Summary
The Trump administration has begun firing several hundred FAA employees via emails, including workers in radar, landing, and navigational aid roles, as well as personnel in a classified early warning radar program for Hawaii.
The terminations occur just weeks after a fatal mid-air collision at Reagan Washington National Airport amid ongoing staffing shortages and safety concerns in air traffic control.
Some employees allege the firings were politically motivated and executed without following standard government protocols.
…and there’s been another plane crash just a bit ago.
Don’t forget the Delta flight that did a barrel roll today
That would have been Canadian ATC.
I thought it was the 51st state. /s.
That’s funny. God’s one. Not /s
Likely the weather though we had some pretty blustery winds in ontario
Yeah, I just meant not the US ATC.
I have a ss of it directly above this post in /all.
ffs
“ss” = screenshot, I get it now.
I took me a second. At first I could Nazi what the letters represented.
Screen shot, social security, secret service, subway sandwhich, it really could have been anything
There’s a reason piloting is one of the top 5 most dangerous jobs in the US. It isn’t because of the airlines, it’s because of small aircraft like bush pilots, light aircraft and helicopters. Without trying to be dismissive of the tragedy of a crash and the loss of life, small aircraft accidents and incidents are not unusual.
One of my family members owned a plane back in the ‘70s. For fun, I looked it up and traced the history. It was crashed three times, repaired twice, the third and final crash being a loss of life and aircraft thanks to a drunken owner taking it out on the final flight.
It’s surprising how dangerous aviation still is despite the immensely safe air travel we’ve all gotten used to.
deleted by creator
Starting to wonder if I should have even agreed to travelling for work.
several hundred FAA employees
Back around 1980, you had the Reagan-PATCO union showdown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Organization_(1968)
On August 5, following the PATCO workers’ refusal to return to work, the Reagan administration fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order,[13][14] and banned them from federal service for life.
These layoffs are something like a few percent the size of that. And those were people in one role, which is gonna be a bottleneck, harder to deal with, whereas this is gonna be spread out.
ATC numbers took 10+ years to recover after Reagan. Not only that but more flights and longer hours means even with the former number before the trump cuts, the ATCs were struggling. While each individual cut is small, ATCs are more strained than ever, and there is also the risk of organized strikes or more mass firings. Also, it takes a while to train ATCs, so it’s not something that can be immediately rectified without rehiring the fired workers and reinstating trainees
Just wanted to point out a minor detail. Thank God these morons were not dumb enough to fire actual ATCs. These firings were for non-ATC positions at the FAA.
Still really important positions like people who do shit like maintain critical systems (who needs radar? lol) but at least they haven’t fucked with ATC numbers yet. Someone must have told President Musk that would cause the collapse of an already fragile system
I’m sorry, I guess I could post this elsewhere, but there is computer software that can do a lot better job than people at determining possible collisions That software can notify people who can then oversee the change in flight pattern.
Currently the warning system still requires human acknowledgment without any communication to the Vehicle/vehicles involved.
A system that would work would notify the individuals who are flying within their instrument panels similar to how we use Waze in a car to notify us if we need to turn right. Having 1 million air traffic controllers trying to do that job for the user is just foolish.
Have you ever used software… it ain’t great. They also have software that can land planes. You wanna volunteer for those flights?
Without taking either side of this debate - you realize that the vast majority of the duration of a flight is already automated by software, right?
yep. But the subject on the thread was that there is software that does a lot of what an air traffic controller does, but we currently make it’s recommendations go through a person first. And he/she was saying it should skip the ATC and go straight to the aircraft, so we don’t need as many ATC’s. Auto-pilot today is basically the same thing as to how that software is used today. The pilot turns it on. And they can turn it off very quickly. So they are still always there checking up on the technology. Taking the human completely out of the loop would be a very big difference. And I am not saying that software couldn’t be written that we could trust. Just that our current society keep software in a race to the bottom quality-wise. So there isn’t enough people with the experience it would take to do it totally perfectly that can be hired to work on it. And the government certainly would never pay them enough if they could be found.
I use a lot of software. Buggy as all get out apps gets tossed for apps that work.
Being stuck with buggy software from the 1940’s sounds worse to me.
Go sit in the back of a Tesla and have it drive you somewhere.
1 million air traffic controllers
I’m sorry but if you’re going to exaggerate numbers you should cite the exact amount there are.
Fools only believe in made up numbers.
I meant if air traffic controllers were trying to do the job of the Waze application for people driving their cars and telling them which wayto turn in order to get to their destination. I should have saved that more clear.
Of course these would be different than air, traffic controllers, if we were living in the future of Back to the Future II, our cars would be flying by now.
So, what are your thoughts on The Jetsons?
Ha ha, we are already living the Jetsons.
Many people have central heat and air, and a closed in dome environment of their home. Where they go to their closed in garage and get into their space fairing craft, proceeded to maneuver themselves to the tall skyscraper in which they pull into a closed garage controlled by central heat and air systems. They go to work for the day and go home. Now, of course many people work outside of the office, but that is never covered in the Jetsons.
Everyone is always wearing space suit of some type to protect from the outside harsh environment.
Is this software in use?
And Reagan got rewarded for that by naming an airport after him
This country is the worst. Buildings and monuments and other sites are named after traitors and those who try to run the government into the ground because we learn absolutely nothing.
Did he? Never heard of it.
I know Dulles and John Glenn and National and JFK. Can’t say I recall a “Reagan Airport”.
It’s the one in DC that the airliner hit the helicopter.
This is really great news. I’m traveling domestically next month and internationally in May. Time to update that will, I guess.
Putin: And if it ends up killing Americans, even better!
I wonder when the redcap dumbasses will wake up and realize he’s trying to kill them as well?
No, it’s all still Biden’s fault
Or worse, they’re still blaming Hilary
That’ll show them.
/s
