Given the persistent and extreme understaffing of air traffic controllers it wouldn't take that many quitting at the same time to have a massive impact.
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
487 points (98.2% liked)
News
24715 readers
4643 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
What do the think is going to happen? Privatize air traffic control? Or just rank the economy so bad they buy everything up?
Well the cynic in me says "to undermine the public trust in the safety of air travel so people become more isolated, unwilling to organize, and dependent on either corporate-controlled media or gasoline-powered cars to maintain contact with any part of the world outside a 20-mile radius," and the nutjob conspiracy theorist in me sure thinks he could make a convincing corkboard out of it if you gave him enough thumb tacks and red string, but once again I could be making the mistake of assuming they're going into this with a plan and not just flailing wildly to make it look like they're addressing a problem they have no idea how to solve.
just flailing wildly to make it look like they’re addressing a problem they have no idea how to solve.
Yeah, rumor goes this started because the FAA had issues with Starship blowing up and raining debris, and Musk deciding to teach them a lesson.
It's more that SpaceX has consistently lied on the forms that it gave the FAA, EPA, etc and have been cited multiple times. (See the saga about the blast deflection plate and the deluge water being industrial runoff they were letting drain into the nearby protected wetlands)
The starship exploding thing was a proverbial slap on the wrist and Elon still threw a fit.
load more comments
(1 replies)
In Hungary, Fidesz just either forces the media to not report on protests until they can get a picture where they can pretend only a few people attended, or they send the "football fans" (skinheads) in.
That has already been suggested by his minions. Let the airlines manage everything. Including baggage and body checking.
Oh god, the very idea...
Even if that's your goal getting ATCs to simply quit all at once isn't the way to go about it lol. I hope it works. It'll ground all flights and cripple the country and bring this stupidity to it's conclusion quickly.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Close all the exits.
That is one angle. Hmm.
He could totally intend to privatise ATC. They're already halfway done with privatising education, and there's no need to even mention healthcare.
US can into theocratic Stone Age.
Just get ChatGPT do it or something
On Friday, speaking about his plan for federal workers during a press conference, Trump stated: “It’s our dream to have everyone, almost, working in the private sector, not the public sector.”
They literally want to privatize every government function they possibly can. They're saying it out loud, and have been for some time, and with control of all three branches of the federal government there's absolutely nobody to stand in their way. So buckle up because things are about to get very bumpy.
load more comments
(1 replies)
How does it go again? "In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity"
The fact that they are using these tragic events as a means to dismantle the government even more quickly is horrifying to watch from the other end of the pond.
What's the old saying...
Never waste a crisis
Or something like that?
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Chaos is a ladder
Manufacture a crisis so you can gut the government and install a dictatorship
Ah yes, just what we need right now... FEWER controllers in an industry that's already short-staffed, and with two very recent fatal plane crashes. Perfect fucking idea.
If their aim is to kill as many Americans as possible, they are doing a superb job. By that metric, Trump is the best president of all times.
I do hope the majority who get canned and who suffer voted for him. Everyone else, including myself, I feel sorry for and hope we can either ride it out or get out. His supporters should go down with the ship poor and depleted.
Seems like he's going for maximum damage, bet he gets a Russian airlift from the white house just before it crumbles.
You know what, fuck it. I hope they quit. Let’s accelerate this whole bullshit to its conclusion as fast as possible. Seems to me the only way through this fascist hellscape is by pissing off enough people to provoke a popular response.
A lot of people had this attitude in Russia. Let the evil guys run the country to the ground, and then rebuild into a better structure. This will happen, I think, the only problem is that can take decades and millions of people dead in the process. No suggestions here, just a note...
I think you underestimate just exactly how popular Putin is with the Russian people, or I should say was originally. I don't think he's as popular now because of the "police action" in Ukraine and the number of Russians who have died to it and the economic hit the country has taken as a result of it. But he was insanely popular with the Russian populace through most of the 2010s.
Didn't he win his last election with something like 94% of the vote. The dude is outrageously popular... or there might be something else going on.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Accelerationism is the stupidest idea ever. Shit being fucked is the natural state of things, and if you just let it slide, it will gradually come to it and stay there forever.
Accelerationism is helping the enemy. You should be doing the exact opposite - resisting, rallying and counterattacking.
In an apparent attempt to ignite the culture wars and further discredit the FAA, Trump falsely claimed that the agency’s website lists individuals with “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism” as “qualified” applicants for the air controller position, CBS News reported.
Wait. Wait...
and dwarfism
Okay. Everything in his claim is wholesale made up, but what could possibly be wrong with an air traffic controller having dwarfism? There is nothing inherent about that condition that should preclude a person from being able to do this job. Many ATC coordinate flights traveling through Class A airspace, which is way up in the stratosphere, using computers. They might need a higher seat or something to reach the controls, but that's it.
Trump genuinely thinks air traffic controllers just stare out windows all day, doesn't he? And because he says this, now ignorant people will be imagining that their plane is coordinated by a little person in a tower, standing on their tippy toes.
Trump genuinely thinks air traffic controllers just stare out windows all day, doesn’t he? And because he says this, now ignorant people will be imagining that their plane is coordinated by a little person in a tower, standing on their tippy toes.
Given that Airports were key to our victory over the British literally a century before Airplanes were invented... Probably
And missing extremities? Are we against employing disabled veterans? I thought we loved the military?
Oh you mean the "suckers" and "losers"?
I see that Trump is trying to reduce US carbon output by drastically reducing commercial air traffic, either by simple lack of air traffic controllers or by making the public too scared to fly! Quite the environmentalist! /s
it is not safe to work for the federal government in trump America
It's about to get unsafe to fly in the US.
It's about to get unsafe in the US.
Sad but very likely as well.
That's what we get when Nazis are encouraged instead of getting punched in the face.
Make America Russia Again.
Expecting pilots to be sober is woke somehow I imagine. And hiring a black woman pilot over a drunken white man is DEI.
You first.
Would be funny if all remaining ATCs decided to quit and get a job on a different country. Take the land route to Canada or Mexico, or a ship to elsewhere.
Maybe they could give AirForce1 some "special" instructions as their last duty before being kicked out of the building?
Ironically Reagan fought ATC unions. They went on strike so he fired them and called in the military ATCs to cover their work.
And it was kind of a shit show for awhile.
There's obviously overlap between military and civilian controllers, but it's not the same job. The volume of traffic alone at a busy hub makes most air force bases look like quaint backwater airstrips.
There's also just not a lot of "extra" military ATC.
he probably caused all this and is just blaming everyone else again
Pilot here. I fly little airplanes for fun.
Much of the ATC system is already understaffed by a good amount. Becoming a controller is not super easy, nor is it for everyone. You have to pass a fairly stringent medical test, background check etc, and then you go to their academy for a while. After that, they will assign you wherever they need you, which may be nowhere near where you actually wanted to live. What you make depends on where you are and what you do. So for example, if you man a small airport in the middle of Idaho, you make less than if you are an approach controller near JFK. Each position that you might work requires its own training and certification, and I don't just mean each physical location I mean like each chair, each working position. That's because each sector of the airspace has its own quirks, where traffic usually comes from and usually goes to, defined airways and GPS points and procedures and that sort of thing.
My point with all this, is that hiring and training new controllers is significantly harder than most other jobs. To use the earlier example, and approach controller near JFK is doing one of the most difficult and stressful jobs in aviation, and is easily making six figures. But to get that guy there, getting him trained and certified on everything took years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. If he resigns, whatever salary you save on him is a drop in the bucket compared to what it will cost to replace him.
Private sector controllers are a thing. Many small airports contract out their tower operations, but this is generally done at small regional airports.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of places where fat needs to be trimmed in the federal government. I don't believe ATC is one of them. And is certainly not a place where I want fat aggressively trimmed, because when you lose experience you reduce safety.
That'll help
Reply all... Likewise
view more: next ›