A discussion about the airline industry, airline employees, and all things related

As a NATCA member, I'd say you can pretty much take any press release from them with a grain of salt.

I agree NATCA tends to be over dramatic with their press releases. I just see it from my end of only a few graduates being sent to Oklahoma City from our university. I would gladly like to hear your perspective on the situation.

The bottom line, a huge percentage of the controller work force will be eligible to retire over the next five years. This is a direct result of the PATCO strike of 1981, when most of the workforce was fired for striking illegally and replacements were hired. The FAA has known for twenty years that this situation was developing. NATCA is merely capitalizing on it with their claims that the controller work force is being "cut".

Contracting out of some lower-density towers was one of the agency's responses to the problem, as well as contracting out Flight Service. A huge number of former Flight Service workers are being trained today as controllers. Some will make the grade, many more won't.

The FAA did its biggest disservice to itself when it eliminated the "screen" at Oklahoma City, a high-intensity six-week course at OKC that all prospective new-hires went through. With an attrition rate well over 50%, the screen insured that MOST of the developmentals to actually survive the screen and reach a facility would go on to become fully-qualified controllers.

That's a different story today, and over the last five or so years, over half the new-hires we've received for training at our facility have washed out of the training program. Most of the ones that DO make it through struggle, at best.

The bottom line is it takes a unique kind of individual to do this job, and no amount of college education can prepare you for that. Very few of the fully-qualified controllers at my facility are college-educated, or at least not to the point that they hold a degree.

In fact, the last developmental we had who came from a college "air traffic" program barely made it through the program, and now has discovered she hates the job. Another that came through in the same group also checked out, but quickly moved to a support staff position when the job of "pushing tin" (and working rotating schedules, and providing OJT to new hires) proved to be too much to handle.