By KIM BELLARD
Chances are, someone in your family is a gamer. Maybe you are a gamer yourself. After all, somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of Americans play video games, and if you only looked at young men, it would be closer to 100%. Grumpy old people don’t get it and complain that playing is just a waste of time, but gamers believe helps them solve problems (although at the cost of sleep).
Well, the good news is that if you’re really a gamer, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is looking for you.
Last Friday, Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced The FAA’s campaign to attract “the next generation of air traffic controllers” seeks people “who possess useful skills that are transferable to a career in air traffic control, including:
- Demonstrated high cognitive functions.
- Multitask
- Spatial awareness
- Strategy and problem solving
With all that, they are referring to players. The ad goes on to add, “…this effort is focused on reaching talented young people pursuing alternative career paths, many of whom are active in gaming. Feedback from controllers’ exit interviews reinforces this, with several controllers noting that gaming influences their ability to think quickly, stay focused, and manage complexity.”
there is a clever YouTube ad also.
“When you hire someone who has experience in gaming, especially in air traffic control, they have an advantage,” said Michael O’Donnell, an aerospace consultant who previously worked as a senior FAA official focused on air traffic safety. said Karoun Demirjian or The New York Times. “They come with a skill set. But that’s no substitute for aptitude, discipline or decision-making under pressure.”
Surprisingly, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association supports the effort, with its president Nick Daniels. count bbc:: “Our union welcomes innovative approaches to broadening the candidate pool, including reaching out to people with high-level skills, such as players, as long as all pathways maintain the rigorous standards required in this safety-critical profession.”
To be fair, both the FAA and NATCA would probably welcome anything that might prompt people to apply. The FAA only has about 75% of the target number of controllers, so it is several thousand short. Individual airports may be even less staffed, as well as at certain times of the day. It is not a new problem and it is not a problem that will be solved quickly; It’s not like today you can play a video game and tomorrow you can be an air traffic controller. There is definitely a learning curve.
It also doesn’t help that air traffic controllers generally don’t get paid during government shutdowns, something Congress increasingly appears to allow. “Failure to pay air traffic controllers for 44 days created uncertainty, pushed many experienced controllers out of the profession and undermined the hiring process,” a Department of Transportation spokesperson said. said CBS News in November.
It also doesn’t help that air traffic controllers rely on technology that’s probably older than them. The FAA is trying, for example, replace your outdated radar systembut NBC information: “The FAA has been spending most of its $3 billion equipment budget just to maintain the old, fragile system that still relies on floppy disks in some places. Some of the equipment is old and no longer in production, so the FAA sometimes has to search for replacement parts on eBay.”
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chair Jennifer Homendy he complained: “It’s 2026. The secretary talks about improving our air traffic control system. We have an old air traffic control system. That’s why he talks about that. We need to update it.”
I was surprised to learn that gaming could not only be an advantage in becoming an air traffic controller, but also an advantage for air traffic controllers. Josh Jennings, supervisor of the FAA air traffic command center in Virginia, told Demirjian that the games are both a way for controllers to stay alert and a form of “social currency” with each other. “I would say it’s probably ten times as fast as this new generation is able to pick up our physical technology, our radar ranges,” he said. Apparently, controllers often play video games on their breaks.
In similar approaches to searching for unconventional backgrounds, the Marines they are looking motorcyclists to become drone pilots, while Russia is looking at college students for your drone pilots.
I can see the argument for recruiting players to be air traffic controllers. Both are used to obsessively monitoring multiple screens with a lot of activity, requiring quick reactions and with lives at stake. The difference, of course, is that to air traffic controllers, those virtual images represent real things, and the lives that may be lost are the lives of real people.
Still, if I have to choose between a controller who was a gamer or a middle-aged college graduate who’s used to looking at spreadsheets, always give me the gamer.
I think of all this, strange as it may seem, in relation to healthcare. Some of you may also be fans of “The pit. One of my favorite characters is Head Nurse Dana Evans, and I sometimes wonder if she would ever get tired enough of covering for ineffective or incompetent doctors to choose to become one. You can’t tell me she’s not smart enough, and you probably couldn’t convince me that she didn’t have enough medical knowledge, but in our system, if she wanted to make such a change, it would mean sending her to medical school, then an internship, and then a residency: years of her life and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.
Who exactly would that help?
Where is the equivalent of “players, please apply” to medical training, where non-traditional but potentially applicable backgrounds count? Could, for example, people with exceptional pattern recognition skills but perhaps not so good at chemistry or biology become excellent radiologists? Could biologists perform well as pathologists, without all the years of medical training?
For many decades, a college degree was seen as the ticket to middle-class (or more) success, but now we’re seeing that be less true. We live in a digital world and people are acquiring skills and knowledge from that world that we do not fully recognize.
So kudos to the FAA for recognizing how players can be good candidates, and I can only hope that the subsequent training program isn’t so tied to tradition as to scare them away. And I’m looking forward to seeing how healthcare and other industries could learn from their approach, and not just copy it.
PS: If you’re wondering, “1337” is gamer slang for “leet,” which is slang for :elite,” as in gaming prowess.
Kim is a former e-marketing executive at a major Blues scheme, publisher of the late and lamented Tincture.ioand now a regular THCB contributor
