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Posted on 07/28/2025 8:49:03 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
In his first few days guiding aircraft at the Oakland, California, air traffic control center, trainee Ryan Higgins deleted a plane’s data from the radar screen. It was untrackable for a few frantic moments while more experienced controllers made sure the plane was on a safe path. The rookie mistake rattled Higgins and earned him a stern rebuke.
By that point, Higgins, a promising candidate with a college degree, already felt slighted by the veteran Federal Aviation Administration controllers who are responsible for training recruits under the agency’s apprenticeship system. He witnessed another trainee get cursed out in front of his peers. He found the center’s equipment outdated, with technology that he said made it difficult to understand pilots’ communications. And for all the stress, the payoff — after at least three years of training — would be working in a job marked by six-day workweeks.
He quit.
“I just felt kind of miserable going to work and being berated when I’m just trying to learn,” said Higgins, who was 28 when he first arrived at the Oakland center, which guides thousands of passenger planes a day along busy West Coast air routes.
Higgins’s experience was far from unusual, according to a Washington Post examination of data and interviews with trainees who pursued a career in the federal system but ultimately washed out. The FAA’s high trainee dropout rate is a leading cause of the nation’s dangerous shortage of air traffic controllers. In some cases, recruits failed their training and were dismissed. In others, they left of their own accord rather than endure what they described as haphazard instruction, organizational dysfunction and abusive conditions.
The agency employs about 11,500 certified controllers, about 3,000 short of its goal, a shortfall that affects almost every airport in the country...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
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Kind of like what they'd experience in a high-stress profession like air traffic control.
I’d be worried if there wasn’t a high washout rate!
Whether people get killed in a mid-air collision is less important than if trainees feel dissed.
Air traffic control seemed to work pretty well until lately.
Climate change, probably /s
I’ve read that former Air Force and Navy flight controllers have applied to the FAA and been turned down because they had the wrong melanin level and/or the wrong internal plumbing.
NUKE THE UNCONSTITUTIONAL FAA!!!!
naturally, WaPo never considered the high washout rate to be the result of entitled, pussified Gen-Xers being unable to withstand the rigors of intense training for a VERY high-pressure career ... would love to see the dropout rate of a control group of this same bunch undergoing Marine training on Parris Island ... [”Oh no, the DI screamed and cursed at me and called me mean names, boo hoo!”]
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you…….
Keep in mind that the only reason there is a shortage is DEI — whites were previously refused because of the color of their skin. FAA went woke and that = racism whenever instituted.
As to stress, Geesh. Of course.
In what, Urban Studies?
I'll bet most of these washouts were coddled and sherpad all the way through school, and came to ATC Control training expecting more of the same.
Poor child.
Yeah. The FAA sucks rocks.
NOW ... what are you going to replace it with? Think carefully ...
No kidding… if they struggle with the stress of training, a gradual process from simulated traffic to midnight ops and eventually to some busier traffic, probably not a good fit for 20+ years at a relatively busy facility.
Easy. Private enterprise and federal involvement constitutionally LIMITED to ONLY removal of interstate commerce barriers.
Describe in detail, please.
Air travel should be essentially private enterprise.
The feds should be in the background and get involved only if a dispute arises between states and to remove any barriers a state may put up to interstate travel.
Seems like you haven’t thought this through very carefully.
That’s OK.
It’s easy to shout “NUKE THE FAA” on a discussion board, and I absolutely support your right to do it. It’s just not very helpful.
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