Summary
Elon Musk called on retired air traffic controllers to return to work, citing a shortage amid heightened scrutiny of the FAA under Trump’s second term.
With DOT Secretary Sean Duffy’s support, Musk’s DOGE attempts to “upgrade” aviation systems despite recent FAA job cuts.
The AP reports fired employees included radar and navigational aid maintenance personnel, though Duffy insisted no “critical safety personnel” were terminated.
Musk’s appeal comes amid increased public concern over recent aviation incidents, though experts consider the uptick an anomaly.
lol bet he just found out that his private jet also has to wait in line.
You mean that people who work in one of the highest-stress jobs in the world might not want the added stress of being potentially shitcanned at any second by this apartheid manchild?
Moron with history of fucking shit up fucks shit up. No one stops him. Some applaud. Start the wood chipper.
I used to work for Amazon in a division I didn’t feel grimey for. Spent over 7 years of my life in that division, doing great things and recurringly got top performer review status and was even awarded role model on top of that on several occasions.
Then they laid me off in 2023, after my latest review of “top performer” & award of “role model”.
About 2 weeks ago a recruiter reached out to me for a role in AWS and I responded with, “Amazon shouldn’t have laid me, a top performer and role model, off if they’d like me to work for them.”
ATCs should give this response to Musk.
A friend of mine was laid off in a firing of 300 workers. A couple of years later, a new upper manager comes in and tries to hire 500.
The people making decisions at large corporations have no idea what’s happening on the ground, they just see major shareholders, a budget and expenses.
they did a wave massive layoffs in tech in 2023, my bro was included i knew he would be a target, because if you earning that much income, its bound to happen.
My friend just retired. Today.
He’d been working the same job a decade, but he did about half his career with the same company.
He consistently made 10% less because #union, but it was consistent and reliable. Now he gets half pay until he dies.
People chasing that Amazon pork, I’m thinking made a mistake.
Shame you can’t do the same with CEOs
*Luigi enters the chat*
One way to cut down on costs.
I was told there was no such thing as a shortage in a free market, why won’t the executive branch embrace free market economics?
Musk is discovering he can’t hire foreign workers to replace people at will. That some federal workers perform highly specialized and high stress tasks that you can’t fix with his typical knuckle dragging tactics.
“upgrade”
Tesla Autopilot… for planes?
EVERYBODY RUN IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION!
I hadn’t flown since right before quarantine dropped in the US, and flew United once last year. I was already thinking I’d stick to driving
If you wanna stay here then yeah. Imagine giving up everything you’ve built up in this country to escape, doing that so your children can have better life, and the airplane crashes. They’re making us scared to live, scared to leave. Any action besides being in compliance.
As a guy who has to travel for work. I hope that these guys tell him to pound fucking sand
Really highlights how stupid Republicans and Musk really is and how his companies thrived despite his leadership not because.
Good luck to you. I’m not setting foot on a plane until this administration is over with (assuming there is an end to it).
Yup. Don’t really have a choice of If I want to keep the family housed and fed but I do have a lot of life insurance.
Don’t worry, they won’t pay out.
That makes me feel better. I’m happy that my premiums are going to end up in the pockets of some CEO on a boat somewhere instead of to my family after I die. I’m sure the CEO needs the money more then my daughter. I mean, underage trafficked girls and coke doesn’t pay for itself.
It’s never a problem until it affects them
This is so easy to fix. Just ask the remaining ATCs to put in 30 more hours per week. If there is a safety law which needs to be amended to make this happen, just amend it. Remove all the rules and safeguards. We should do it like the Tesla factories.
Look. More air accidents will happen. People should be ready to sacrifice themselves. It’s that easy.
So easy to fix.
PS: /s for some of you who may need it…
We also need to brace ourselves for hardship. I mean Elon won’t be facing monetary hardships but you will. So brace for that.
How, exactly, are we to brace ourselves for any of this?
Learn about growing, preparing, and preserving food. Learn how to repair things. Make connections with like-minded people in your IRL community.
I could do with learning which seaweeds taste nice. All that grow here on the shoreline are safe to consume though some might be as useful as eating cardboard or taste disgusting. Beyond that, catching crabs is something I have managed a few times. Mussels I am not sure if they are safe as they are filter feeders and the water isn’t that clean here.
Put your head down between your legs, cover with hands, pray that you land successfully
Just don’t board a plane. Should be fine, they probably won’t crash into your house. Plus fewer people on planes reduces air travel which can only be a good thing.
Seriously you couldn’t pay me to fly these days.
What happened to “AI will do it”?
Oh he needs those useless federal workers? Most of those people remember what reagan did and feel no loyalty at all to the republican party.
You underestimate conservatives
I’ve worked around some ATC people. They remember what the republicans did. All the new hires get indoctrinated with the sure knowledge that they are considered disposable by republicans and Washington in general. Musk is going to get people killed. We can only hope that that he rushes through the new air force one and it has a titanic sub type of malfunction.
Anecdotally, a significantly large - maybe even 20% - will still get behind anyone with an R after their name. I left the federal civil service after almost five years because I didn’t like the influence of politicians undermining things even then. That included the shutdowns while Obama and Trump admins were in office.
There are union-protected labor workers - even now - still think anyone Republican will protect them, because… “values.” Hell, Utah recently passed legislation making it illegal for any public workers to collectively bargain. How many teachers and firefighters there voted for that possibility in?
I would think in Utah plenty of teachers and firefighters voted R, but I would love to hear from someone who has better info than me. I worked with tons of union guys who were very proudly conservative and even hated the union they were in. The propaganda is strong in some…
“I clear cut the forest and now there is a shortage of trees. Woe is me.”
its not possible since they are forced to retire by law at 56 anyways, and they already proven that with studies that past a certain age you cant maintain the same cognitive abilities like in your 20s-40s.
Well if it isn’t the consequences of his own actions.
Fucked around ✅
Found out 👈
Not really, tbh. He’s pretty clearly just doing as much damage as he possibly can. This whole “Oooh whoopsie, we did a bad, does anyone want their job back?” shit is pure show to give himself some plausible deniability to keep the guillotines at bay.
If you look at what’s happening through the lens of his goal being malice, and ignore the “ooooops!” pony show, what you see is a man who’s hamstrung an entire nation with literally zero consequences.
In less than a month too.
Feels like we need no confidence/snap elections or some shot to deal with this.
But really we needed better protections from dictators and better under-represented vote counting long ago and now we have to fix shit the hard way.
we have to fix shit the hard way.
No going to be fun.
It’s called impeachment and could happen at any time. Every single Republican is complicit with the Nazi regime.
Every single Republican is complicit with the Nazi regime.
That’s the problem. Half of our representatives are Nazis. How is an impeachment going to go anywhere?
or some shot to deal with this.
I mean…
Blessed autocorrect.
I wonder if he regrets this one though. If it becomes dangerous to fly he’d have to travel on the ground like a peasant
He’d sooner take the oligarch route and privatize the FAA, fill it with his own loyalists, then give his flights priority wherever he goes, including whatever private aviation business (e.g. FedEx clone) he wants to push.
ATC training takes a long time, he assumes it can be done by anyone, it cant.
😞
Are malignant narcissists like him capable of the critical self-reflection required to regret things?
From my experience, no I don’t think so
Gotta fly the old fashioned way, VFR.
VFR is fine for those Piper Cubs but no so great for high speed, congested airspace.
Looks like they need to ‘get good’, eh.
There’s also the “fire everyone, then hire them back at a reduced salary while leaning on the fact that they care about preventing deaths enough to take the deal” aspect.
Honestly, this one’s not even completely his own fault. Standard bureaucratic ossification has been fucking up ATC staffing for years now. The pay is low, the qualifications are steep, and the responsibility and stress is insane. Why would someone do that? And so, people don’t. And, on top of them, management from both the business and political sides simply doesn’t give a fuck about safety or morale.
The levels of traffic were just recently increased in that DC airspace where the plane hit the helicopter, and at the time, a bunch of qualified people were trying to raise the alarm that some bad shit was going to happen if they stuffed more aircraft into an already overcrowded area. No one in a position to make any of the decisions cared, and they did it anyway. That all happened before Trump and Elmo came into the picture.
Of course, it is true that their own actions have produced some additional consequences now. They’ve fired a bunch more people and demotivated all the existing or prospective ones pretty much as much as it is possible to do. And, as much as the existing systems are aging and in need of some modernization, it’s absolutely guaranteed that whatever Musk does to “improve” them will make them even worse. All I’m saying is that he didn’t entirely create the bad situation he is now about to amplify tenfold.
100%. There was a shortage of traffic controllers before the firings even began, this only exacerbated a bad situation.
Someone at all familiar with the status of ATC staffing who isn’t a complete idiot would clearly not have exacerbated this situation.
I’m a developer - I’d even classify myself as pretty far to the “move fast and break things” end of the spectrum. But I’m a senior developer because I ask questions and understand things and write tests to confirm that understanding and prove a new system correct before fucking breaking them. Once that’s done I’ve totally got a sledgehammer in hand and am wildly swinging it around to rebuild it cleaner but, critically, we do this in a development environment.
This fucker is hot fixing production without a fucking clue how anything works. He’s in a little fucking bubble where the only opinions allowed in are “Elon is a genius” and he’s drinking the fucking Kool-aid. I’ve seen executives like that and the only correct response is to jump fucking ship.
yea you cant even apply past 30, only under certain exceptions, like being a military traffic controller. and they dq like the military does too. if they dint really care about the train derailments they wouldnt care about the air traffic. of course reagan made sure there are less ATC, when he fired them all, it just scared people into not becoming one over time.
IIRC the FAA layoffs did not include air traffic controllers, so I don’t think that he was involved with that.
“There is a shortage”
ah damn i love that language. reminds me of the boss that abused my mother back when she was still in employment. “there is a shortage, you need to come over on your day off, otherwise we can’t handle the workload”. how about employing more people? no? maybe because you can’t find another fool who will do the work with these bad working conditions?
There has been a shortage for a decade, and the post is literally Musk trying to hire early retirees to fill staffing shortages.
There’s no such thing as a labor shortage, especially if it’s been long enough to train more ATCs. If the pay is high enough, then people will come out of the woodwork.
The work is difficult, and the expectations and stress are high. They 100% need to pay better, but the pool of qualified candidates is already fairly small.
Sounds like they need to increase pay and reduce the number of hours worked while still getting a salary and benfits to entice more people to the position and make the stress more bearable for those they can get to fill the position. It’s not a matter of how many people are qualified it’s a matter of how many people want to make the tradeoffs to work there and be upskilled to meet the requirements. If your deal is not enticing enough, you need to restructure how the position works in order to entice more people for the position.
retiring at 56, and only able to apply until the age 30, doesnt make it very unappealing to people at all, especially when people retire in thier 60s and 70s in many less stressed jobs.
Maybe increase the pay so they aren’t searching for another job when they are forced to retire at 56 without training for another career. And also decrease hours needed to work per week to account for the additional stress they face so they can recoup. You would surely have more people applying when taking these factors into account.
Yet it’s larger than the number of people required.
It’s also difficult to qualify for. As I recall the civilian route to become an ATC is at least six months of full time training (also - usually you need to have already had some work experience/college background) and the test has at least a 50% failure rate.
You need a college degree only to be qualified, but you are only put into groups 2 or 4. Veterans and people who do to college for atc or aviation safety go to groups 1 or 3. That’s just to then do the minimum 6months of atc training. They also just started direct hiring from colleges with approved programs.
I got to tour the FAA training facility and it’s kind of difficult to convey how intense that atmosphere and the training seemed to be in text. Just walking past the guys eating lunch felt stressful.
I got to do a simulation where they even gave me a script with timing and fucked it up.
I think they give you a stipend to live on when you’re in training at least. It would really suck to fail though.
for things like atc there is, theres a maximum age you can become one, and a max age to retire, very little exceptions outside of that.
Ummm, didn’t he fire them? Also, how many air traffic controllers does he think are using his xitty platform?
