Overweight/obesity combined: ~73-75% (nearly 3 in 4 adults) in the US.
We get it, @ExtraRoulette. You're big pimpin'.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046401
But I don't think we should extrapolate from it.
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
You can still do contract ATC work after 56.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How dare those peons use their economic leverage! That's only for the upper class
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.
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.
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.
We can probably semi automate runway crossing. Someone mentioned red lights when you definitely cannot cross
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.
One of the failure modes should not be “guy forgot thing”.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.