over radio.

[cyberax]

> Imagine it were 90% automated.

It already is.

> Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.

Planes divert to another airport, passengers grumble, end of story. Airport closures can and do happen all the time for all kinds of reasons, including weather or equipment malfunctions.

[cj]

Except when the system fails regionally.

[cyberax]

Then all the takeoffs will be cancelled, immediately reducing the workload, and planes will be manually landed.

[tempestn]

Speaking of runway crossings specifically, you could have an automated backup, and require authorization from both ATC and the automated system to enter a runway.

[moduspol]

We build pacemakers, AEDs, flight control software, and other mission-critical life-and-death software. The idea that we'll just forever keep the system run by specially trained humans with known and foreseeable faults because poorly designed software could fail is head-in-sand unreasonable.

[what]

Look what happened when the power went out in SF and the Waymos just stopped in the street because they were confused and there weren’t enough humans to direct them. Now imagine that but with planes that will fall out of the sky when they run out of fuel since they can’t land. Automating this is pants on head retarded.

[moduspol]

That sounds like a poorly thought-out implementation.

An example of a poorly thought-out implementation elsewhere does not exclude the possibility of coming up with a better one than humans coordinating with their mouths over radio.

[hajile]

Overwork is an issue in general, but I don't know that it was the actual issue here.

> In audio from the air traffic control tower at LaGuardia, a staff member can be heard saying: "'Truck One, stop, stop, stop!" in the seconds before the crash.

It sounds to me like either the Cop or the Firefighter (whichever was driving) wasn't listening to ATC and this whole incident was probably completely avoidable.

EDIT: a video of the crash seems to have warning lights that the emergency vehicle ignored.

[storyinmemo]

> Overwork is an issue in general, but I don't know that it was the actual issue here.

One controller working tower duties, ground movement duties, coordinating with other ATC functions off the radio, an active emergency request, and giving clearance amendments all within 2 minutes. It's insane understaffing. On top of it, there was nobody there to take over after the crash. He worked the whole cleanup for the next 30 minutes.

This is an Olympian level elite Air Traffic Controller who was setup to fail.

I've visited towers, center facilities, and have flying (and some instructing) in the San Francisco airspace for 10 years. That kind of failure is systemic way above an individual.

[lotsofpulp]

The audio I heard seems to show the firetruck asking if the runway is clear to cross, the controller responding in the affirmative, the firetruck confirming the affirmative, and then 7 seconds later, the controller saying STOP STOP STOP.

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/

[hajile]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Kqg6sokz4

It seems like less than 2 seconds from declaring intent to cross until they are told not to cross.

The runway entrance lights look red to me which is also a huge warning flag.

[deathanatos]

From the description:

> Audio is not synced.

I think the gaps between transmissions have been trimmed, too; this isn't matching other versions of the ATC audio, such as [VASAviation's][1].

> The runway entrance lights look red to me which is also a huge warning flag.

IANA-ATC, but presumably in an emergency, you're permitted to obtain clearance from ATC to enter an active runaway, to get to the emergency. (Which they did, and got, but which ATC later effectively revokes with the command to stop, prior to the accident. Whether ATC should have granted the clearance, well, I'll wait for the NTSB report there.)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY

[rogerrogerr]

It’s supposed to be “permission to enter runway = obtained clearance && stop bars not red”. Pilots would know this; ground vehicles often do goofy stuff and it’s difficult to train them to follow procedures exactly while they have “we are responding to an emergency” in their head.