If you want some help on the ATC piece, please feel free to DM me.

Thanks for reading!

The focus of the WaPo article on pass rates is misplaced without regard to the candidate abilities. The emphasis has to be getting the best people into the job. The best way to do that is to use the research and selection process with a level of effort and resourcing to meet the current crisis.

This is a staffing crisis! It will take an effort equal to or greater than the 1981 recovery…

The people who make it in the workforce are people with top tier cognitive skills and abilities analogous to the skills of athletes in professional sports such as the NFL.

All of this is to say, a few people are much better at Air Traffic Control than most. Controllers are a professional workforce not many people understand or know anything about.

This selection model allowed the FAA to recover staffing levels from the 1981 firing of controllers within a few years.

The washout rate from the Screen at the Academy was about 50%. It was much more cost effective to identify people who could not do the job in the first few months of their careers than to send people to the field and put the burden on field facilities. Even then, field washout rate could be high.

The second stage was a train and test model, the Academy Screen, in which people were trained to separate airplanes and tested on whether or not they could. Asking people to demonstrate that they could do the job was a much more effective predictor of who might succeed.

The first stage was a paper and pencil test through the Office of Personnel Management. However, paper and pencil testing had limits to predicting who would succeed as a controller.

Between the 1970s and 2000s, the Civil Aeromedical Institute had a robust research program on selection of Air Traffic Controllers. As a result of research and existing training models, the FAA and the Academy implemented a 2 stage selection protocol.

There is wealth of research on selection and training of Air Traffic Controllers in the Civil Aerospace Medical Institute’s library archives dating back to the 1970s:

www.faa.gov/data_researc...

Thank you for posting your pics! Since we can’t get there, much appreciated!

Congratulations! Beautiful combo!

How are you liking the cursive Monoc?

Very welcome. Nice list!

1. Usually not posted, except Kaweco Sport.
2. No wish list yet. Still exploring a batch of samples…