No way am I flying in US airspace. This is just the latest in a series of major issues.
I’m sure they are fine with this. They probably want it. Don’t have to pay them. Plus more control over the people. I’m sure they will have coverage for their private jets and those of their friends.
They already aren’t paying them.
If ATCs strike right now, what could they even do? They can’t possibly bring on enough scabs to do the job. If they tried, it’d be a disaster and ensure US air travel dies.
Hey, Air Traffic Controllers! You have immense power right now!
If they strike trump will probably do what reagan did and fire all 10,000+ ATC employees and replace them with military ATC.
There are less than 3k Air Force ATC (AFSC code 1C1). I couldn’t find how many Navy Air Corps ATC there are, but since it’s a bit smaller than the Air Force, we can guess around 2k.
There are 13k civilian ATC, and that’s at anemic levels as it is. They can’t possibly replace these people.
Reality has a way of dealing with consequences on its own.
Every service has a large air component so even if they each only have 2k that’s 9000 atc right there. Even with a lean roster they can shutdown airports and keep important corridors open.
These aren’t smart people in charge. They don’t care if the military ATC get even more burned out since they can’t quit like civilians do.
Don’t assume trump and his ilk will do the intelligent thing, they will always do the capricious vengeful thing.
Don’t assume trump and his ilk will do the intelligent thing, they will always do the capricious vengeful thing.
As I’ve been trying to get at, that’s irrelevant. No, pulling military ATC does not work. 9k isn’t enough when 13k is already anemic. And what are the military air installations supposed to do without ATC?
Shutting down airports only highlights the problem. The airlines won’t survive that for long. Everything they could possibly try has natural consequences. It’s not a court imposing an order. It’s not congress finding its spine. It’s reality.
Edit: is there even a single military airport more complicated than Chicago Midway? Running a major hub may well be outside their training.
I don’t have numbers, but there are tons of tiny regional airports. The kind that have only a handful of flights a day. But they all still need ATC right. I bet you can halve the need by just shutting those down. A small number of people will have to drive further to catch a flight.
There are small, untowered airports, but they usually aren’t equipped for large jets, or for IFR landings (“instrument flight rules,” which is when the pilot relies on instrumentation instead of visually looking outside, such as during inclement weather.)
Small planes depending on VFR (visual flight rules) can probably plan flights to avoid towered airports. But the big commercial flights will be in trouble.
It’d almost have to be the opposite. Military ATC aren’t used to dealing with the same kind of traffic levels as civilian ATC. Even Chicago Midway might be pushing it.
Because reality has stopped these people from implementing their plan already? That’s not how it works under authoritarians. The cruelty will be the point. Any airline who complains will get hit with fines or shuttered. They will shut down airports in democrat areas and keep the republican ones open.
They don’t give two shits about reality when they can just have their media lie about it.
They can try as much as they like. The airports are still getting shut down. Airlines will bleed money. There is no way out of that if ATC go on strike, illegal or not. You bargain with them or you fail.
And yeah, they do get stopped by reality all the time. They tried to fire a whole lot of people in the federal government. Then realized that a lot of those people absolutely must do certain jobs, like oversight of nuclear weapons stockpiles.
Just after the election, I argued with someone trying to make that same point about Project 2025. I argued that because of reality getting in the way, they couldn’t implement half of it. Guess where the Project 2025 Tracker has been stuck at for months? I actually didn’t expect to be so literally correct, but that’s what happened.
Yes, reality matters no matter how authoritarian the system is. Trump can no more do this than proclaim that Stephen Miller can jump off the Washington Monument and fly (no matter how much I might enjoy seeing that happen).
We will just have to agree to disagree and see who’s right in a few months or years.
Imo it will happen if things drag on.
I’d be willing to bet on trump speculating in the next few days that we should get AI to do their jobs.
This already happened. Back in February, Musk/SpaceX got the contact to “modernize” ATC.
While I’m sure you’re being facetious, if that ever happened that would be the last time I step into a plane.
Thing is, it’s been technically possible to automate 95% of the ATC job for decades now. Obviously, you want a human to step in for that last 5% when things get tough.
But that’s a problem all on its own. If the human steps in for that 5% of times when things get tough, they have to have the training to deal with a tough situation. They hone those skills through practice with the other 95% of the time. What you actually want is to have the human take over 25% of it, and cover a broad range of different situations in that 25%.
Choosing when to give over control some of the time is the hard part. Much harder than just waiting until it’s too complicated.
Not really, no. Just ask those who got fired by Reagan.
That didn’t work out as well as Reagan thought it would. And has been fucking up our air travel situation for the last 40 years. To do it again would literally kill air travel in the country for the next 30 years. People would literally stop flying.
Edit: to be clear, I’m not saying this isn’t going to happen. Trump is a fucking moron who thinks of himself as the second coming of Reagan. So he will 100% happily fire all of the traffic controllers we have if they even breathe the word “strike”. I’m just outlining what a god-awful fucked up future we have in store for us.
To do it again would literally kill air travel in the country for the next 30 years. People would literally stop flying.
From a climate perspective, that would be fantastic.
Which caused domino effects that are still being felt. They can’t do that again. There simply isn’t anybody they can hire.
I keep hearing/seeing people say “they can’t do that…” Then they do it with no repercussions.
It has nothing to do with anyone imposing consequences. There simply is no way to hire people for this job to replace what’s already there. They can’t even backfill turnover from retiring ATCs. Reality takes care of this on its own.
I wonder how well that would work right now. You fire them all and then…. ask for volunteers? Since there’s no money to pay them with.
It’s not a strike when they aren’t getting paid for labor hours
Yes it is. What?
It’s wage theft
Not legally but yes.
However them striking is still striking.
Not a strike when employer doesn’t pay. People need to eat and pay for living spaces
I think you need to go refresh yourself on what a strike is and the conditions surrounding it.
Employees have never been paid while on strike. That’s part of the whole thing. It’s a standoff to see who will cave first; the employer with no money or the employees with no money.
Just wait till holiday season!
But the upshot is that commercial airlines heavily fund Republicans. So if they start having issues, they’ll start letting their Republican folks know about it.
No. They’ll just get a bailout and we’ll go even further into debt.
Can you order them back to work and then not pay them?
We even have a word for this: slavery.
Which is illegal in the US, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.
And since they made it illegal for ATC to strike…
In theory, I guess, but that can only go wrong with a highly technical job like ATC.
There’s a lot of things they could try on paper. All of them result in disaster. Not necessarily even planes hitting each other. Just one hub airport coming to loggerjams on the runway would be enough to have repercussions on the entire US airport network.
