> The ad also highlights the salary on offer to controllers, saying it is $155,000 (£115,000) after three years of work.
Unless the US government shuts down again, at which point you stop being paid, you are required to keep working, you have no right to strike[0], and the competences you've built across this job are largely hard to directly make use of elsewhere so the incentive to job-hop is low.
This is why shutting down the right to strike is a short term approach: you can't make people choose to start or keep working in your sweatshop, so eventually you run out of staff.
What you can do, at state scale, is pass everybody through a services training filter and sit them under the sorting hat after three months to winnow out skills and potentials of interest.
Some are clear rejects, some are good for getting up early and walking perimeters, others would suit the motor pool. An occasional few will gel for traffic control, signal intell, etc.
The trick then, for a state, is to incentivize with carrots, sticks, patriotic abstractions like duty, etc. the ones they want for the jobs they have.
I know this is culture-war stuff, but on the balance I think it's true that the FAA deprioritised applicants from the AT/CTI programmes, that is training courses speficically to become ATCs.
My main source is https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa..., and I'm assuming in particular that the screenshot of the letter in footnote 1 is genuine. In the section ended by footnote 16, there is a claim than in 2014 the FAA sent out just short of 3k job offer letters whereas in 2019 that had dropped to below 1k.
That sounds like cutting off your own recruitment pipeline.
It's also evidence that the FAA did not drop the standards for qualification and certification, which is reassuring.
What video game on Steam allows me to practice air traffic control? How can I determine if I have a skill at the logistics of managing planes on a radar screen? Where can I join a multiplayer lobby where at game start we're assigned to either give radio commands to planes, or interpret radio commands and respond on behalf of planes, with at least two players for each? How does anti-griefing work in that environment?
It does, and it's called VATSIM[0]. VATSIM Radar[3] will show you what's going on right now.
As a pilot, you connect using either Microsoft Flight Simulator or X-Plane. Your flight simulator will include graphics (hopefully up-to-date) for your chosen area. Pick a starting airport, spawn at a ramp location (a gate, cargo area, etc.), connect to the network, file a flight plan (or go VFR), call up (or announce intentions), and go.
As a controller, VATSIM organizes ATC by region of the world, then in to 6-8 divisions within the region, then in to individual ARTCCs, ACCs, or FIRs[2]. You'll typically register with a division, then make your home in a particular ARTCC/FIR. For example, I was registered with VATUSA and made my home in the Indianapolis ARTCC.
There is software[1] for both pilots (connecting your flight sim to the network) and controllers (providing a radar display). Each "radio frequency" has an associated text chat and voice chat for communication. ATC are trained to support both text and voice simultaneously, following pilot's preference.
For controllers, your chosen ARTCC/ACC/FIR handles your training. They provide the "sectorfiles" that give you a graphical view of your airspace and your airports. (Think of it like a modern version of an old-style vector display.) They also help you through training, both book learning and sim training. You start controlling things on the ground, and work your way up to controlling things in the air.
[2]: Air Route Traffic Information Center / Area Control Center / Flight Information Region. Different countries use different terms, but mean the same thing: It's a large three-dimensional volume of airspace.
Another useful tip: don't immediately register with the division local to you in the 'real world', but instead take a look at a variety to see how different divisions conduct themselves. Some divisions have very long waiting lists, and standards of service do differ between ARTCCs/FIRs. It's also worth just checking to see whether the software a given division uses is actually compatible with your computer, because they don't all use the same programs.
I've spent many hours in VATSIM and loved it, so don't be discouraged from diving in, but as a warning: I encountered a pervasive issue with pretentiousness across the VATSIM community, with some divisions setting largely arbitrary rules and procedures which don't exist in real world ATC.
MS Flight Simulator w/ VATSIM [1] l has this, in the sense thar you can participate as a pilot or a controller, although you are not assigned these roles at game start.
Anti-griefing works by keeping the barriers to entry very high, so chances are you won't try VATSIM, even though MSFS is technically available on Steam.
Probably not on Steam, but maybe still somewhere on the net. There used to be an open source game for unix-like systems simply called "atc" that gave you a text-mode view of a radar screen. You gave directions to pilots using the keyboard through some abbreviated text instructions. I know because it was pretty popular among some friends of mine back in the day.
I made a patch that made it a multiplayer networked game where each player controlled the space of one airport. When I was doing that I remember being surprised how the entire game was written as a parser in lex (or maybe yacc? not sure anymore) not straight C.
Honestly, it feels like RTS players might qualify considering how much multitasking is required in a game like Starcraft. Maybe they should add a StarCraft 2 competitive rank qualification.
I would be very much in favor of an amendment that says that whenever there's a single person in a public role that isn't being paid in a given month, then no other public employee above them in the chain, going up to the governor/president will be paid that month either.
That won't work since they'll still receive their bribes. Except for the ones who don't take bribes - they'll be punished for not taking bribes. Be careful what incentives you set up.
Now, if the rule was for them to have their bank accounts drained to zero (offshore bank accounts though)...
Actually what might work is locking them inside the government building until people are getting paid again. Some countries have rules like that in some scenarios.
Another one that might work is dissolving the government and calling an election. Many countries have that. If the governance structure can't pass a budget, operations continue according to the old budget while the entire governance structure gets fired and replaced.
AI should be able to handle the bulk of this work. "14,663 active controllers" is too much when you could have a single gamer + AI combo running it for multiple airports.
> The Xbox one logo appears at the start of the video before dissolving into a montage that cuts between images of men playing various online computer games and people, including women, in air traffic control towers looking at their own computers.
> "You've been training for this," the ad says.
Wow looks like Microsoft were not kidding with their 'this is also an xbox' ad campaign. Also really console gamers is who you target for this role? USG is becoming a joke
I'm sure an automated system would do great in 95% of conditions but it's that 5% where you really, really need a human in the loop to make judgement calls that would be incredibly difficult to program.
Here's a classic example of a controller noticing a pilot is hypoxic, indirectly testing his competency and ability, and likely being careful with how he routed traffic around the unreliable pilot until he got better. This alone seems pretty hard to imagine automated with current technology without some overkill prone-to-failure solution.
Sorry for being that person, but wouldn't situations like this be better resolved by replacing the pilot with full automation too?
I mean, I've seen quite a few cases where inordinate amounts of effort are expended to create automation to fit the needs of humans and legacy human-oriented interfaces, whereas redesigning the entire flow for the capabilities of modern tech can be significantly cheaper and more reliable.
I'm sure that there are a million various complications in this area that I have no idea of, but still would hope that the people in charge are looking to redesign the whole thing rather than just each piece individually.
It's not - it's much simpler. Drivers move in a 2D plane densely populated with cars and things that are not cars. Planes sparsely populate the sky by themselves. (There are birds too, but not that high up, and they're largely unavoidable in real-time anyway)
There's already semi-automated collision avoidance. If two planes are on a collision course, TCAS tells one plane to climb and another to descend. This works because outside of tightly managed scenarios like a holding stack, and planes shouldn't be anywhere near each other horizontally. There are no other planes above or below you (or anywhere nearby) and by fixing the directions as up and down, TCAS doesn't even have to calculate compass bearings that would work for avoidance.
If you were to design an entire ATC system from scratch (pilot interfaces, sensors everywhere in the airport and planes etc) it can be automated. But with pilots having to actually talk to ATC (and sometimes talk over each other with no feedback) instead of observing their status on a screen and pressing buttons on what they want to do or change their status it seems like it will be quite hopeless for quite some time.
What you can probably do is create software which observes traffic and simulates it into the future and notifies the human ATCs about risks. It might even be a good idea to try and digitize it for the ATCs so they talk less and press buttons more (which will feed into the simulation) and use TTS for the legacy transmissions to pilots that don't have an updated interface. Given the regulation on that industry it seems unlikely anyone competent enough to do it will have an interest to even try.
> If you were to design an entire ATC system from scratch (pilot interfaces, sensors everywhere in the airport and planes etc) it can be automated.
Even then you'll probably run into the long-tail distribution issues, similar to self-driving cars. 99.9% of all situations are pretty standard, but once in a while something so abstruse happens that it's not pre-programmed and requires some creativity to solve.
> What you can probably do is create software which observes traffic and simulates it into the future and notifies the human ATCs about risks.
Fully agree. Some of the recent close calls really were "obvious" much earlier, meaning they were not caused by late course changes.
Have we just forgotten that there is more to computing than LLMs?
Most big planes can land themselves now - in calm weather, at least. It's done regularly when fog is worse than a certain point, because the necessary radio signals pass through the fog. Both the airport and the plane need certain equipment. The same navigation equipment is used on many manual approaches, but with a human in the loop.
> hallucinate 10% of the time in charge of human lives
Out of curiosity, about a year ago I queried a few models about how to fly a particular instrument approach. It was an ILS approach using a DME arc transition. Other the basic concept of lateral and vertical guidance, most of the models got literally everything wrong. Wrong headings, wrong NAVAID frequencies. Wrong procedures. Maybe they’re better now in this domain, but they were confident in their claims of the ability to read an approach plate. But it was terrible.
Please correct me I'm wrong:
> The ad also highlights the salary on offer to controllers, saying it is $155,000 (£115,000) after three years of work.
Unless the US government shuts down again, at which point you stop being paid, you are required to keep working, you have no right to strike[0], and the competences you've built across this job are largely hard to directly make use of elsewhere so the incentive to job-hop is low.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...
This is why shutting down the right to strike is a short term approach: you can't make people choose to start or keep working in your sweatshop, so eventually you run out of staff.
> you can't make people choose to start or keep working in your sweatshop
If you're a government, you can; it's called a draft. The US seems to be preparing for it.
Can't really corveé labour skilled jobs which require passing a lot of exams. Even in the military.
What you can do, at state scale, is pass everybody through a services training filter and sit them under the sorting hat after three months to winnow out skills and potentials of interest.
Some are clear rejects, some are good for getting up early and walking perimeters, others would suit the motor pool. An occasional few will gel for traffic control, signal intell, etc.
The trick then, for a state, is to incentivize with carrots, sticks, patriotic abstractions like duty, etc. the ones they want for the jobs they have.
Now its time for levelling up training.
I think people here may enjoy John Oliver's report on how bad the situation for air traffic controllers currently is.
Jump to minute 18 for a discussion on floppy disks or, appropriately, to minute 25 for an "honest recruitment ad".
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YeABJbvcJ_k&t=1539
No right to strike? So then we go back to playing high school games. Report in sick. Use one of the many tricks to actually be sick.
I know this is culture-war stuff, but on the balance I think it's true that the FAA deprioritised applicants from the AT/CTI programmes, that is training courses speficically to become ATCs.
My main source is https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa..., and I'm assuming in particular that the screenshot of the letter in footnote 1 is genuine. In the section ended by footnote 16, there is a claim than in 2014 the FAA sent out just short of 3k job offer letters whereas in 2019 that had dropped to below 1k.
That sounds like cutting off your own recruitment pipeline.
It's also evidence that the FAA did not drop the standards for qualification and certification, which is reassuring.
What video game on Steam allows me to practice air traffic control? How can I determine if I have a skill at the logistics of managing planes on a radar screen? Where can I join a multiplayer lobby where at game start we're assigned to either give radio commands to planes, or interpret radio commands and respond on behalf of planes, with at least two players for each? How does anti-griefing work in that environment?
If that game existed, I would try it.
Does it?
It does, and it's called VATSIM[0]. VATSIM Radar[3] will show you what's going on right now.
As a pilot, you connect using either Microsoft Flight Simulator or X-Plane. Your flight simulator will include graphics (hopefully up-to-date) for your chosen area. Pick a starting airport, spawn at a ramp location (a gate, cargo area, etc.), connect to the network, file a flight plan (or go VFR), call up (or announce intentions), and go.
As a controller, VATSIM organizes ATC by region of the world, then in to 6-8 divisions within the region, then in to individual ARTCCs, ACCs, or FIRs[2]. You'll typically register with a division, then make your home in a particular ARTCC/FIR. For example, I was registered with VATUSA and made my home in the Indianapolis ARTCC.
There is software[1] for both pilots (connecting your flight sim to the network) and controllers (providing a radar display). Each "radio frequency" has an associated text chat and voice chat for communication. ATC are trained to support both text and voice simultaneously, following pilot's preference.
For controllers, your chosen ARTCC/ACC/FIR handles your training. They provide the "sectorfiles" that give you a graphical view of your airspace and your airports. (Think of it like a modern version of an old-style vector display.) They also help you through training, both book learning and sim training. You start controlling things on the ground, and work your way up to controlling things in the air.
[0]: https://vatsim.net/
[1]: https://vatsim.net/docs/policy/approved-software
[2]: Air Route Traffic Information Center / Area Control Center / Flight Information Region. Different countries use different terms, but mean the same thing: It's a large three-dimensional volume of airspace.
[3]: https://vatsim-radar.com/
Another useful tip: don't immediately register with the division local to you in the 'real world', but instead take a look at a variety to see how different divisions conduct themselves. Some divisions have very long waiting lists, and standards of service do differ between ARTCCs/FIRs. It's also worth just checking to see whether the software a given division uses is actually compatible with your computer, because they don't all use the same programs.
I've spent many hours in VATSIM and loved it, so don't be discouraged from diving in, but as a warning: I encountered a pervasive issue with pretentiousness across the VATSIM community, with some divisions setting largely arbitrary rules and procedures which don't exist in real world ATC.
MS Flight Simulator w/ VATSIM [1] l has this, in the sense thar you can participate as a pilot or a controller, although you are not assigned these roles at game start.
Anti-griefing works by keeping the barriers to entry very high, so chances are you won't try VATSIM, even though MSFS is technically available on Steam.
[1] https://vatsim.net/docs/basics/becoming-a-controller
Probably not on Steam, but maybe still somewhere on the net. There used to be an open source game for unix-like systems simply called "atc" that gave you a text-mode view of a radar screen. You gave directions to pilots using the keyboard through some abbreviated text instructions. I know because it was pretty popular among some friends of mine back in the day.
I made a patch that made it a multiplayer networked game where each player controlled the space of one airport. When I was doing that I remember being surprised how the entire game was written as a parser in lex (or maybe yacc? not sure anymore) not straight C.
AFAIK, Only Japanese gaming studio interested in this
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1348390/I_am_an_Air_Traff...
(only on Switch) https://www.sonicpowered.co.jp/bokukan/nsw/rjgg_allstars/
Honestly, it feels like RTS players might qualify considering how much multitasking is required in a game like Starcraft. Maybe they should add a StarCraft 2 competitive rank qualification.
StarCraft, LoL, DOTA are likely more relevant.
Have they tried paying them consistently?
I would be very much in favor of an amendment that says that whenever there's a single person in a public role that isn't being paid in a given month, then no other public employee above them in the chain, going up to the governor/president will be paid that month either.
That won't work since they'll still receive their bribes. Except for the ones who don't take bribes - they'll be punished for not taking bribes. Be careful what incentives you set up.
Now, if the rule was for them to have their bank accounts drained to zero (offshore bank accounts though)...
Actually what might work is locking them inside the government building until people are getting paid again. Some countries have rules like that in some scenarios.
Another one that might work is dissolving the government and calling an election. Many countries have that. If the governance structure can't pass a budget, operations continue according to the old budget while the entire governance structure gets fired and replaced.
[dead]
If you’re considering it, you should probably watch Last Week Tonight’s investigation first.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeABJbvcJ_k
After Theme Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_Park_(video_game) and Theme Hospital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_Hospital videogames now it's the turn of:
THEME TRAFFIC CONTROLLER
Source:
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/trumps-transportation-secretary...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9MczWfLpBcw
Where is the mighty AI when you need one.
AI should be able to handle the bulk of this work. "14,663 active controllers" is too much when you could have a single gamer + AI combo running it for multiple airports.
> The Xbox one logo appears at the start of the video before dissolving into a montage that cuts between images of men playing various online computer games and people, including women, in air traffic control towers looking at their own computers.
> "You've been training for this," the ad says.
Wow looks like Microsoft were not kidding with their 'this is also an xbox' ad campaign. Also really console gamers is who you target for this role? USG is becoming a joke
great at a skill but dont need money, ve disrespexted by politicians as pawns
[flagged]
I'm sure an automated system would do great in 95% of conditions but it's that 5% where you really, really need a human in the loop to make judgement calls that would be incredibly difficult to program.
Here's a classic example of a controller noticing a pilot is hypoxic, indirectly testing his competency and ability, and likely being careful with how he routed traffic around the unreliable pilot until he got better. This alone seems pretty hard to imagine automated with current technology without some overkill prone-to-failure solution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVpfOvVgHtY
Sorry for being that person, but wouldn't situations like this be better resolved by replacing the pilot with full automation too?
I mean, I've seen quite a few cases where inordinate amounts of effort are expended to create automation to fit the needs of humans and legacy human-oriented interfaces, whereas redesigning the entire flow for the capabilities of modern tech can be significantly cheaper and more reliable.
I'm sure that there are a million various complications in this area that I have no idea of, but still would hope that the people in charge are looking to redesign the whole thing rather than just each piece individually.
> Why would we be hiring new human air controllers now?
I suppose because it's not fully automated?
They just need to push the big red automate everything button. I’m sure it’s just that easy.
Claude Mythos will take care of it
We don’t even have fully automated driving cars despide a decade of heavy investment to this problem any random human can do at 16 years old.
I’d image air control for a whole airport is even more complex than that, you can take any conclusion you’d like.
It's not - it's much simpler. Drivers move in a 2D plane densely populated with cars and things that are not cars. Planes sparsely populate the sky by themselves. (There are birds too, but not that high up, and they're largely unavoidable in real-time anyway)
There's already semi-automated collision avoidance. If two planes are on a collision course, TCAS tells one plane to climb and another to descend. This works because outside of tightly managed scenarios like a holding stack, and planes shouldn't be anywhere near each other horizontally. There are no other planes above or below you (or anywhere nearby) and by fixing the directions as up and down, TCAS doesn't even have to calculate compass bearings that would work for avoidance.
Which tools do we have capable of automating it? LLMs? Not a good idea to put a machine that hallucinate 10% of the time in charge of human lives
If you were to design an entire ATC system from scratch (pilot interfaces, sensors everywhere in the airport and planes etc) it can be automated. But with pilots having to actually talk to ATC (and sometimes talk over each other with no feedback) instead of observing their status on a screen and pressing buttons on what they want to do or change their status it seems like it will be quite hopeless for quite some time.
What you can probably do is create software which observes traffic and simulates it into the future and notifies the human ATCs about risks. It might even be a good idea to try and digitize it for the ATCs so they talk less and press buttons more (which will feed into the simulation) and use TTS for the legacy transmissions to pilots that don't have an updated interface. Given the regulation on that industry it seems unlikely anyone competent enough to do it will have an interest to even try.
> If you were to design an entire ATC system from scratch (pilot interfaces, sensors everywhere in the airport and planes etc) it can be automated.
Even then you'll probably run into the long-tail distribution issues, similar to self-driving cars. 99.9% of all situations are pretty standard, but once in a while something so abstruse happens that it's not pre-programmed and requires some creativity to solve.
> What you can probably do is create software which observes traffic and simulates it into the future and notifies the human ATCs about risks.
Fully agree. Some of the recent close calls really were "obvious" much earlier, meaning they were not caused by late course changes.
Have we just forgotten that there is more to computing than LLMs?
Most big planes can land themselves now - in calm weather, at least. It's done regularly when fog is worse than a certain point, because the necessary radio signals pass through the fog. Both the airport and the plane need certain equipment. The same navigation equipment is used on many manual approaches, but with a human in the loop.
> hallucinate 10% of the time in charge of human lives
Out of curiosity, about a year ago I queried a few models about how to fly a particular instrument approach. It was an ILS approach using a DME arc transition. Other the basic concept of lateral and vertical guidance, most of the models got literally everything wrong. Wrong headings, wrong NAVAID frequencies. Wrong procedures. Maybe they’re better now in this domain, but they were confident in their claims of the ability to read an approach plate. But it was terrible.
> Fully automated and human free air traffic control would save lives.
I now know 100% that you are not a pilot. No thanks! 100% no thanks.
Only if it was Microsoft and entirely LLM-powered, because I trust their engineering:
Clippy: "Cessna 123, cleared for takeoff runway two-seven."
Cessna 123: "Cleared for takeoff runway two-seven, Cessna 123."
[seconds later]
Clippy: "Piper 456, cleared for landing runway niner. Where do you want to go today?"