Bart Harley Jarvis
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Just heard from a friend at the academy and saw an instructor on FB post that RPOs are going on strike effective September 1st, how much is that gunna screw things up?
RPO strike
- Thread starter Bart Harley Jarvis
- Start date
There is a thread about that on SM. Surprised it hasn't been talked about here. If it's resolved quickly it shouldn't be a big deal.
GulfBravoPapa
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It seems as though most people on this website ate already controllers at their facility. A RPO strike at the Academy really has very little impact on us other than stopping what little flow of new people we would be getting
There are plenty of academy threads on here. Regardless depending on how it's handled an RPO strike could have a significant impact on new hire timeline and could adversely affect every facility in the NAS.
vectorwagon
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Big picture no it won’t. Unless it went on for a really prolonged amount of time it wouldn’t even impact it small picture.
Southern
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You really think it could affect the NAS? The hiring company probably has plenty of applications coming in for this job at any given moment, they want to go on strike? Let them have at it. There are plenty of people out there capable and willing to do their job and not complain.
Funny thing is when I went through the academy recently none of the RPO's I had were that great. Most of them couldn't even get their prompts straight and were constantly messing up. Maybe a strike is exactly what they need to get rid of some of the awful RPO's that are there.
If they fire all the RPOs how long do you think it would take to train the 100 or so that they need?
Southern
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Take time to train them? The RPO's I had at the academy were all brand new in training! They don't take time to train them, at least it doesn't seem like it the RPO's we had were really new to the job and had a supe or a trainer sitting behind them telling them what to say and do on every transmission it was very distracting.
RPOs are trained by other RPOs. If there are none then training will get extended even further.
J8ke
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I used to be an Academy RPO back in the Raytheon days so I feel like I have good context to comment on this situation.
My wage back then (2014) was $15.66/hr plus a health and welfare supplement which was $3.80/hr = about $19.46 an hour.
According to the RPO's post on Stuckmic, the current contractor is proposing to slash wages to $14.97/hr with $0 health and welfare.
You might be thinking $19.46 is a lot for OK, and you're right, however, this is not a FT job. Hours / future income is not guaranteed so many RPOs have second jobs to supplement their income.
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Additionally in his post, he says the current contractor's supervisors tells them "to train two new hires simultaneously while wearing two headsets (Not a joke - goofiest shit ever), or making the RPOs run the R-side when the majority of us have never set foot in an approach control or CTI school".
That is very concerning behavior from the contractor. Raytheon ran a tight ship but they would have never allowed someone to work two positions at once while training. I do remember instances where certain RPOs would be allowed to run R-side but that was only when training SAIC instructors and not academy students.
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There are several positions that RPOs fill and a majority of them are cross-trained among several different areas.
I would guess roughly 80% of the RPOs have aviation backgrounds and are actively pursuing ATC as a career.
RPOs in EnRoute have two different positions they can run.
The first is ghost pilot. You center controllers of the past will remember that you used to do ghost pilot while at the academy. It is definitely among the easiest positions to learn in the academy. Training on ghost pilot would not take more than a couple of days with someone with an aviation background.
The second position (I don't know an official name) simulates the interfacility communications between adjacent centers, approach controls, FSS, and TMU. This position requires a lot more aviation knowledge to run properly. I would say between 1 - 3 weeks of training time depending on if you have aviation experience or not.
It took about 20 days in between getting a firm offer letter to starting Day 1 at the academy (background checks/govt clearance).
So for EnRoute, you could assume, best case scenario, it would take a minimum of a month to get "up and running" again.
I personally doubt there are mountains and mountains of applications for this job, especially if they're proposing a sub-$15 wage.
Things get more complex in Tower.
Tower RPOs train in 3 different areas. Tabletops, 3D, and TSS. I personally never trained in any of these areas when I was at the academy so I can't speak to the training times. I do know that running the TSS sim is very complicated. RPOs are listening both to a headset and a loudspeaker at the same time and correcting the voice recognition simultaneously for GC and LC. I know that when I was there, TSS RPOs were paid a $.25 more an hour (LOL) for the added headache and complexity of dealing with that. An estimated guess is 1-2 weeks for tabletops/3D and 3-4 weeks for TSS.
Best case scenario, Tower is up and running again between 30-60 days.
Then RTF.
RPOs have a couple of different positions in RTF. They're all ghost pilot positions with occasional interfacility coordination simulation. I remember you would get checked out on the standard RTF ghost pilot position and then would need special training to run TSEW (and I'm assuming TETRA also requires special training). Depending on experience, I would imagine 1-2 weeks of training time and then maybe an additional week for TSEW/TETRA training. RTF could probably be up and running in a month.
My wage back then (2014) was $15.66/hr plus a health and welfare supplement which was $3.80/hr = about $19.46 an hour.
According to the RPO's post on Stuckmic, the current contractor is proposing to slash wages to $14.97/hr with $0 health and welfare.
You might be thinking $19.46 is a lot for OK, and you're right, however, this is not a FT job. Hours / future income is not guaranteed so many RPOs have second jobs to supplement their income.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Additionally in his post, he says the current contractor's supervisors tells them "to train two new hires simultaneously while wearing two headsets (Not a joke - goofiest shit ever), or making the RPOs run the R-side when the majority of us have never set foot in an approach control or CTI school".
That is very concerning behavior from the contractor. Raytheon ran a tight ship but they would have never allowed someone to work two positions at once while training. I do remember instances where certain RPOs would be allowed to run R-side but that was only when training SAIC instructors and not academy students.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are several positions that RPOs fill and a majority of them are cross-trained among several different areas.
I would guess roughly 80% of the RPOs have aviation backgrounds and are actively pursuing ATC as a career.
RPOs in EnRoute have two different positions they can run.
The first is ghost pilot. You center controllers of the past will remember that you used to do ghost pilot while at the academy. It is definitely among the easiest positions to learn in the academy. Training on ghost pilot would not take more than a couple of days with someone with an aviation background.
The second position (I don't know an official name) simulates the interfacility communications between adjacent centers, approach controls, FSS, and TMU. This position requires a lot more aviation knowledge to run properly. I would say between 1 - 3 weeks of training time depending on if you have aviation experience or not.
It took about 20 days in between getting a firm offer letter to starting Day 1 at the academy (background checks/govt clearance).
So for EnRoute, you could assume, best case scenario, it would take a minimum of a month to get "up and running" again.
I personally doubt there are mountains and mountains of applications for this job, especially if they're proposing a sub-$15 wage.
Things get more complex in Tower.
Tower RPOs train in 3 different areas. Tabletops, 3D, and TSS. I personally never trained in any of these areas when I was at the academy so I can't speak to the training times. I do know that running the TSS sim is very complicated. RPOs are listening both to a headset and a loudspeaker at the same time and correcting the voice recognition simultaneously for GC and LC. I know that when I was there, TSS RPOs were paid a $.25 more an hour (LOL) for the added headache and complexity of dealing with that. An estimated guess is 1-2 weeks for tabletops/3D and 3-4 weeks for TSS.
Best case scenario, Tower is up and running again between 30-60 days.
Then RTF.
RPOs have a couple of different positions in RTF. They're all ghost pilot positions with occasional interfacility coordination simulation. I remember you would get checked out on the standard RTF ghost pilot position and then would need special training to run TSEW (and I'm assuming TETRA also requires special training). Depending on experience, I would imagine 1-2 weeks of training time and then maybe an additional week for TSEW/TETRA training. RTF could probably be up and running in a month.
I was also an RPO back during the Raytheon days in the tower. I would guessa bit longer to get the tower side backup and running from 0. If they do fire everyone we can expect even more complaints concerning the quality of RPOs (especially during evals) for a long time.
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I started in RTF before moving across the street as an RPO, everything you have posted is accurate. Myself and another guy actually got picked up by TSA at OKC (PT but I was happy to trade out of my RPO shifts) to supplement income. As a whole training regardless of the "specialty" takes a long time. Some people are just incapable of doing it or suck hard enough at RTF (Vectoring VFR targets out of boredom, ask everyone knows who I am) and finally get kicked over to Tower (should have been there in the first place due to having a CTO). Ended up being extremely lucky though, while working TSA/ Raytheon I was picked up by Aircraft Registration as GS-5 FAA.
Dontbotherme
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Best of luck to them
Leafontehwind
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They signed an extension till Sept 21st. So no strike.
CNI(RPOs) is the subcontractor under SAIC(r-side/instructors). If the RPOs went on strike, I would think the FAA would terminate CNI(which is what the RPOs would want) and and have SAIC take it over. There's no way in hell the FAA would let CNI hold things up. Now yes, the RPOs could get fired from CNI, but there's nothing stopping SAIC from taking over the sponsorship of their PIV cards and onboarding them ASAP.
When I worked there I heard stories of people getting fired from Raytheon, being put on the ''not eligible for rehire" list... Then a few weeks later when CNI got the contact, they got hired again. Kind of the same thing.
When I worked there I heard stories of people getting fired from Raytheon, being put on the ''not eligible for rehire" list... Then a few weeks later when CNI got the contact, they got hired again. Kind of the same thing.
GulfBravoPapa
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Well that was anticlimactic
