#825 Zoom Zoom

Next time you see the airplanes go zoom zooming through the wild blue yonder, consider this. It’s traffic controllers that keep them from crash booming into each other.
And now there’s a shortage.
You may remember back in the Reagan years, when President Ron finally and momentously broke the backs of the unions by firing the nation’s air traffic controllers in one fell edict.
Big Business breathed a sigh of relief. They were on the way to less regulation and bigger profits. You know, like the mortgage business.
So the airplane business now has a shortage of trained air traffic controllers. Now I don’t know about you. Perhaps when you board a plane you don’t think about the people up in the tower directing traffic.
You might suppose that pilots are like drivers. Show them a road and they’ll pretty much work it out with an occasional stoplight and merging ramp.
Not so. Airplanes can’t turn on a dime. They need a little advance notice to move the lumbering beast they drive so it doesn’t plow into another lumbering beast. And they often can’t see the next beast down the airways because of visibility issues.
Clouds up there are, like, you know, flying fog.
All the more reason why this article I read disturbs me. Seems they are so desperate for new air traffic controllers that they are advertising on MySpace and reaching into high schools. The FAA says it will accept high school graduates into its three-month training program, then assign them to an air traffic control center for additional on-the-job training.
Three months?
It’s nice to know your air traffic controller gets less training than your Volkswagen mechanic.
But hey. I’d probably reach out to the kids too. Even though safety never seems like a number one priority to youth, the multi-tasking experience of manipulating multiple inputs with their video games, Ipods, cellphones and laptops, suits them perfectly for a job as an air traffic controller.
An old single-tasking fart like myself would have planes crashing like the economy.
America, ya gotta love it.