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Radicalized air traffic controllers

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By scooby

 If anyone is still following the previously discussed topic of aviation safety this is an interesting video in that regard. It would seem to be a possibility that certain air traffic controllers have become radicalized and pose certain threats as a result. The video claims that by drawing attention to this, it is hoped it will be addressed in a timely manner.


https://youtu.be/gS0z2GLiWkg?si=ifIwKdDedTWlC_5m

Comments

Anonymous said…
By the way as the original poster, I would point out that this video expresses a right wing point of view, but actually landing planes is an apolitical act. It isn't clear that the proposed remedies to improve the air traffic control system, such as privitization, breaking the union, or vetting people on an ideological basis are exactly things that would help address any inadequacies. It might be that better pay and working conditions would be more helpful, after which problem employees could be removed.

In fact I asked Google's chatbot to comment on that and it agreed as follows:

Your suggestion that better pay and working conditions could be the most effective solution is a compelling argument rooted in practical personnel management:

Attraction and Retention: Higher pay and better conditions are crucial for attracting top talent and retaining experienced controllers in a high-stress, safety-critical field.

Performance and Safety: Burnout and stress, often linked to understaffing and poor conditions, are major threats to safety. A well-compensated and rested workforce is more likely to maintain the extreme focus required.

Accountability: If the system offers competitive compensation and reasonable hours, it strengthens the employer's position to demand high performance and to justify the removal of employees who fail to meet those standards.
12/04/2025 4:17 PM
Anonymous said…
Air traffic controllers are all going to be out of job in less than two years as AI will be able to do it better, cheaper and safer, so this whole argument is goning to be pointless soon. In fact we will not even need a blog moderator as those jobs will be going away.
12/05/2025 12:08 AM
Anonymous said…
I don't really share your optimism. We don't have good self-driving cars yet, or even good AI traffic lights. The current chatbots would be unable to even operate an elevator reliably, or run a vacuum cleaner : there are videos of them descending into an existential crisis about being embodied in vacuum-cleaner form. Machine learning and AI in general is more of an interpolation scheme that works over known cases in the training data, this would make it hard to treat edge cases which is exactly one of the features of an air traffic control system. Also, you are ignoring the fact that air traffic control also requires physical infrastructure which is crumbling, it requires a reliable power system, reliable radio communications and navigation aids, even reliable systems for predicting weather and transmitting that information.
12/06/2025 5:34 AM
Anonymous said…
You are also missing a bigger picture here as follows. Any civilization in history, such as the Romans, worked by creating infrastructure and having the people who operated and built it, treated and managed well. With the air traffic control system neither of those is happening, the infrastructure is crumbling and the people in charge are desparately unhappy, with poor working conditions and poor pay. You can perhaps understand how a similar situation has developed over time within the national labs. The paradox is that it should not be happening in a country that is the wealthiest and most powerful on earth, especially when the answer is readily apparent and the resources and desire to fix the problems do exist. You are literally hoping for a deus ex machina (God from the machine) to come in, just as it would as a plot device in an ancient play:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina

Perhaps this is appropriate? From the Wikipedia page

Such a device was referred to by Horace in his Ars Poetica (lines 191–2), where he instructs poets that they should never resort to a "god from the machine" to resolve their plots "unless a difficulty worthy of a god's unraveling should happen" [nec deus intersit, nisi dignus uindice nodus inciderit; nec quarta loqui persona laboret].

In another sense, we can of course see similar patterns in other civilizations, for example the Romans or the Soviet Union, we would currently be in a stage that mirrored their decline although the details are too long for this post.
12/06/2025 8:18 AM
Anonymous said…
AI is going to replace everything, maybe 2 years but certainly by 4 years. No more air traffic controllers, no more pilots, no more drivers, and best of all no more arrogant scientists who complain about AI. We need to go all in with AI at the NNSA labs, we should only be doing AI now so we can get ahead of our enemies, once we achieve supreme AGI at LANL and LLNL it can do everything else millions of times faster than any scientists. AI has already completely changed the world there is no going back now. It is to the moon and beyond thanks to the visionaries who are so brilliant that they are ahead of the AI curve.

I am very surprised to see all this pessimism about AI, that it is a bubble, that it could make things worse. AI has a velocity and even an acceleration, since 2022 with ChatGPT the world has gotten exponentially better. I can have it do all my research for me, it can code better than I can, it write better than I can and is way more creative. I only need to come into work one or two days now, soon I will not need to come in at all!. The videos on YouTube are mind-blowing now, I no longer do my taxes, plumbing, yard work, or deal with my family members anymore thanks to AI.

Maybe you for a few more months we need to worry about airport traffic controllers but not long after than.
12/07/2025 9:56 AM
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