Ten days after an equipment malfunction left about a dozen planes flying blind for 90 seconds in the crowded skies over New Jersey, worried pilots and air traffic controllers are imploring the Federal Aviation Administration to fix the system’s aging infrastructure.
The “shell-shocked” controllers who guide planes in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport work in constant fear of radar systems’ going down or losing radio contact with pilots as they’re approaching one of the busiest airports in the country, a recently retired controller told NBC News.
Both of those failures happened at once on April 28.
Heads up this is about to get worse. Republicans recently voted to cut retirement funding for air traffic controllers. . By cutting the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) for workers retiring before 62 (all Air Traffic Controllers are required to retire at 56 and are eligible to retire at 50), this is completely fucking over ATCs who continue working by changing their retirement math.
An open secret with ATCs is that they have numerous medical qualifications that they have to maintain to keep working. For example, if they see a doctor about sleep apnea, depression, alcoholism, etc they lose their medical qualification and are forced to take a medical retirement.
So what happens if you’re an ATC in your 40s and the government says “hey you can keep working for the next 10 years and retire without this FERS supplement… Or you can tell your doctor that you snore at night and take an immediate medical retirement right now and get paid more in retirement”?
TLDR; We’re about to have a shit load of Air Traffic Controllers taking medical retirements and these staffing problems are going to explode.
Silver-lining: This will disproportionately affect rich people and consumerists because they are the ones most likely to be flying.
It affects everyone. Everyone is just one accident away from needing an air ambulance for an extraction, or an airlift to another region for specialized treatment (burns, cancer, etc). No good will come of this.
“no, see, the plane which crashed into my house was full of rich people”