Kim Bellard
Chances are, someone in your family is a gamer. Maybe you’re a gamer too. After all, between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans play video games, and if you only look at young men, it’s closer to 100%. Grumpy old people don’t understand, complaining that games are just a waste of time, but gamers believe that games help solve problems (even if it means sacrificing sleep).
The good news is that if you’re actually a gamer, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is looking out for you.
Last Friday, Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced the FAA’s campaign to attract “the next generation of air traffic controllers.” The FAA is seeking individuals with the following valuable skills that can translate into careers in air traffic control:
- Demonstrated high cognitive function
- multitasking
- spatial awareness
- “Strategy and Problem Solving”
That means gamers. “…This effort is focused on reaching talented young people pursuing alternative career paths, many of whom are active in the gaming field. Feedback from controller exit interviews further reinforces this, with several controllers noting that gaming impacts their ability to think quickly, stay focused and manage complexity.”
There are also neat YouTube ads.
“Hiring someone with gaming experience, especially in air traffic control, can give you an edge,” Michael O’Donnell, an aerospace consultant who previously worked as a senior FAA official focused on air traffic safety, told Karoun Demirjian. New York Times. “They bring a set of skills, but that doesn’t replace aptitude, discipline or decision-making under pressure.”
Surprisingly, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association supports this effort, with its president, Nick Daniels, saying: BBC:: “Our union welcomes innovative approaches to expanding the candidate pool, including support for individuals with high-level aptitude skills, such as gamers, as long as all pathways maintain the rigorous standards required for safety-critical occupations.”
To be fair, both the FAA and NATCA would welcome anything that might entice people to apply. The FAA only has about 75% of its target number of controllers, short of thousands. Individual airports may have fewer staff at certain times of the day. This is neither a new problem nor one that will be resolved quickly. It’s not like you can play a video game today and be an air traffic controller tomorrow. There is definitely a learning curve.
It also doesn’t help that air traffic controllers are not paid during government shutdowns, which Congress is increasingly allowing. A Department for Transport spokesperson said: “Not paying air traffic controllers for 44 days has created uncertainty, pushed experienced controllers out of the profession and harmed our recruitment pipeline.” CBS News In November.
It also doesn’t help that air traffic controllers rely on older technology than they currently have. For example, the FAA is trying to replace older radar systems; NBC Report: “The FAA has spent most of its $3 billion equipment budget maintaining fragile, outdated systems that still rely on floppy disks. Some of the equipment is old and no longer manufactured, so the FAA sometimes has to search eBay for spare parts.”
Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), complained, “It’s 2026. The secretary talks about upgrading our air traffic control system. We have an outdated air traffic control system. This is why he’s talking about it. We need to upgrade.”
I was surprised to learn that not only can gaming be an asset to becoming an air traffic controller, but it can also be an asset to an air traffic controller. Josh Jennings, a supervisor at the FAA’s Air Traffic Command Center in Virginia, told Mr. Demirjian that the game is a way for controllers to stay sharp and a form of “social currency” among them. “Depending on how quickly this new generation can understand our physical technology, radar scopes, it will probably be 10 times faster,” he said. Controller appears to often play video games during his free time.
In a similar approach to finding unconventional backgrounds, the Marine Corps is looking for dirt bikers to become drone pilots, while Russia is looking for college students to be drone pilots.
I see an argument for recruiting gamers as air traffic controllers. Both require high activity, quick reactions, and are used to obsessively monitoring multiple screens with their lives at stake. The difference, of course, is that for air traffic controllers these virtual images represent real things, and the lives that could be lost are the lives of real people.
Nonetheless, given the choice between a controller who was a gamer and a middle-aged college graduate who is used to looking at spreadsheets, give the gamer every time.
I think of all of this strangely in relation to health care. Some of you may be fans of “The Pitt.” One of my favorite characters is Dana Evans, the head nurse. Sometimes I wonder if she’ll ever become a doctor because she’s tired of replacing incompetent and incompetent doctors. You can’t tell me she isn’t smart enough, and you probably won’t be able to convince me that she doesn’t have enough medical knowledge. But in our system, if she wants that change, that means sending her to medical school, then internship and residency. She has years of life and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
Who exactly will it help?
Where is the “gamers, apply” equivalent of medical education where non-traditional but potentially applicable backgrounds are important? For example, can people who have excellent pattern recognition skills but are not very good at chemistry or biology make good radiologists? Can a biologist do well as a pathologist without years of medical training?
For decades, a college degree was considered a ticket to middle-class (or higher) success, but that’s no longer the case. We live in a digital world, and people are gaining skills and knowledge from a world we are not fully aware of.
So kudos to the FAA for recognizing how gamers can be good candidates. And I just hope the follow-up training program isn’t so unconventional that it scares away gamers. And I’m waiting to see how healthcare and other industries can learn from that approach rather than simply copy it.
PS Do you have any questions? “1337” is gamer slang for “leet”. This itself is slang for :elite, as is gaming skill.
Kim is a former emarketing executive at Major Blues Plan and editor of the late & Mourned. Tincture.ioAnd now I’m a regular THCB contributor.
