FAA considering old commercial space for facility consolidation

Shikaka said:
WhY dOnT wE hIrE lOcAl At AsPeN aNd NaNtUcKeT
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Idk but if you change this system it forces them to fix these issues. Maybe these facilities need to be 2 on 2 off with government housing. Then you’ll have people beating down the doors to work there. Btw they already offer that for some flight service stations so the FAA already knows how it works.
 
Shikaka said:
WhY dOnT wE hIrE lOcAl At AsPeN aNd NaNtUcKeT
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If they could get a good workable concept, those would be great places to have remote towers. Especially Nantucket.

My worry is that the Scandinavian experience shows that for remote towers to be cost-effective you have to have a controller working more than one airport at a time. Northern Norway is very much like remote Alaska where the weather is incredibly dynamic and the traffic generally few and far between making it manageable. Those Towers function more like manned weather observatories than being about the separation of traffic (can’t have a conflict with just one plane), but you know some turd in headquarters is going to get the brilliant idea to combine up things that have no business being combined.

Also Norway is very rich and very small by comparison so they can put towers everywhere they want, even at places that would be uncontrolled most other places
 
Bandit117 said:
If they could get a good workable concept, those would be great places to have remote towers. Especially Nantucket.

My worry is that the Scandinavian experience shows that for remote towers to be cost-effective you have to have a controller working more than one airport at a time. Northern Norway is very much like remote Alaska where the weather is incredibly dynamic and the traffic generally few and far between making it manageable. Those Towers function more like manned weather observatories than being about the separation of traffic (can’t have a conflict with just one plane), but you know some turd in headquarters is going to get the brilliant idea to combine up things that have no business being combined.

Also Norway is very rich and very small by comparison so they can put towers everywhere they want, even at places that would be uncontrolled most other places
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Remote ACK to A90 and have the sectors over ACK combined with the tower be an 'up/down' of sorts.
 
Bandit117 said:
That’s peanuts there dude. Bismarck is the gateway to the oil patch, you can make more easily, all the company stuff is up there, since you can’t get good flights to Williston. Housing is up a lot out there as well. It went up during the oil boom, last I heard you’re looking at 400k on average for a house. Previously, before the oil boom it was a place where you could work at a gas station and still buy a house. That 400k is a decent swing on level 5 pay (starts at 81k out there).

Local hiring is fine to get people in the door, until after they get in and learn they can make 200k plus at say ZMP. Some might stay but a non zero chunk of local hires will want to advance up the pay band when they learn about it
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And then that chunk of local hires would be replaced with a new crop of local hires. Actually sounds like the career progression problem would be solved and the FAA would operate like a "normal" career where there is actual advacement.

Also there are probably thousands of Bimarckians working in retail, fast food, the counter at BIS airport, making a fraction of what controllers make at BIS, probably with little/no benefits. Surely 10-12 of them would be willing to give ATC a shot and not immediately want to flee to a higher level facility...
 
RalphBeast said:
And then that chunk of local hires would be replaced with a new crop of local hires. Actually sounds like the career progression problem would be solved and the FAA would operate like a "normal" career where there is actual advacement.

Also there are probably thousands of Bimarckians working in retail, fast food, the counter at BIS airport, making a fraction of what controllers make at BIS, probably with little/no benefits. Surely 10-12 of them would be willing to give ATC a shot and not immediately want to flee to a higher level facility...
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I’m not totally opposed to it, it needs to be a tool in the toolbox when places are hard to staff, but I would expect very lopsided results. Given the amount of young people who grow up in Bismarck and leave and don’t come back after graduation.

The only surefire way to stop people from quitting black holes is to give them hope. Like an A124 kind of hope. Like If you get sent to somewhere like RST, with its constant 40-something percent staffing, after 5 years as a CPC you get to leave. If you give people a light, they will pass through the tunnel instead of turning around. That’s the biggest gripe I hear, is people being stuck for years, trying to move the right away, staying on the boards, but they can’t due to circumstances outside their control. It’s like the agency punishes people for going to hard to staff locales.
 
Bandit117 said:
I’m not totally opposed to it, it needs to be a tool in the toolbox when places are hard to staff, but I would expect very lopsided results. Given the amount of young people who grow up in Bismarck and leave and don’t come back after graduation.

The only surefire way to stop people from quitting black holes is to give them hope. Like an A124 kind of hope. Like If you get sent to somewhere like RST, with its constant 40-something percent staffing, after 5 years as a CPC you get to leave. If you give people a light, they will pass through the tunnel instead of turning around. That’s the biggest gripe I hear, is people being stuck for years, trying to move the right away, staying on the boards, but they can’t due to circumstances outside their control. It’s like the agency punishes people for going to hard to staff locales.
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Yeah, I'm not saying it'd be a perfect system, but I can't imagine how it would be worse than what we have now where you've got people from CA and FL getting sent there.

Completely agree on the idea of "temporary assignments" - make it desirable to do a 5-7 year stint at a hard-to-staff hellhole - a nice completion bonus and choice of facility transfer after the 5-7 years are up. You'd be set by your late 20s/early 30s until retirement afterwards.
 
RalphBeast said:
Yeah, I'm not saying it'd be a perfect system, but I can't imagine how it would be worse than what we have now where you've got people from CA and FL getting sent there.

Completely agree on the idea of "temporary assignments" - make it desirable to do a 5-7 year stint at a hard-to-staff hellhole - a nice completion bonus and choice of facility transfer after the 5-7 years are up. You'd be set by your late 20s/early 30s until retirement afterwards.
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I think you’re right. There is no single silver bullet solution. The agency has many options to try and turn the boat around and they need to be doing as many as they can, since nothing has worked yet.

The problem I know we both agree on is that they (the upper management, the least competent people who get paid the most, despite their utter failure over the last 20 years) hates their workforce. They hate controllers. They don’t care about you, your pay, your benefits, your career goals, your career progression, your morale or even your health. The agency is perfectly happy to look the other way if you want to lie about your physical or mental health. They just want you to check the box that you’re fit for duty. Looking at DCA, the abysmal faa testimony in the hearing that was absolutely trying to obfuscate and cover things up, they don’t even care about safety anymore.

Until the agency cares about the controllers that make the system work everyday, in spite of the numbers, in spite of the lack of leadership, in spite of everything DC does to make the job just that much harder and more tedious, nothing will change. They view all facilities are equally desirable and any controller as interchangeable as any other, to include people they have in the pipeline. Until controllers are viewed as people who matter, members of a team, and not just a number or a box or part of a spreadsheet, nothing will change. And at the rate things have been going, buckle up because that staffing cliff is another year closer and I don’t think we really know what a staffing shortage even smells like until 3k+ controllers leave in 12-18 months
 
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Shikaka said:
ACK will always be manned, same as ASP. Too much money for it to be otherwise.
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Airline tickets include a "9/11 fee" that funds the TSA. Some people have thrown around an "ATC fee" which doesn't exist but is theoretically possible.

I wonder how difficult it would be to implement a "business jet landing fee" specifically for these kinds of rich-asshole-vacation-spot airports? And it would go directly to the controllers working in these VHCOL vacation towns. I know it's a pipe dream, but really, if you have someone spending $10k a flight to bring their family out to a summer weekend on Nantucket or a ski trip to Eagle County then an extra $200 or whatever isn't that much of an ask.

PS this is from the NetJets (EJA) website: "NetJets programs start at $215,000 for a jet card with 275 days of annual access." This third-party website claims that a Phenom starts around $8k per flight hour.
 
Termine said:
Airline tickets include a "9/11 fee" that funds the TSA. Some people have thrown around an "ATC fee" which doesn't exist but is theoretically possible.

I wonder how difficult it would be to implement a "business jet landing fee" specifically for these kinds of rich-asshole-vacation-spot airports? And it would go directly to the controllers working in these VHCOL vacation towns. I know it's a pipe dream, but really, if you have someone spending $10k a flight to bring their family out to a summer weekend on Nantucket or a ski trip to Eagle County then an extra $200 or whatever isn't that much of an ask.

PS this is from the NetJets (EJA) website: "NetJets programs start at $215,000 for a jet card with 275 days of annual access." This third-party website claims that a Phenom starts around $8k per flight hour.
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There should be a fee per passenger and then a fee for each private jet and a fee for each military jet
 
Termine said:
Airline tickets include a "9/11 fee" that funds the TSA. Some people have thrown around an "ATC fee" which doesn't exist but is theoretically possible.

I wonder how difficult it would be to implement a "business jet landing fee" specifically for these kinds of rich-asshole-vacation-spot airports? And it would go directly to the controllers working in these VHCOL vacation towns. I know it's a pipe dream, but really, if you have someone spending $10k a flight to bring their family out to a summer weekend on Nantucket or a ski trip to Eagle County then an extra $200 or whatever isn't that much of an ask.

PS this is from the NetJets (EJA) website: "NetJets programs start at $215,000 for a jet card with 275 days of annual access." This third-party website claims that a Phenom starts around $8k per flight hour.
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American Airlines came out years ago and said it would happily pay many millions more in a theoretical ATC fee if it fixed the staffing, that the money spent would be less than money lost due to delays caused by structural and staffing issues
 
Bandit117 said:
American Airlines came out years ago and said it would happily pay many millions more in a theoretical ATC fee if it fixed the staffing, that the money spent would be less than money lost due to delays caused by structural and staffing issues
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If it was an equal fee I don’t see the airlines caring. It would just be a pass through and even across the board.
 
32andBelow said:
If it was an equal fee I don’t see the airlines caring. It would just be a pass through and even across the board.
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From what I recall, it was American Airlines reaching out to natca. Obviously natca has no ability to do anything like that, but the message was clear, we will gladly spend 30 million to prevent 100 million in costs from delays, etc
 

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