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OT: American Politics

Bleedsblue&white said:
I have a cousin who was, at one point a traffic controller in the military.

I've got friends in the airline business, and we all know how stressful working air traffic is, so these fuckers better not set up a sacrificial lamb unless it's the person responsible for being short shifted.
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I had a friend who was an air traffic controller for close to 20 years (before becoming a crack and heroin addict, but that's a whole other movie)

When he joined after passing the entrance exam, he was sent to the federal government training centre in Cornwall for 9 months of training. He lived in residence and his room and board were deducted from his meager stipend. During these 9 months there were several benchmarks he had to reach. Failure to make the grade resulted in being "cease trained" or washed out if the program.

After that, he was assigned to work in a tower. In his case, this was in Prince George BC. He worked there for (I think) another 9 or perhaps 12 months and, after successfully checking out, was brought into the Vancouver area control centre as a full-fledged controller.

But by this time, air traffic control in Canada had been semi-privatized under the auspices of Nav-Canada and the people now running things all came from the ranks of private corporations. And if you're from the corporate world, your job, no matter where you are, is to be able to show your next employer that you turned a profit. So even though Nav-Can was supposed to be run as a break even company, the people in charge were interested in one thing: cutting costs to increase profits.

Ultimately, the only ways to achieve this in an industry like air traffic control, is to offload training costs on to the individual, cutting back on staff as much as possible without endangering lives, and, of course, grinding the union down. So the first thing to go was the training centre in Cornwall. If you want to be an ATC now, you have to pay to go to college and take all the approved courses and if you do well enough and there's a vacancy, MAYBE Nav-Can will give you a shot. But the financial burden of your training now falls on you, not them.

Additionally, there were staff cut backs which added to the stress level and led to more ATC burnout. But as far as management was concerned, if anything bad happened, they'd just tie the can to whoever was on duty when it happened rather than admit that the accident was a result of being short staffed.

And then they managed to grind the union. They "grandfathered" existing staff under the old union rules while screwing new hires. The obvious consequence from this is that ATC no longer pays as well as it used to and so the caliber of the new applicants is not as good as it used to be.

In the US, air traffic control has been a bit of a shit show ever since Reagan fired them in 1981. I can well imagine that there are often situations where there simply aren't enough controllers or tower operators on duty at a given time (especially in the evening hours when this collision happened) and that the standard operating procedure is to blame the lowest person on the food chain and ruin their life while the status quo remains and we wait for the next catastrophe.
 
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