▲ 210 points
back
160 comments
To be clear, they began a recruitment ad campaign targeting gamers, and ended up meeting their hiring goal of 2,000+. It's not like they pulled 2,000 gamers off the street and stuck them in ATC towers.
Better link (.gov):
https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/trumps-transpor...
> With only about 25 percent of controllers holding a traditional college degree, this effort is focused on reaching talented young people pursuing alternative career paths, many of whom are active in gaming. Feedback from controller exit interviews reinforces this, with several controllers pointing to gaming as an influence on their ability to think quickly, stay focused, and manage complexity.
there are similar campaigns in Canada for NavCanada hiring ATCs as well
their ads have been targeting busy waiter/waitress staff, as handling a bumping restaurant floor gives the multi-tasking skills needed, or so goes the thinking
Have played competitive fps games with a couple of ATC dudes for almost half of my life now.
They're all very sensible, level headed people who get justifiably upset when you do not do the procedurally and objectively correct (lowest risk, highest percentage) thing to win in a given situation and will calmly spell it all out every single time.
leroy_jenkins.wav queued up on the Discord soundboard.
Wait after reading the article it simply says that many of these hired people also play video games.
Their definition of “video gamer” is literally just somebody who says they play games.
I don’t see what the big deal is. Lots of young people play games every now and then.
Many medical students play video games. You don’t see articles saying “America’s new surgeons…are video gamers!”
If the medical school put out adverts like this and specially asked "gamers" to apply then it is okay to focus on it: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/us/politics/air-traffic-c...
yes many of them also play video games and they were specifically focused on this recruitment drive. it wasn't a side effect that just happens to correlate
Movie watchers and food eaters, too.
That's because this article is PR fluff for Sean Duffy to make it seem like they are on top of the air traffic controller problem.
When you look at what a video game is defined as it includes: mobile games that are just microtransaction driven only & gambling on any kind of electronic machine.
"US hires over 2000 people who eat tacos as Air Traffic controllers"
No mention of what games they're playing?
Also no mention of when the NYC ones were told to move to Pennsylvania or be fired? Interestingly also cbs's article https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/new-york-philadelphia-a...
Not sure - but I know there's a really serious community of folks who do ATC virtually on VATSIM: https://vatsim.net
I feel like those folks would already have been candidates for air traffic controller jobs though.
It seems like they probably just ran recruitment ads targeted to people with an interest in gaming, right? The article actually doesn't say anything about how they went about recruiting gamers.
ATCs are chronically understaffed in a way that endangers all of us, and the FAA has been under scrutiny for their hiring practices for over a decade https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39184451
It's equally plausible to me that this is an example of "we need to try something and this is something" or just deflection from the prior criticism.
When I got interested in flying I took to flight simulators and the VATSIM network[0], as I had seen mentioned multiple times that the radio work can be a difficult aspect of flying to pick up on when flying out of a towered/busy field. By the time I started, I was comfortable on the radio and pre-flight checks, and this seemed to gained quite a bit of favor from my CFI.
I'm not saying it made me a well-versed pilot, but simulating these situations can do a lot to get one going.
Oh boy. So... I have some ties still to the FAA and its ATC staff despite living in Sweden and This article is just painting a picture I've seen time and time again when there are staffing woes.
I'm gonna ignore the gamer hype because that's just recruitment that has happened even in other admins (Level Up campaign was the last one in 2022 or so)
They got near to their quota in the training pipeline but it's not like training as most think about where someone can just study hard. Going to the Academy (there's only one in OKC and congress will almost always shut down ideas of opening another elsewhere) is not like a guarantee that someone intelligent or hardworking will pass like in uni. If historic stats are any indicator we will see a ton of washouts there (30%+) and then they need to qualify as a CPC (certified professional controller) in which time they may also wash out while training for their facility which the article didn't actually touch on. The bottleneck is still this process and until that 2000 converts to CPCs I'm not going to be raising hell or singing praises. Great that more are passing the ATSA and going to the academy, but that's step 0.
Not like any of this is Duffy's fault but as we say here: comes with the title man. I really would like to see more staff get there so best of luck to all the candidates, given the amount of OT I've seen (not just from facilities that game it mind you) the FAA needs all the controllers it can get.
I had a coworker from the democratic republic of Congo who insisted that if he was back home he would do ok fighting because he played lots of first-person shooters. I mean he was 100% serious about this. We argued about it.
He got a commitment from our employer to pay his undergrad tuition. But he disappeared one day, probably went home to fight and die. I search for him every now and then but I think he's gone.
I think his naïveté is equal to this policy.
Some interesting takes on Reddit Aviation
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1vlnlq9/faa_hires...
There is a ATC game from Japan: BOKUKAN (I am an Air Traffic Controller):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Traffic_Controller_(series...
From a very naïve perspective, why isn’t air traffic control a solved problem?
Would love to be educated here, but it seems like there are just not that many moving pieces per airport (<10,000) and all of them are tagged with transponders, etc. And a human in the loop with respect to coordination might be the biggest source of risk.
This all seems like queuing theory and collision avoidance, which are very well done by computers.
I wanted to do this job since the late 90s. Too old now (not old, just too old for this or the military). Pity. I think they have an upper limit of 40 years old or something. Probably why they reached out to gamers. I am not sure what the psychological reasoning of their choosing gamers is though. In practice, yes, they are able to focus and think fast, but they also tend to have a short attention span when it isn't engaged continuously and under a certain amount of stress or perceived duress. While ATC is certainly stressful from what I have read, it is not at all high stimulus.
One of my pilot friends told me that he knew of someone training to be an air traffic controller, and they completed the training but were denied the job due to an Obama era racial quota program which discriminated against him. I was skeptical of his claim, as he leans as far right as they come, and anything that Obama touches, he criticizes. But in this scenario, his anecdote was correct. Don't know if that's still the case, but recently it was.
i think too many people are getting hung up on the fact whether these air traffic controllers play video games or not.
Being an air traffic controller in the past has been a very difficult job not just to do but to get (for good reason) We have been short air traffic controllers for a long time now and all of a sudden were getting 2,000? How? Did they lax their requirements?
Im not saying that some qualified air traffic controllers havent been hired but considering this current administration lies/mishandles to a spectacular degree almost everything it touches im doubting there are actually 2,000 air traffic controllers and if there are how qualified a lot of them are
So instead of training Air Traffic Controllers to play video games, you trained Gamers to direct air traffic?
It's Armageddon! :-)
I don't know why hiring gamers for ATC would be any different than hiring anyone else to do it. There's extensive training required, and I don't think it's something you can get a college degree for anyway. Maybe there's some advantage for gamers, but I don't see where it would be all that important.
If there's one civilian class that's going to be adept at fast macro-micros, it's gamers, and specifically ones from Real Time Strategy (RTS) games.
It would be more interesting if they control for the games played. Eg Air traffic controllers that play Flight Sim, truck drivers that play GTA5 or teachers with Call of duty.
What could go wrong with preferring people who have ingrained disconnect between the objects on screen and real living humans.
> The exchange ended with Mr. Trump telling Mr. Duffy that he had to hire people from MIT as air traffic controllers. These air traffic controllers need to be “geniuses,” he said.
I guess MIT didn't work out...
Are they focusing on RTS players with high APM?
Just like the old rumors of Missile Command players being recruited for NORAD etc.
Really, there are people that play ATC games for fun.
I remember playing atc on a Unix machine which had dial–in access back in the BBS days.
Only 10% make it through the first week? At least the weed out process is quick.
Something, something, "Ender's Game".
I think the headline should have emphasized that they were hired as trainees.
I am not a fan of the Trump admin but Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, is one of the few people in it that I think steers clear of politics and prioritizes doing a good job. A horrible air traffic disaster that occurred a couple of weeks into the new administration threw him into the spotlight while he was still getting settled in, and it seems like he took the lesson to heart.
I actually think gamers are a good population to recruit from because you do want people that internalize cognitive abstractions, maintain focus for long periods, juggle competing priorities etc. But one can also imagine some less attractive gamer stereotypes like poor emotional containment or cognitive saturation leading to a rage quit. It will be interesting to see what the attrition rate will be like for this cohort vs others.
What could possibly go wrong?
It's not a terrible idea, especially if they find people who are already good at one of the many Air Traffic Control realistic sim videogames:
https://store.steampowered.com/search?term=%22air+traffic%22...
https://bigfatsimulations.com/game/approachcontrolremastered
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unmatched-air-traffic-control/...
gamers might be good fit for the job, and if everyones happy no need for dramatize it
one of the greats of early League of Legends esports, Froggen, went into ATC recently
This probably explains why I saw the Ghost from Pacman trying to eat my plane when I was making that ILS approach for runway 32 Right.
why is that? are they good at observing
Why are they saying “video gamers” as if it is a job title? Qualification for ATC is to be under 31 and the job is male dominated. No shit everyone they hire plays video games.
Idiotic headline. This is a trainee pipeline. The headline is meant to mislead you into thinking they hired some people based on video games and they are now air traffic controllers.