Latest news with #airtrafficcontrollers
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Business
- Irish Times
The Irish Times view on problems in the Air Corps: Ireland's no-fly zone
The shortage of air traffic controllers in the Air Corps , which threatens to curtail military operations, is the most extreme manifestation yet of the recruitment problems facing the Defence Forces. The move to five-day-a-week, day-time-only flying operations at Casement Aerodrome is of a piece with Naval Service vessels being tied up because of crew shortages and in some cases going on patrol without functioning main weapons. It also mirrors the difficulties experienced by the Army in meeting EU and UN commitments. Paradoxically, the State's need for a functioning Defence Force – and in particular an Air Corps and Naval Service – has probably not been greater since a state of emergency was declared during the second World War. Incursions into Irish air space and territorial waters are on the increase as east-west tensions escalate. The communication cables that criss-cross the Irish sea bed are seen to be both particularly vulnerable and uniquely important. A number of specific issues lie behind the shortage of air traffic controllers, as is the case with shortages of similarly key personnel in the Naval Service and Army. For air traffic controllers, it is the allure of work in the private sector for better pay and conditions. Controllers leaving for the public sector is not a new phenomenon but to date the rate of attrition has been sustainable. READ MORE This is no longer the case and the implications of reduced flying operations for Garda and air ambulance operations as well as the security of the State mandate action. There are a number of stop gap measures that can be put in place, such as retention payments which have been sought previously by the Defence Forces. But ultimately the issue of staff retention can only be addressed by making careers in the Defence Forces an attractive option. This is a about more than pay and conditions. It also includes culture and values. Until these deficits are addressed the Minister for Defence's vision of an expanded Air Corps which could ultimately operate modern fighter jets is the stuff of fantasy.
The Independent
2 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
More than 1,200 FAA employees are planning to leave in the coming months putting more strain on taxed workforce
More than 1,200 employees of the Federal Aviation Administration reportedly may leave the agency in the coming months, as the U.S. air transit system continues to struggle with flight delays, aviation accidents, and technical issues. 'Employees are departing the agency in mass quantities across all skill levels,' read a May 7 internal presentation about the effects of a Trump administration deferred-resignation program, obtained by The Wall Street Journal. A similar presentation obtained by the paper said more than 1,200 employees of the agency could depart under the program. The staff exodus under Trump could cause the agency to fall below its statutory and regulatory staffing requirements, one of the internal presentations said. Front-line workers, including air-traffic controllers and airline inspectors, aren't eligible for the resignation program. The FAA told the Journal the impacts on staffing described in the presentations were theoretical. The agency added that upcoming resignations and retirements amount to 3 percent of the FAA's 46,000-person workforce and will not impact mission-critical functions. The potential resignations are the latest challenge for the FAA, which has struggled with accidents and uncertainty under the new administration. After a series of radar outages, software problems, flight delays, and a lack of air traffic controllers, officials reduced flights out of Newark Airport, a major hub for United and one of the busiest airports in the country. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has blamed the issues on the Biden administration and choices, such as the decision to relocate a key air traffic control station from Long Island to Philadelphia. At the same time, the secretary has also admitted more could've been done to shore up the air system during the pandemic years, including under Trump. The FAA has also played host to Elon Musk's at times chaotic cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency program. Hundreds of probationary FAA employees were fired and then rehired in recent months. Inside the FAA, a staffer from Musk's space firm SpaceX reportedly threatened FAA employees if they opposed alleged efforts to integrate Musk's Starlink satellite internet service into federal air infrastructure. A series of aviation disasters have occurred since Trump took office, including a collision between a military helicopter and a passenger jet near Washington, but Duffy says it is a 'falsehood' that these problems were rooted in changes that occurred since he took office. The administration has sought billions from Congress to overhaul the air-traffic control system, and has boosted incentives for hiring and retaining controllers.
Medscape
2 days ago
- Health
- Medscape
Scientists Invent a Literal Thinking Cap
This transcript has been edited for clarity. Welcome to Impact Factor , your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I'm Dr F. Perry Wilson from the Yale School of Medicine. My job (my real job) as a clinical researcher is complex. It's cognitively challenging; there are multiple studies to keep track of, grants and papers to write, a large group of mentees and trainees and staff in the lab to manage. It's emotionally stressful too — recently more than ever, in fact. But if I'm tired, or I ate a bad burrito for lunch, or I get some bad news on a personal level, it's not a crisis. I'm not making life-or-death decisions in a split second. I can take a break, gather myself, prioritize, and come back when I'm feeling better. Not every job has that luxury. A surgeon doesn't get to take a break in the middle of an operation if they feel like they are not at 100%. An air traffic controller can't walk away from ensuring that planes land safely because their kid woke them up in the middle of the night. These jobs and others like them have a unique challenge: a constant cognitive workload in a high-stakes environment. And the problem with constant cognitive work is that your brain can't do it all the time. If you force it to, you start to make mistakes. You can literally get tired of thinking. Think of how the world might change if we knew exactly how overloaded our cognitive processes were. I'm not talking about a subjective rating scale; I'm talking about a way to measure the brain's cognitive output, and to warn us when our ability to keep thinking hard is waning before we make those critical mistakes. We're closer than you think. The standard metric for assessing cognitive workload is the NASA Task Load Index. Yes, that NASA. The Task Load Index is a survey designed to assess how hard a task is. It was originally designed to be used in human-machine interactions, like piloting a spaceship. It's subjective. It asks you to rate how mentally demanding a task is, how frustrating, how much effort it takes, and so on. Cognitive researchers have used this scale to demonstrate how successive mentally stressful tasks degrade task performance. Science has demonstrated that taking breaks is a good thing. I know — news at 11. The problem with subjective scales, though, is that people have a tough time being objective with them. Astronauts might tell you a task was easier than it really was because they want to be chosen to ride on the rocket. Or a doctor might evaluate a complex surgery as less mentally taxing so they can continue to operate that day. Bringing objectivity to the brain is hard. Sure, you can do an fMRI scan, but sitting inside a metal tube is not conducive to real-world scenarios. You can measure brain fatigue in the real world with an EEG, though. The problem is that an EEG involves wires everywhere. You're tethered. And the goo, the sticky stuff that they use to put the electrodes on your head, is very sensitive to motion. In anywhere but a dedicated neuroscience lab, this isn't going to work. I thought the day of real-time monitoring of cognitive load would be pretty far off because of these limitations, and then I saw this study, appearing this week in the journal Device, from CellPress. It reimagines the EEG in a way that could honestly be transformational. There's a not-too-distant future when you'll be able to recognize people with highly cognitively intense jobs because they will look something like this. What you're looking at is a completely wireless EEG system. The central tech here is what the researchers call an 'e-tattoo' — but think of it like those temporary tattoos your kids wear. Conductive wires are printed on a thin transparent backing which conforms to the forehead. Electrodes make contact with the skin via a new type of conductive adhesive. The squiggles in the wires allow you to flex and move without breaking connections. That whole printed setup is made to be disposable; apparently the material cost is something like $20. The blue square is the ghost in the machine, a processor that receives the signals from the electrodes and transmits them, via low-energy Bluetooth, to whatever device you want. It's got a tiny battery inside and lasts for around 28 hours. In other words, even in this prototype phase, you could wear this thing at your cognitively intense job all day. And yeah, you might get a few looks, but the joke will be on them when the algorithm says your brain is full and you need to take a 15-minute rest. Of course, cool tech like this is only cool if it actually works, so let's take a look at those metrics. The first thing to test was whether the device could perform as well as an EEG on a simple task. Six adults were recruited and wore the tattoo at the same time as a conventional EEG. They were then asked to open and close their eyes. There's a standard finding here that with eyes closed, alpha frequencies, mid-range brain oscillations, dominate. You can see the patterns recorded by the standard EEG and the new tattoo system here. They are basically indistinguishable. But the tattoo system, with its flexible design, offers some particular advantages. One of the problems with conventional EEGs is how sensitive they are to motion. You turn your head, you get a bunch of noise. Walk around, and the signal becomes useless. Not so with the tattoo. These graphs show the electronic noise levels when the participant was doing various motions. Broadly speaking, you can see that the tattoo continues providing solid, reliable recordings even when walking or running, while the EEG goes all over the place with noise. The only exception to this was with eyebrow raising — maybe not surprising because the tattoo goes on the forehead. But I didn't start off telling you we have a new flexible EEG tech. I told you we had tech that could quantify our cognitive load. Here's how they tested this. In the lab, they had their volunteers do a cognitive task called the N-back test. It starts at level 0. Basically, they ask you to click a button whenever you see the letter Q or something. Easy. Level 1 is a bit harder. You have to click the button when the image on the screen matches, in either location or content, the image from one screen ago — one image back. Get it? Level 2 is even harder. You click when the current image matches, in content or location, the image from two screens ago. Level 3 gets really stressful. You have to click when you see something that matches three screens ago. And, of course, this keeps going, so you have to keep this information in your memory as the test continues. It's hard. It taxes the brain. Here are the results on the NASA survey scale. This is what the participants reported as to how mentally taxed they were. As the N gets higher, the cognitive stress gets higher. So the system works. The participants, you won't be surprised to hear, performed worse as the N increased. At higher N, the detection rate — the rate at which matches were appropriately clicked — declined. The reaction time increased. False alarms went up. All hallmarks of cognitive stress. And the e-tattoo could tell. Feeding its wireless output into a machine learning model, the researchers could predict the level of cognitive stress the participant was under. They show the results for the participant where the system worked the best — a bit of cherry-picking, certainly, but it will illustrate the point. The blue line indicates what level of the N-back test the participant was actually taking. The red line is what the machine learning model thought the participant was doing, just from reading their brain waves. They match pretty well. Again, that was just the time the experiment worked best. The overall results aren't quite as good, with a weighted accuracy metric ranging from 65% to 74% depending on the subject. Clearly better than chance, but not perfect. Still, these are early days. It seems to me that the researchers here have solved a major problem with monitoring people doing cognitively intense tasks — a way to read brain waves that does not completely interfere with the task itself. That's a big hurdle. As for the accuracy, even an imperfect system may be better than what we have now, since what we have now is nothing. But I have no doubt that with more data and refinement, accuracy will increase here. When it does, the next step will be to test whether using these systems on the job — in air traffic control towers, in operating rooms, in spaceships — will lead to more awareness of cognitive strain, more rest when it is needed, and better decision-making in the heat of the moment.
Skift
3 days ago
- Business
- Skift
'Most Critical Infrastructure Project': DOT Chief Urges Air Traffic Overhaul
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he wanted a brand new air traffic control system, but it could take years — or even decades. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Wednesday that the top infrastructure project in the U.S. is overhauling the air traffic control system. 'This is probably the most, not probably, this is the most critical infrastructure project that this country has at this moment,' Duffy said during a press conference. Aging infrastructure and an acute air traffic controller shortage have started to take a toll on air travel. Newark Liberty International Airport recently experienced a string of outages that led
Fast Company
3 days ago
- General
- Fast Company
Air traffic controller training is tough. Here's how universities could help
Air traffic controllers have been in the news a lot lately. A spate of airplane crashes and near misses have highlighted the ongoing shortage of air traffic workers, leading more Americans to question the safety of air travel. The shortage, as well as aging computer systems, have also led to massive flight disruptions at airports across the country, particularly at Newark Liberty International Airport. The staffing shortage is also likely at the center of an investigation of a deadly crash between a commercial plane and an Army helicopter over Washington, D.C., in January 2025. One reason for the air traffic controller shortage relates to the demands of the job: The training to become a controller is extremely intense, and the Federal Aviation Administration wants only highly qualified personnel to fill those seats, which has made it difficult for what has been the sole training center in the U.S., located in Oklahoma City, to churn out enough qualified graduates each year. As scholars who study and teach tomorrow's aviation professionals, we are working to be part of the solution. Our program at Ohio State University is applying to join over two dozen other schools in an effort to train air traffic controllers and help alleviate the shortage. Air traffic controller school Air traffic control training today —overseen by the FAA—remains as intense as it's ever been. In fact, about 30% of students fail to make it from their first day of training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City to the status of a certified professional air traffic controller. The academy currently trains the majority of the air traffic controllers in the U.S. Before someone is accepted into the training program, they must meet several qualifications. That includes being a U.S. citizen under the age of 31 and speaking English clearly enough to be understood over the radio. The low recruitment age is because controllers currently have a mandatory retirement age of 56 (with some exceptions) and the FAA wants them to work for at least 25 years in the job. They must also pass a medical exam and security investigation. And they must pass the air traffic controller specialists skills assessment battery, which measures an applicant's spatial awareness and decision-making abilities. Candidates, additionally, must have three years of general work experience, or a combination of postsecondary education and work experience totaling at least three years. This alone is no easy feat. Fewer than 10% of applicants meet those initial requirements and are accepted into training. Intense training Once applicants meet the initial qualifications, they begin a strenuous training process. This begins with several weeks of classroom instruction and several months of simulator training. There are several types of simulators, and a student is assigned to a simulator based on the type of facility for which they will be hired, which depends on a trainee's preference and where controllers are needed. There are two main types of air traffic facilities: control towers and radar. Anyone who has flown on a plane has likely seen a control tower near the runways, with 360 degrees of tall glass windows to monitor the skies nearby. Controllers there mainly look outside to direct aircraft but also use radar to monitor the airspace and assist aircraft in taking off and landing safely. Radar facilities, on the other hand, monitor aircraft solely through the use of information depicted on a screen. This includes aircraft flying just outside the vicinity of a major airport or when they're at higher altitudes and crisscrossing the skies above the U.S. The controllers ensure they don't fly too close to one another as they follow their flight paths between airports. If the candidates make it through the first stage, which takes about six months and extensive testing to meet standards, they will be sent to their respective facilities. Once there, they again go to the classroom, learning the details of the airspace they will be working in. There are more assessments and chances to 'wash out' and have to leave the program. Finally, the candidates are paired with an experienced controller who conducts on-the-job training to control real aircraft. This process may take an additional year or more. It depends on the complexity of the airspace and the amount of aircraft traffic at the site. Increasing the employment pipeline But no matter how good the training is, if there aren't enough graduates, that's a problem for managing the increasingly crowded skies. The FAA is currently facing a deficit of about 3,000 controllers, and unveiled a plan in May 2025 to increase hiring and boost retention. In addition, Congress is mulling spending billions of dollars to update the FAA's aging systems and hire more air traffic controllers. Other plans include paying retention bonuses and allowing more controllers to work beyond the age of 56. That retirement age was put in place in the 1970s on the assumption that cognition for most people begins to decline around then, although research shows that age alone is not necessarily a predictor of cognitive abilities. But we believe that aviation programs and universities can play an important role fixing the shortage by providing FAA Academy-level training. Currently, 32 universities including the Florida Institute of Technology and Arizona State University partner with the FAA in its collegiate training initiative to provide basic air traffic control training, which gives graduates automatic entry into the FAA Academy and allows them to skip five weeks of coursework. The institution where we work, Ohio State University, is currently working on becoming the 33rd this summer and plans to offer an undergraduate major in aviation with specialization in air traffic control. This helps, but an enhanced version of this program, announced in October 2024, allows graduates of a select few of those universities to skip the FAA Academy altogether and go straight to a control tower or radar facility once they've passed all the extensive tests. These schools must match or exceed the level of rigor in their training with the FAA Academy itself. At the end of the program, students are required to pass an evaluation by an FAA-approved evaluator to ensure that the student graduating from the program meets the same standards as all FAA Academy graduates and is prepared to go to their assigned facility for further training. So far, five schools, including the University of North Dakota, have joined this program and are currently training air traffic controllers. We intend to join this group in the near future. Allowing colleges and universities to start the training process while students are still in school should accelerate the pace at which new controllers enter the workforce, alleviate the shortage, and make the skies over the U.S. as safe as they can be.
