NATCA maintains a computer bulletin board service where members can go to wax philosophical on any number of topics. The waters of this information stream are fast moving, and many times individuals will capture the essence of an issue so perfectly that I pause and think, "Man...I wish I had said that."
Such was recently the case with an exchange concerning the "unintended consequences" of the FAA's recent actions. Barb Walton, a controller from Daytona Beach, managed to put into words what many journeymen (and women) air traffic controllers are feeling as they watch their beloved agency swirling around the drain. In the art and science of air traffic control the little things mean a lot, but they are often not even noticed or missed until they are totalled up together as part of the "safety chain that broke" in the hearing to investigate the tragedy. Barb's insightful take on the state of air traffic controller training in the agency was so good, I reprint it here virtually verbatim:
"There is a large group of people coming to 25 years of service starting next month, and a huge bell curve of retirement eligibility over the next 5 years. The FAA hired huge groups of people for about 10 years, then froze hiring from 1993 to 2005 except in a very few cases, relatively speaking.
"There is almost no reason for anyone to stay after they are eligible if they go forward with imposed work rule implementation as it looks today. There is definitely no reason financially to bid anywhere by experienced controllers. A lot of what we do is actually teamwork, and the shift's success depends a lot on the collective synergy of all those working, not on each individual's performance.
"The FAA has made it clear that those coming in, whatever their level, will not be expected to have the knowledge base we were required to have pre-1993 in order to pass the screen. Performance characteristics, weather, aircraft identification, thousands of other bits of information were culled from the training in order to speed it up. People now are taught the most basic phraseology, separation standards, and procedures that will get them through a shift without killing any aircraft. They don't know why they do a lot of it. So when something weird goes on, not within the very limited database they know, they won't be able to flow with it and provide service to the pilot in trouble. They won't be able to recognize trouble when they see it. They will only know one way of doing things. And the group around them, after 5 or 6 years, will be mostly a generation removed from the institutional group knowledge that allowed a coordinated response to unusual situations, a variety of solutions to choose from, and an experience base that has seen every situation before among the group present.
"The agency's new training plan fosters and encourages this by providing minimal training, minimal expectations, and minimal time to get to a limited certification. They will not, in the near future, care whether anybody is ever a CPC again; they will only care if the SABRE scheduler shows that nobody who's "certified" to work a particular scope or position is not there.
"It's an entire, huge, completely different training philosophy than the agency has had for the past 20 years at least, probably the last 48 (the FAA was created in 1958 to promote safety and air commerce - something else they probably don't teach any more); they don't care about the depth of your knowledge or the completeness of your skills any more; they only care that you can work at least one sector/position in the shortest possible time under general supervision.
"And there is truth to the long-standing perception that knowledge is lost with every generation of trainee; nobody can teach everything they know to the person they're training, and if only one or two people train a new hire on one or two sectors and then stop, that person will have a limited knowledge base, and if they're only allowed a minimal time to learn the sector, they'll learn even less. There are basic ATC skills that take time to develop; the tuning of the ear to the radio, the training of the eye to see aircraft consistently over several miles; the scanning techniques that must become rhythmic and almost subconscious, and most importantly, the stretching of the time sense to get the little itch that someone's overdue, something hasn't happened, someone hasn't moved quite fast enough, something will go wrong in 5 minutes if I don't do this now. Some people never get that, and most trainees I've seen fail do so because they haven't tuned their brains to the rhythm of aircraft motion and movement through all 4 dimensions (including time). My guess is that takes 3 to 6 months, over 20 years of observing the light bulb come on for many new hires; and most of the coming new hires won't get that much time to certify on their first position. And they won't be allowed to work back and forth between different positions, learning the consequences of their decisions from the position working the aircraft before or after they do, taking more time to certify overall but then getting a lot at once because the light has turned on. All they're going to know how to do is "1000 and 3," and they will say "unable" to everything else.
"All of that is a HUGE shift in corporate thinking about training. It's not the FAA's objective any more to train an employee for a career of progressively more complex traffic and responsibility, as our training was structured. Instead, it's a corporate philosophy that puts butts in the seats with just enough knowledge to keep the conga line moving, and learn it quickly so we don't have to waste another controller's time being plugged in with you. Any idea anyone still holds that tomorrow's training will be anything like today's is a dangerous assumption. The whole philosophy is different. They not only don't care if employees know nothing outside their little slice of the job; they prefer it.
"To maintain the type of quality air traffic training you're talking about, every OJTI will have to assume from day one that every new trainee will have to learn everything they're going to be allowed to learn on the very first position you train them. Say they train on a satellite sector; they won't ever, under the agency's new philosophy, have to know how to work a 4 corner major airport flow, or vector parallel finals, or tunnel over/under major routes. They will only have to learn that one sector, with its type traffic. It will be solely up to the OJTI and the trainee to apply themselves more broadly during that short training period if they wish to know anything more about ATC than basic vectoring within their assigned airspace, because the agency in its wisdom does not see the value in that knowledge any more.
"Those who have been required to have a comprehensive knowledge of ATC are being replaced by a generation who will not be given the opportunity to learn things in depth. Because of hiring practices there will be a great movement in numbers out the door, and a sudden and downward rebalancing of team experience with people starting well below the experience level now needed to work the traffic in the higher facilities. I'm sure it will work for a few years, but there will be a sudden spike in problems in a few years as those time frames hit critical points.
"And, to clarify further, there is no disparagement meant towards those who will do the majority of the training of the next generation. Instead, in about 5 years, there will be a great outcry from that group specifically at the lack of complete and comprehensive training investment by the agency in those new people from now until then, and their relative uselessness compared to those now leaving.
"You can't beat the dog for not performing tricks you don't teach him; but the agency will try, if it is allowed to continue with an over-arching bean-counter philosophy. It will be the controllers' fault for screwing up if we as an institution start eroding our safety record. If regime change allows us to return to a "safety no matter what it costs" money philosophy, look for us to return to educational value over fast insertion into the general operation.
"And I think that the pendulum has swung so far in the bean-counter direction just because we have done our jobs so well. We are victims of our own success. Our safety standards are so high, and our accident records so historically low, that the FAA has deluded themselves into thinking they can cut costs by cutting essential training and staffing. It will only take one, maybe two, big blunders by ATC to refocus this tombstone agency back onto safety where it belongs. But people will die in the effort, and the agency will only have proved that they did not learn from having to structure us in this way in the first place; that is, to be so comprehensively trained in order to bring us to this point of success we enjoy now.
"So, in effect, the agency is teasing the bear, up next to the cage with a stick poked through and into his belly, and his big ole' paw is reared back, ready to swipe them hard, but they're smiling over their shoulder at the spouse with the camera and not paying attention to the bear.
"Does this make any more sense to you? I realize I rambled all over the place, but I'm trying to shed light on a problem from several directions just hoping one of them gets the idea across. I don't know, short term, that we can do anything about it ourselves. Again, it will take regime change and/or tragedy before this gets fixed, because the agency's pretty well locked in to this cheapo mode of being able to prove to Congress that they are doing their administrative jobs. They may get the body count up eventually, but the quality they allow those controllers to be will not be even close to the quality and experience they have now. And they don't care. They really don't get how important that is. And it's hard for us to imagine they could be that stupid, but they really are. Because right now they only answer to their administration, and in a limited way to Congress, and those money and body count numbers are the stats that are important to those two groups. All of them are taking the safety of the flying public and the quality of the service provided for granted. All of them think the accident numbers can only go down. And all of them buy the mantra that available technology is ready and installed to take over for any skill, experience, and common sense. We are the only ones (and I include many field managers and supervisors in this group) who know how much the system really relies on the controllers making things work, because we do it so well.
"Unfortunately, they're about to find out how wrong they are."
