- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
Summary
The Trump administration emailed air traffic controllers urging them to quit and accept buyouts 24 hours after a fatal Reagan plane crash.
At 8:30 p.m. Thursday, the email urged federal employees to pursue private-sector jobs, offering pay incentives and vacation benefits while on government payroll.
This program contradicts established rules by allowing second employment, sparking union concerns about losing experienced personnel amid an air traffic controller shortage.
Trump blamed previous administrations for safety issues and misrepresented FAA standards, intensifying culture wars as officials remain uncertain about the buyout program’s future.
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Pilot here. I fly little airplanes for fun.
Much of the ATC system is already understaffed by a good amount. Becoming a controller is not super easy, nor is it for everyone. You have to pass a fairly stringent medical test, background check etc, and then you go to their academy for a while. After that, they will assign you wherever they need you, which may be nowhere near where you actually wanted to live. What you make depends on where you are and what you do. So for example, if you man a small airport in the middle of Idaho, you make less than if you are an approach controller near JFK. Each position that you might work requires its own training and certification, and I don’t just mean each physical location I mean like each chair, each working position. That’s because each sector of the airspace has its own quirks, where traffic usually comes from and usually goes to, defined airways and GPS points and procedures and that sort of thing.
My point with all this, is that hiring and training new controllers is significantly harder than most other jobs. To use the earlier example, and approach controller near JFK is doing one of the most difficult and stressful jobs in aviation, and is easily making six figures. But to get that guy there, getting him trained and certified on everything took years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. If he resigns, whatever salary you save on him is a drop in the bucket compared to what it will cost to replace him.
Private sector controllers are a thing. Many small airports contract out their tower operations, but this is generally done at small regional airports.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of places where fat needs to be trimmed in the federal government. I don’t believe ATC is one of them. And is certainly not a place where I want fat aggressively trimmed, because when you lose experience you reduce safety.
it is not safe to work for the federal government in trump America
It’s about to get unsafe to fly in the US.
It’s about to get unsafe in the US.
Sad but very likely as well.
That’s what we get when Nazis are encouraged instead of getting punched in the face.
Make America Russia Again.
Expecting pilots to be sober is woke somehow I imagine. And hiring a black woman pilot over a drunken white man is DEI.
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If their aim is to kill as many Americans as possible, they are doing a superb job. By that metric, Trump is the best president of all times.
I do hope the majority who get canned and who suffer voted for him. Everyone else, including myself, I feel sorry for and hope we can either ride it out or get out. His supporters should go down with the ship poor and depleted.
Seems like he’s going for maximum damage, bet he gets a Russian airlift from the white house just before it crumbles.
In an apparent attempt to ignite the culture wars and further discredit the FAA, Trump falsely claimed that the agency’s website lists individuals with “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism” as “qualified” applicants for the air controller position, CBS News reported.
Wait. Wait…
and dwarfism
Okay. Everything in his claim is wholesale made up, but what could possibly be wrong with an air traffic controller having dwarfism? There is nothing inherent about that condition that should preclude a person from being able to do this job. Many ATC coordinate flights traveling through Class A airspace, which is way up in the stratosphere, using computers. They might need a higher seat or something to reach the controls, but that’s it.
Trump genuinely thinks air traffic controllers just stare out windows all day, doesn’t he? And because he says this, now ignorant people will be imagining that their plane is coordinated by a little person in a tower, standing on their tippy toes.
Trump genuinely thinks air traffic controllers just stare out windows all day, doesn’t he? And because he says this, now ignorant people will be imagining that their plane is coordinated by a little person in a tower, standing on their tippy toes.
Given that Airports were key to our victory over the British literally a century before Airplanes were invented… Probably
And missing extremities? Are we against employing disabled veterans? I thought we loved the military?
Oh you mean the “suckers” and “losers”?
Would be funny if all remaining ATCs decided to quit and get a job on a different country. Take the land route to Canada or Mexico, or a ship to elsewhere.
Ironically Reagan fought ATC unions. They went on strike so he fired them and called in the military ATCs to cover their work.
And it was kind of a shit show for awhile.
There’s obviously overlap between military and civilian controllers, but it’s not the same job. The volume of traffic alone at a busy hub makes most air force bases look like quaint backwater airstrips.
There’s also just not a lot of “extra” military ATC.
Maybe they could give AirForce1 some “special” instructions as their last duty before being kicked out of the building?
Ah yes, just what we need right now… FEWER controllers in an industry that’s already short-staffed, and with two very recent fatal plane crashes. Perfect fucking idea.
You know what, fuck it. I hope they quit. Let’s accelerate this whole bullshit to its conclusion as fast as possible. Seems to me the only way through this fascist hellscape is by pissing off enough people to provoke a popular response.
Accelerationism is helping the enemy. You should be doing the exact opposite - resisting, rallying and counterattacking.
A lot of people had this attitude in Russia. Let the evil guys run the country to the ground, and then rebuild into a better structure. This will happen, I think, the only problem is that can take decades and millions of people dead in the process. No suggestions here, just a note…
I think you underestimate just exactly how popular Putin is with the Russian people, or I should say was originally. I don’t think he’s as popular now because of the “police action” in Ukraine and the number of Russians who have died to it and the economic hit the country has taken as a result of it. But he was insanely popular with the Russian populace through most of the 2010s.
Didn’t he win his last election with something like 94% of the vote. The dude is outrageously popular… or there might be something else going on.
A little of both since he is extremely popular in his country and he has also either jailed his opposition or they have gone missing or died mysteriously.
Your point does not contradict mine, unfortunately. He was and is popular. Maybe a little less so now, but he would win fair elections now, I think. The line many people in Russia take is “he is the only one who could take us out of this mess. Without him the country will collapse”. And there are, of course, a lot who wholeheartedly support his imperial ambitions, just like there are plenty of magas in the US.
Accelerationism is the stupidest idea ever. Shit being fucked is the natural state of things, and if you just let it slide, it will gradually come to it and stay there forever.
Given the persistent and extreme understaffing of air traffic controllers it wouldn’t take that many quitting at the same time to have a massive impact.
What do the think is going to happen? Privatize air traffic control? Or just rank the economy so bad they buy everything up?
On Friday, speaking about his plan for federal workers during a press conference, Trump stated: “It’s our dream to have everyone, almost, working in the private sector, not the public sector.”
They literally want to privatize every government function they possibly can. They’re saying it out loud, and have been for some time, and with control of all three branches of the federal government there’s absolutely nobody to stand in their way. So buckle up because things are about to get very bumpy.
They absolutely want to privatize it.
And there will be many more plane crashes when they do.
That has already been suggested by his minions. Let the airlines manage everything. Including baggage and body checking.
Oh god, the very idea…
Even if that’s your goal getting ATCs to simply quit all at once isn’t the way to go about it lol. I hope it works. It’ll ground all flights and cripple the country and bring this stupidity to it’s conclusion quickly.
The fallout has long lasting effects. When Reagan fired the ATC people who went on strike, it took a long, long time to rehire and train people who could do it. It’s a stressful job, and many people who looked like they were handling it well suddenly broke down and had to quit. In some ways, the industry never recovered from that.
Well the cynic in me says “to undermine the public trust in the safety of air travel so people become more isolated, unwilling to organize, and dependent on either corporate-controlled media or gasoline-powered cars to maintain contact with any part of the world outside a 20-mile radius,” and the nutjob conspiracy theorist in me sure thinks he could make a convincing corkboard out of it if you gave him enough thumb tacks and red string, but once again I could be making the mistake of assuming they’re going into this with a plan and not just flailing wildly to make it look like they’re addressing a problem they have no idea how to solve.
In Hungary, Fidesz just either forces the media to not report on protests until they can get a picture where they can pretend only a few people attended, or they send the “football fans” (skinheads) in.
just flailing wildly to make it look like they’re addressing a problem they have no idea how to solve.
Yeah, rumor goes this started because the FAA had issues with Starship blowing up and raining debris, and Musk deciding to teach them a lesson.
It’s more that SpaceX has consistently lied on the forms that it gave the FAA, EPA, etc and have been cited multiple times. (See the saga about the blast deflection plate and the deluge water being industrial runoff they were letting drain into the nearby protected wetlands)
The starship exploding thing was a proverbial slap on the wrist and Elon still threw a fit.
The thing is that the Starship issue really isn’t that big a deal. There is always an FAA investigation after every spacecraft or aircraft flight anomaly.
It’s not the first time and definitely won’t be the last that a craft will fail to get to orbit, especially experimental ones like Starship units current iterative form.
The bigger question with the Starship anomaly is whether the active flight routes in that area during the launch window were normal or unexpected. Closer to the launch site there are large restricted areas, and launches are negotiated ahead of time and paths well known. Planes aren’t normally under the direct flight path for that exact reason.
He could totally intend to privatise ATC. They’re already halfway done with privatising education, and there’s no need to even mention healthcare.
Close all the exits.
That is one angle. Hmm.
US can into theocratic Stone Age.
Just get ChatGPT do it or something
How does it go again? “In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity”
The fact that they are using these tragic events as a means to dismantle the government even more quickly is horrifying to watch from the other end of the pond.
What’s the old saying…
Never waste a crisis
Or something like that?
Manufacture a crisis so you can gut the government and install a dictatorship
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Chaos is a ladder
I see that Trump is trying to reduce US carbon output by drastically reducing commercial air traffic, either by simple lack of air traffic controllers or by making the public too scared to fly! Quite the environmentalist! /s
You first.
he probably caused all this and is just blaming everyone else again
That’ll help
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