USMC3197

This article i found on yahoo. I think it is BS myself. ATC his a VERY high pace high stress job. I think it is very misleading to accuse them of less education.

10-jobs-with-high-pay-and-minimal-schooling-required: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance

OJT is schooling in my opinion.

jmcmanna

I think the article was, technically, accurate . . . but misleading at the same time. Any facility that pays in the median 50% they mention for a newly certified controller has a significant washout rate for people with no experience. Consider a few years making between $50-$60 grand (or less) your education before trying to get to one that pays over $100,000 per year.

PinnacleFO

Times might be tough right now and i personally know a lot of people who have left the airlines to go to ATC. I thought about it myself as well but when it came down to it i thought to myself how i would feel in 10 years when i was clearing one of my friends to take off in a 777 and saying that could have been me, and thats how i made my choice. The money is good and yeah, you get to be home every day. But you work some wierd shifts and if you have flying in your blood, it may not be for you.

Rascal

By the time you get to fly a "regional" 777 you friends will be in Florida collecting their retirement/pension

PinnacleFO

Ha, yeah you might be right its always a calculated risk in this industry.

TonyWilliams

Like airlines closing shop, ATC is one determined president/congress away from closing up and being sold to Lockmart, China, or whatever. Bye bye pension. Thanks for stopping by.

Can't happen? Ask a friendly Flight Service person what happened Oct 1, 2005.

Besides, those ATC people are crazy anyway. Stay in that RJ at $20-$30/hr.

757upspilot

This job is tough the training and yes education is tougher. Minimal schooling of the liberal arts variety possibly.
When the controllers where replaced in the early eighties the way the government justified their argument that the controllers where not worth the money they where asking for was to throw down the lack of "education" required to get the job. This gave the public the impression that any high school grad could do the job, very far from the trueth.

OldManReverend

I flew with a guy who was a supervisor down at Miami Ctr, doing his multi. I asked him about how stressful it gets, because I was interested in possibly pursuing the career. His reply...

"Any job has it's stressful times. Just check out the McDonald's cashier at lunch time. Same thing, morning departures, late morning arrivals, afternoon departures, and evening arrivals is when it usually gets busy."

Coming from the cockpit, I think any pilot would have an advantage from the previous knowledge, but can't get much less stressful than ATC. Especially when you hear those beeping noises getting faster and faster when ATC comes on the radio... then a pause... then you hear your call sign said in an inquisitive manner.

TonyWilliams

When I attended the ATC academy in Oklahoma City in 1988, they told you to look to each side... one of those guys won't be here at the end of 3 months.

With a 50% washout rate, and it didn't matter if you had a degree, or not, or had military ATC, or not (we had two Air Force ATC guys in my class... one made it, and went to Bay Approach, and the other washed out).

For entertainment, I composed a spreadsheet (ok, this is mega nerdy) of all my classmates, and any identifiable "features" that might provide a trend towards whether we would pass or fail. Important stuff, like smoking or not, beer or wine drinker, etc. No trends could be indentified when the final verdict came out.

Those of us in the top portion of our class (lucky me) had to go to a center. I didn't even really know what a center was. I had a private pilot certificate, and had never talked to a center. I wanted Orange County tower in SoCal. I got Oakland Center (ZOA) in lovely Fremont, after briefly considering ZLA in even less lovely Palmdale.

A few that scored very close to passing were offered Flight Service jobs. Five of us went to Fremont, and even though it had a 40% failure rate, only one failed the 3-4 year checkouts to become journeyman enroute radar controllers. The agency gave the one failure from our group a Flight Data position (mostly putting in international flight plans in the center).

One of my classmates went to ZFW, and I went on to SCT in San Diego, both after about 10 years at ZOA.

schone

So at the end of your term in Oak city you don't get to choose whether or not you go to an airport or a center?

The faa choses for you?

How is the determination made?

If you go to an airport, does everyone start at flight data/clnc delivery on their journey to become departure/approach controllers?