Don’t forget to quicksave
Cool they “hired” but if they fail the tests then they won’t be hired. Which is the main issue. People fail out of the school, because it’s hard and stressful.
I played an ATC game on my phone. Was pretty good at it. Can I has job?
That wasn’t a game.
“Bio break guys. Can we just pause the air traffic for 10 mins?”
This was why MMO experience was sought out.
so i have a little bit of insight into this whole thing. i got a few friends who are controllers and i’ve been in the hiring process myself for nearly 2 years. to save you the history of the hiring process of the last few years: long. duffy “supercharged” the hiring process last year, making it take a lot less time than it used to (months instead of years).
anyway, we don’t actually know if 2000 “gamers” got hired from this latest bid, they’re just saying that because they were catering to gamers with the advertisement (which was majority genAI content lmao). if you applied to the bid, you’re automatically a gamer.
now a few things on what this means for us and the safety of aviation. the minimum requirements are as follows: do you have a pulse? can you obtain a security clearance? do you not have any medical problems that will make you unfit to do the job? have you not taken any federally illegal drugs in the last few years? can you do a few basic math problems? if you can answer yes to all of these questions, you get hired. that’s what the 2000 number is.
when you get hired by the FAA, those 2000 people don’t immediately get to go control traffic at the busiest airport. all ATC candidates must go to the FAA’s training academy in OKC for 3-4 months to learn how to control traffic. it’s designed to train someone who doesn’t even know what a plane is to the basics of controlling traffic, phraseology and proper procedures and all. not everyone makes it through the academy and is a large percent of the attrition rate for applicants.
only after all that do they go to a real facility, but not like LAX. and then they learn some more before touching live traffic.
so overall, i’m not super worried about it. only the people who are actually capable will get though and even then, it will be well over a year before they are controlling on their own if they don’t fail training at their facility
So, be worried in about 6 months then?
What bogus hysteria. Do you have any idea how many people play video games? Would you expect them not to advertise a recruitment drive on television because we don’t want our air traffic controllers to just kick up their feet and watch the screens? Let’s not be idiots.
It’s far more interesting to ask why they need to advertise a recruitment drive. The profession has been losing skilled people because its high skill, high stress, high stakes, and their paycheck gets jerked around every time there’s a government shutdown. Let’s focus on that instead of clutching our pearls over them hiring people who have played video games before.
about 6 months minimum before they’re allowed to talk to real planes, a year and a half minimum after that before they are out on their own. the academy will get rid of a lot of people who truly are not cut out for this type of work, and facility training will get rid of more. tbh i’m not super worried because the job is do it by the book or find another job. if they don’t do it right, they won’t be talking to real traffic for very long if at all
He said 3-4 months lol
For education, plus some more before real traffic
Sorry was making a joke, that under this admin, they’ll push them through, kinda like they do with the rent a cops at ICE.
Does the game allow cheats or the ability to spawn natural disasters? I want simcity levels of control.
“Mid or I leave”
Too bad I am an audio gamer 🙁
Jokes aside, thanks for reminding me this audio game exists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Blind_Legend
Apparently there’s a PC version
gg
Way back in the day there used to a game called Tracon, which was an air traffic control simulator. I played it a few tells and from those experiences I knew that ATC was never going to be a path for me. I caused so many midair collisions.
Plane Landed!
style: 4500
substance: 4500
speed: 4000
civilian health: 5000 PERFECT
rings collected: 5000 PERFECT
black box: INTACT
Grade: A
“A?! A?? wtf do you even want!? WHERE’S MY GODDAMN S-RANK!?”
throws controller
throws controller
Steve looked up from the corner of the tower. “What the hell, man? I didn’t know you could pick me up, but what the hell? Just toss me like that? Jesus, dude, calm the fuck down!”
Hi guys! Welcome back. So today we’re going to see if we can trigger that unsigned integer underflow bug that some of you have been talking about. As you can see here I’ve already got an Iberia Airbus A380 heading perfectly due West towards Null Island and, thanks to the telemetry bug we found last week that still hasn’t been patched we’ve got it showing as a two-seater Cessna so the occupation rate is 15000% so what were going to do is get the latitude, longitude and altitude to all cross zero at the same time…
“Atlanta Center, Delta 412, descending through flight level 190, vector for runway 26 Right.”
“Delta 412, copy. Hold your horses, bad connection on your end, total dial-up energy.”
“Atlanta Center, American 805, five miles behind Delta 412, also requesting 26 Right.”
“American 805, radar contact. Wait, you guys are practically sniffing each other’s tailpipes, this spacing is absolute dogshit.”
“American 805, we can go around and vector back if—”
“Nah, speedrun mode activated. Both of you cleared land 26 Right, first one down gets the lobby win! LEeeerrrooooyyyyy mmmmmmJjjeeennnkkkiinnnsssss!!!”
Incredible comment, thank you!

“We cannot allow you to protect your data.”
Fox 21 is a local affiliate of Fox based in Duluth, MN. It’s a regional news source for Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
I seriously doubt they get enough traffic from GDPR regulated countries to retrofit their entire site to be compliant when it is targeted for a very specific audience in the US.
Yes, but also, it is sad you can automatically safely assume a news site that we only want to display our news will be handling a fuck-ton of our personal information. If it just showed the news and non-targeted ads, it wouldn’t need a retrofit. GDPR wouldn’t apply.
I saw ‘fox’ in the URL and wasn’t surprised.
There should be an extension that prevents you from risking your privacy accessing an american site that does this
Then again americans wouldn’t be able to access 90% of their internet so maybe it would be pointless
Well in this case the website itself is preventing me from risking my privacy accessing it.
A VPN.
As an American, I would use it.
“We cannot take a print of your anus, therefore we are blocking you”
Good that I don’t have to fly to get anywhere.
Just respawn if you die.
Being good at some computer games (not just flight simulators) is helpful in getting through the recruitment process. I’d say a mix of having good orientation and implementing and executing a strategy is required at the very least (and sticking to it, which I didn’t do lol), which you definitely get/practice in games.
However the actual training process can cut those numbers dramatically, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they ignored obvious red flags with some of these ‘gamers’ just to pump those numbers up.










