Race based staffing - Because it works so well in other government operations - like schools and the DMV.
"width=500">
“Education is really not our thing”. Previous post about South Africa.
Yes, being an ATC is a stressful job that isn't for everyone, but it ain't rocket surgery either.
Insane is right! NASA was also changed in this way by Obamanation.
Diversity is not a criteria we should work toward in fact we need to run away from the whole idea.
Glad to see Lee try to bring back common sense.
No surprise. The lives of innocent people are just sacrifices on the altar of political correctness. The great god of diversity must have a victim every day. Who’s next?
Race based staffing - Because it works so well in other government operations - like schools and the DMV.
"width=500">
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Trump should “pull a Reagan” and intervene. If minorities are qualified, by. all means, they should apply and help keep the skies safe. It doesn’t matter what color an ATC is, as long as they can do the job.
It must be an incredibly stressful job, knowing you have the lives of thousands in your hands....and the effects on the families. I wonder if there is some psychological training involved. And if the shifts are shorter. People under that kind of stress must need breaks.
Move on. Nothing to see here.
Minority hiring has been federally forced upon employers for decades.
It is all a numbers game now on how many and what kind are mandated.
Qualifications be Dammed.
[Quoting from a couple of old posts of mine]
I was a guest at the "New York Center" many years ago (before Reagan fired my IFR instructor). And based upon that experience, a sleeping controller would be no big deal. At the NYARTCC, 75% of the people I saw in the building weren't even working. (They were playing bridge, watching TV, etc., and this was at the supposed busiest time of the day.) Of the ones who were working only about one in four were actually directing air traffic. The rest were gofers.
It's pure BS that this is stressful or that the controllers have thousands of lives in their hands, except that they could possibly cause a collision if they wanted to. It does help to know the system from a pilot's point of view and also to be shown it in a trusted way from the controllers point of view as I did and was.
When I first walked into the darkened scope room, it was obvious to me that my visit was not unexpected. One of the guys got up from his scope insanely screaming, "They're gonna collide! They're gonna collide!" It didn't take me long to see that the controllers considered their job a joke. I suppose I could have known that from the chatter my controller IFR instructor engaged in sometimes on the radio while we were flying. It must have just been one big fraternity to him as he seemed to have friends at a number of the facilities we were handled by. (I'm not sure we ever were even handled by his NYARTCC as they only come into play above 7000 feet or something like that.)
My instructor was the senior guy on his team and he had three underlings helping him when he was working the scope. He had a particular sector to work. I think he took handoffs from Cleveland ARTCC of planes flying at altitude, and had to bring the NYC bound ones down to 17,000 feet to handoff to another guy. When he was really working the highest number of planes he was talking to at one time was four. (This was between 6 and 8 PM on a weekday.) But he showed me different views he could see on his scope, so first he didn't eliminate the ones flying lower than his sector. And then he gradually kept increasing the radius of the sector displayed until it eventually was centered on NYC and extended past Boston and Washington. Then there a zillion targets on his screen. That zillion target view is always the one you see on a news feature about air traffic controllers.
It's been a while now since I've flown, but the number of times I had to struggle to get a word in edgewise with the controller who was working me was very low. If you're smart when you fly IFR you pay attention to everything going on on the frequency; and usually it's not hard to do. It's just another clue to the usual workload the controllers experience.
ML/NJ
Is that what happened to my flight landing in Newark from Denver last week?
Our approach was typical of such flights, a north to south heading toward the airport.
We had seen NYC from the windows on the left of the plane, and the plane had begun its descent. Then we could see lower Manhattan and then the Statue of Liberty as our descent continued.
We began to see we were getting near to landing altitute and very near the airport when suddenly the pilot took the plane into takeoff mode, and we shut up and up in altitude for quite a few minutes. Eventually the pilot came on and announced he had to abort the flight because their was a plane sitting in our path on the runway, and our ground speed would have overtaken it before it could get out of the way.
He eventually made a half circle heading back north to the airport and landed, about 20 minutes late.
We all wondered how in the hell airport traffic countrol did not know that plane was sitting in our way and reassigned our runway before we got so close.
Tucker did a couple of segments on this during the year; then an ATC Manager came on and said that this had been fixed.
