It's way too early to see how many of them will actually make it, but so far the N90 local bid seems to have done what they wanted it to. Most of the trainees coming in now grew up around here, have families here, and wouldn't want to leave even if they could. Whereas we've had trainees that grew up in california or idaho or texas be pretty open about the fact that they don't wanna check out and get stuck here for their whole careers.
It's a good idea in theory, but I think the problem would be scaling. Those tiny towers don't need 100 new bodies, they need 2 or 3. So you open a local bid for that facility, hire the top 4 ATSA scores, then 1 gets a medical dq and a few fail out in OKC and now you've done all that work to get 1 new body to that tower and you gotta do the same thing all over again. Or they all pass and now you have 4 new trainees in a facility with a CPC target of 9. Would you prevent those local hires from ERRs/hardships, for a couple years or for their whole careers? Plus, in a national bid you can pick the top ATSA scores out of a pool of thousands. In that local bid, you may have a dozen applicants and the highest score is barely above passing. Are you really gonna hire that guy and turn down much higher scores from the national bid? Now all of these could probably be solved if the FAA actually wanted to, but they really don't give a damn about our happiness, so until they actually start to see CPCs quitting over this, they're not gonna go through the effort.