That's true, but there are not that many jobs that have so many lives on the line as ATC.

The point of the frogs boiling metaphor is the frogs in fact do not survive.

[flagged]

As long as we're desperate for a job and we need to finance our lifestyle to impress the Johnsons.

It’s also the only industry that is legally allowed to practice ageism. You have to start before or up to 31 years of age. You’re out at age 56. This figures into how the benefits are structured.

You can still do contract ATC work after 56.

Nurses also get paid more for night shifts, doesn't mean they're 'overpaid'

Yes, when they work overtime they get paid more for that overtime than regular time.

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".

> Overwork is an issue in general, but I don't know that it was the actual issue here.

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.

The audio I heard seems to show the firetruck asking if the runway is clear to cross, the controller responding in the affirmative, the firetruck confirming the affirmative, and then 7 seconds later, the controller saying STOP STOP STOP.

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/

Okay, so then what is? Most jobs have this failure mode because there's a tendency to strip funding until disaster happens, even when it was clearly foreseeable.

Inadequate funding seems like the common factor across the vast majority of jobs with these failure modes.

Well, there was the time Ronald Reagan fired all the ATC workers [Edit: I had the reason wrong but I still blame Reagan.]

This was a special/unexpected situation - one of the other passenger jets declared an emergency and needed to evacuate the passengers onto the ground (there were no free gates to return). The firetruck was on it's way to assist with the emergency.

Nowhere has automated ATC because errors look like this.

Imagine it were 90% automated. Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.

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.

There's exceptions all the time. They turn back because a warning light came on. They saw a deer on the runway, a passenger got up to the bathroom. There's no way that could be automatic, plus they often need atc to look at their jet to see if it's damaged.

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.