If so, doesn't the understaffing (lower # of employees) result in each employee being overpaid (paid a higher hourly rate)?
The mystery to me is that AT shortages have been known fora. while now, so why haven't many more trainees been recruited?
ATC has been a shit career prospect for a while now so no one wants to enter training.
For one it requires uprooting your entire life to live near a training center, then they send you on an apprenticeship to a random airport in the country for a few years. And since there are only so many slots in the desirable metros, most people get sent to live somewhere “undesirable” to say the least.
For two, while trainees get paid they get totally fucked during government shutdowns. Many who make it to the funnel also quit at that point. Without fundamental structural changes to how they’re trained and paid at the political level, the number of trainees will remain small.
The money doesn't somehow make it sustainable for the people burning out their lives. Working 7 days a week, including overnight shifts, for 20 years to collect a pension seems like WELL earned compensation.
That's seems unrelated to "we have so few" and "we enmiserate the one's we do have".
It's hard to argue you're underpaid if, as a result of short staffing, you're getting paid more (both in absolute terms and per unit of effort) than you signed up for.
You can still do contract ATC work after 56.
You can’t account for overtime in pensions because the employees will conspire to force overtime for retiring employees to bounce the pension up. Just a natural risk with an entity that can’t go bankrupt hiring people.
We get it, @ExtraRoulette. You're big pimpin'.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046401
But I don't think we should extrapolate from it.
Overweight/obesity combined: ~73-75% (nearly 3 in 4 adults) in the US.
Try it!
Or don't. Feels good to mog people by just being normal weight.
Personal responsibility sure but that often comes with utter ignorance of the systems that people find themselves in, especially poverty and mental health. The bottom 50% own nothing, have no security, and everything that makes their lives a little easier are things they’ll consider.
I was obese most of my adult life. It absolutely cost me more to eat cheap (as in nutrition) shitty fast foods than prepare things from base ingredients. It was more convenient and it was the easy path for sure, but absolutely in no way a means to save money. It costs vastly more. I could only afford to get fat once I started making money. Growing up we were too poor to eat that horribly.
But since you'd like to speak about price it seems, I'd posit that for a good long while there, dollar menu items were genuinely about as cheap as you could get for food - $4 on the way home from work and get an hour of time back to unwind? It was worth it to me - heck, a lot of the time I used that time to be in the gym.
I'll grant you that pretty much any restaurant you'd sit down in where you don't pay at the counter is utterly more expensive - 3x the ingredient cost at least.
But we're not comparing steaks and chicken entrees here, we're comparing rice & beans and chicken breast vs a McDouble or $5 footlong. Weeknight roasts that you have to plan ahead for, Sunday meal prep days. Its all time - I recognize this because I choose to take that time on, and its time that I don't get to spend on other stuff.
Or you can just eat bread with 1-2 topics of choice. Perfectly viable and fine for a long work day. Its only a problem if you eat to much.
> and everything that makes their lives a little easier are things they’ll consider.
Consider it, but don't cry about cost when you door dash 5 times a week. This is actually pretty common. People Door Dash, pay with Klarna and then pay Klarna with Credit cards.
In the extreme case you don't even need a proper kitchen - a microwave, a rice cooker, and some large bowls will suffice. You can reliably find all of those things at thrift stores in the US. You also have the option to purchase dry staples in bulk (rice, oatmeal, pasta, etc) in 10, 25, or even 50 lb sacks if you can find a local place that stocks them (costco for example).
This is provably untrue. It is such a tired trop to constantly refute. I guess I need to start a google doc with citations.
It is FAR cheaper to buy staples and cook your own food at home. And healthier. You do not need to eat farm to table veggies and local meat for this to happen.
Anyone who tells you it is cheaper to eat fast food and prepared junk foods is misinformed or outright lying with an agenda.
Just look at every single immigrant community that migrates here. They know how to prepare food for cheap.
Yes, it takes a time investment and skill. No, the trope of "single mother with 3 jobs" is not a thing. Those people are already feeding their family healthy foods for the most part since they have self-selected for caring and putting effort in.
If anything is a luxury it's being able to eat prepared fast foods for the majority of your diet. Growing up McDonalds was a twice a year treat for special occasions. Peeling potatoes and baking bread from actual flour and yeast was the daily chores.
absolutely. you need to be smart about your food. your health, your choice. time saved is time earned. healthy eating, healthy body
It’s an argument that if you make changes slowly enough people won’t notice.
Other 19th-century experiments were purported to show that frogs did not attempt to escape gradually heated water. An 1872 experiment by Heinzmann was said to show that a normal frog would not attempt to escape if the water was heated slowly enough, which was corroborated in 1875 by German scientist Carl Fratscher.
I don't see the point of the experiment with the brain removed, but given that they did the experiment with intact frogs as well confirms their original hypothesis.
However, later on in the article, it's been disputed in recent years: as the water is heated by about 2 °F (about 1 °C), per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if it can. Earlier it also says that frogs put into already water just die (not mentioned, but presumably from shock) and so don't have a chance to start attempting to jump out. I imagine humans dumped into boiling water would have a similar response.
I wrote this 12 years ago and it's even more true today: https://magarshak.com/blog/stop-wasting-our-time/
I'm Australian. In Australia, if you are forced to work overtime the rate of pay goes up, by 50% or if it's extreme, double. As a consequence "underpaid" isn't a common complaint of people working lots of overtime.
This has some negative consequences of course. If labour is plentiful you can have lots of people on hand and pay them on an hours-worked basis. The same deal applies - if you go beyond 40 hours a week their rate of pay goes up, but that shouldn't happen if labour is plentiful and management is on the ball.
But if, as in this case labour isn't plentiful, then they are going to have to fix it some other way - like paying to train more staff. What the employers can't do is offload the problem entirely onto their employees, so there are forces compelling them to get their act together.
The OP makes it sound like the dynamic is very different in the US.
See: https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-...
This is from a popular 90s country song:
sleep would be best
but i just can't afford to rest
have to be in Denver at morning light
- much too young to feel this damn old
For long-haul it's probably a bit different, but other routes have a lot of annoying delays.
E.g. waiting at a port, waiting for a trailer replacement, waiting for receiving, etc.
Afaik, these are all classified as driving hours for logbook purposes.
It creates a situation where you legally have to park a truck on the side of the road when you hit your cap, even though 1/2 of your day might have been waiting around for something.
Imho, that's a bit ridiculous, and I'm sympathetic to shadow logbooks there.
For the 16 hours straight cross-country pounders, less-so. But long-haul is what autonomous trucking will likely eat first.
Unfortunately, this is now priced into certain government jobs in the USA and people rely on it. Americans see the obscene amounts of money and hours as a challenge until they actually burn out.
ATC isn't even the worst offender. Law enforcement and prison guards can pull 100+ hours a week on a regular basis. This is how prison guards can pull $400k/year.
There's definitely elements of that - but part of that is that many pensions are based on the two highest earning years of your career, so it's "common" among cops when they are planning to retire to spend two years working every possible piece of OT available, to maximize their pension income.
Mind you, in the UK, defined benefits pension schemes are very rare nowadays, but where they exist they are defined as a percentage of the final year salary with that company, so the highest 2 year thing seems a bit weird to me but for a different reason.
But then you don't get to go on stage with a chainsaw and bragging about how you're downsizing government.
Some state prisons have escaped the overtime pit by offering huge sign-on bonuses and doing a hiring surge. But it takes longer to train ATC than a CO.
The obvious reason that US air traffic control has been understaffed for "a while now" is that, roughly a decade ago, the FAA caved in to political pressure to stop having so many white controllers by decommissioning any hiring practices that posed a risk of hiring white controllers.
This meant the size of the workforce froze, stressing the system.
Tracing Woodgrains went into a good amount of depth on the scandal: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
It’s analogous to this hypothetical conversation:
“XYZ Politician is a corrupt official who needs to be investigated”
“Well actually, corruption is everywhere.”
See how that downplays and changes the subject at hand?
Not everyone is overworked and underpaid like ATC workers. The US government needs to implement real reforms to rectify that situation.
Instead, you find that this critcal mass is happy being boiled with their eyes wide shut.
> In audio from the air traffic control tower at LaGuardia, a staff member can be heard saying: "'Truck One, stop, stop, stop!" in the seconds before the crash.
It sounds to me like either the Cop or the Firefighter (whichever was driving) wasn't listening to ATC and this whole incident was probably completely avoidable.
EDIT: a video of the crash seems to have warning lights that the emergency vehicle ignored.
It seems like less than 2 seconds from declaring intent to cross until they are told not to cross.
The runway entrance lights look red to me which is also a huge warning flag.
> Audio is not synced.
I think the gaps between transmissions have been trimmed, too; this isn't matching other versions of the ATC audio, such as [VASAviation's][1].
> The runway entrance lights look red to me which is also a huge warning flag.
IANA-ATC, but presumably in an emergency, you're permitted to obtain clearance from ATC to enter an active runaway, to get to the emergency. (Which they did, and got, but which ATC later effectively revokes with the command to stop, prior to the accident. Whether ATC should have granted the clearance, well, I'll wait for the NTSB report there.)
One controller working tower duties, ground movement duties, coordinating with other ATC functions off the radio, an active emergency request, and giving clearance amendments all within 2 minutes. It's insane understaffing. On top of it, there was nobody there to take over after the crash. He worked the whole cleanup for the next 30 minutes.
This is an Olympian level elite Air Traffic Controller who was setup to fail.
I've visited towers, center facilities, and have flying (and some instructing) in the San Francisco airspace for 10 years. That kind of failure is systemic way above an individual.
There have been many attempts to change phraseology, teach pilots and controllers to always readback runways, etc. but nothing that actually prevents the issue from occurring entirely via automation.
The pilot was given the clearance to land before the fire engine was dispatched. Apparently there was not even enough time for the crew to max out the thrust and try to lift off the strip even if they managed to notice the lights of the incoming fire engine.
A similar system can and should be used for runways.
As a thought experiment, imagine how many car accidents there would be if instead of traffic lights, each person had a AM radio in their car and police officers called out over the radio which cars should proceed across the intersection. That is the unfortunate state of modern? aviation.
The technology already exists. The problem has already been solved with an iPad and a $200 receiver. Almost certainly some BS regulation or rule was at least partially responsible here.
It wouldn't need to work 100% of the time because you'd still be required to contact ATC. The only requirement is that it have a reasonably high chance of alerting drivers to potential mistakes before they happen.
Which is to say this incident was trivially preventable had anyone with authority over these sorts of things cared to bother.
But this is a hand-wave.
This is a situation where both vehicles got explicit permission from someone who's supposed to know what they're doing. These sorts of runway crossings aren't unusual - and this one was responding to an emergency - and at a place like LGA there's always gonna be a plane on approach.
The difference between "hold short at runway 22" and being on runway 22 is much less than 30 seconds in some cases.
* https://www.radiantvisionsystems.com/blog/worlds-most-advanc...
Not sure if you can do something on a 'simple' HUD that many planes have, so you could see objects in your flight path.
> The difference between "hold short at runway 22" and being on runway 22 is much less than 30 seconds in some cases.
What is the typical minimum temporal separation? I would have expected at least 45 or 60 seconds given the cost of a plane and the imminent threat to life.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigators-search-an...
> Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said at a news conference Tuesday that the airport uses a safety system called ASDE-X to track surface movements of aircraft and vehicles.
> "ASDE-X did not generate an alert due to the close proximity of vehicles merging and unmerging near the runway, resulting in the inability to create a track of high confidence,” Homendy read from an analysis of the system’s performance.
It's obviously the right choice to give the PIC the information via avionics in a graphically concise way that highlights this potential runway contention because it is real and pilots are expected to adjust their speed to maintain the right sequence.
When it isn't possible, which does happen, IE a plane ahead is slow to clear the runway or to takeoff, pilots are expected+required to execute a go-around.
In flight, the answer really shouldn't ever be "less than 500 feet". During landing, the answer almost certainly will be "less than 500 feet"; a plane's queued up to enter the runway after you land, a ground vehicle is working on something near but not on the end of the runway, etc.
It's a surprisingly tough challenge to solve a) reliably and b) in a way that doesn't cause a whole bunch of false go-arounds wreaking havoc on the busy airport.
The ATC clearance gives each vehicle a movement contract.
It would be great if avionics actually took those into account. Avionics should help pilots ensure their vehicles don't break the contract and should also alert immediately if other vehicles have, or their velocity vector is such that they will violate the contract. IE braking rate is insufficient to stop before the hold short line. ATC computers should ensure no conflicting clearances are issued.
None of that happens right now.
Almost every fire department in the country has SOPs for operating in emergency mode that generally include coming to a stop at all intersections or at least being able to affirmatively clear the intersection.
This personal liability is not particularly appealing in the world of fire, where ~70% of US firefighters are volunteer (not that the story is better in career), so codifying it in SOP allows departments/governments to negotiate insurance policies for their members, saying that "if you were driving in emergency mode, but within SOP, the department's insurance will cover your personal liability".
I saw the video. The incoming engine didn't appear to slow until too late, either.
> tendency to strip funding until disaster happens
well there's a tendency to pass unfunded mandates too. They are two sides of the same coin. Here's another way I've heard it described, to show you that this is a "bipartisan" issue:
> the Daily Show problem. I love the Daily Show, and I think Jon Stewart is hysterical. But literally the answer to every single problem is “Congress should pass a new law.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/marc-andreessen-in-c...
i don't think Marc Andreessen knows everything about everything the way that he thinks that he does. but he's not wrong. you are in the really lame "Congress should pass a new law" department - i guess to increase funding? - but you know, then it becomes, i don't see why it would be "enough" funding, we don't know, they could strike anyway...
personally, i believe the problem with guilded professions like "ATC guy" come about from complex but nonetheless finite incentives. so in a narrow sense, as long as some ATC controllers want to "work more, earn more," this problem will persist, it doesn't even have to be all ATC controllers, or even many, but the proportion of "work more, earn more" to "work less, earn less" personalities predicts the scale of the issues facing buyers of the guilded profession's services. other economists have talked about this and i'm sure someone will write great Causality Revolution paper about it for ATC.
broadly I think the problem has much more to do with the lack of economic opportunity in America, that there's minimum wage and everything else, and people are very risk averse like their peers in Europe or Asia but have less of a safety net so they are much more desperate. everyone is looking to guilds to solve their problem instead of demanding that their leaders support and deliver real growth, which makes me sound like Peter Thiel, and that should tell you everything you need to know about why this problem is so hard to solve. it's all politics, not a misunderstanding of the math about maintenance or disasters or whatever the fuck.
This isn't some vague problem, it's a random asshole screaming "delete! Delete! Delete!" enlisting some random college dropouts to execute it for him, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives directly attributable to those short sighted changes.
This isn't a vague problem, it's a specific asshole who is killing people so he can appear on stage with a chainsaw.
Also, ATC controllers are not the one in power here. It is not like they would made the decisions that lead to here.
Failures will happen, and resources are finite. But the idea that this particular failure is an inevitable consequence of a rational economic decision, that we as a society got together and decided we would permit X fatal aircraft incidents per unit of time, and that there is no point in improving because perfection is impossible, is patently absurd.
No, we have been and currently are willing to pay for fully staffed air traffic control towers to prevent precisely this sort of accident. If you told someone at the airport there was a single controller doing double duty, there's a good chance they would choose to pay a premium to change flights to a time when the ATC was appropriately staffed. There is a reasonable expectation that when you book a service like a flight that you are paying for the appropriate staffing to provide that service. I'm paying for the person who maintains the engines, and the person who audits the paperwork to make sure the maintenance got done, and the engineer who checks that the latest revision won't cause the engine to explode in mid-air, and all the rest of the massive chain of people required for air travel to work as its supposed to. The airline is supposed to set the price such that they can afford to pay all these people. They don't get to make the decision that they can take my money and pocket what was supposed to be going towards engine maintenance because they don't value my life sufficiently. Likewise for air traffic control.
The union pretty loudly and early on pointed out major problems with that job and the response of ignoring them for 4 decades is what's driven us to the current situation.
A union that isn't allowed to legally strike when needed isn't a useful union though. The state that ATC has been in for the decades after that suggests to me that they were correct to strike.
Multiple economic write ups have concluded that Reagan’s “stick it to the upstart guy” cost us tax payers way more than it would if they’d just acceded and maybe even thrown in a gracious bonus to say thanks.
Larger sociology say the intangible cost to labor balance laws actually were much more.
Reagan’s trickle down (great euphemism for “piss on”) movement was the beginning of the demise of the GOP IMO. Disclaimed: I voted both times for him and many GOP followers.
How dare those peons use their economic leverage! That's only for the upper class
Their employer, the Federal government, was free to fire them, and did.
ah, truly a decision with no consequences
tl;dr just because it's a legally allowed decision, doesn't mean it's a right decision
Why not blame any number of people who held the same office between then and now who have equivalent power to fix the system?
If we assign blame to this dead guy a long time ago, then there is no accountability to be had.
You're absolutely right that solutions should have been taken, but it's also true that we're picking up the pieces of a decision taken forty years ago.
Source: /r/ATC. I highly recommend lurking there.
In my job we work 40h a week + oncall rotating. It works.
We can probably semi automate runway crossing. Someone mentioned red lights when you definitely cannot cross
Clearly human-run ATC results in situations like this, so the idea that automated ATC could result in a runway collision and should therefore never be implemented is bad.
You obviously wouldn't authorize the bot to do everything, but you could allow it to autonomously call for stops or go-arounds in a situation like this where a matter of a few seconds almost certainly would have made the difference.
Imagine the human controller gives the truck clearance to cross and the bot immediately sees the problem and interrupts with "No, Truck 1 stop, no clearance. JZA 646 pull up and go around." If either message gets through then the collision is avoided, and in case of a false positive, it's a 30 second delay for the truck and a few minutes to circle the plane around and give it a new slot.
If we aren't confident enough in the automation to allow it to make the call for something simple like a runway incursion/conflict (via total automation), augmentation might be worse than the current approach that calls for 100% awareness by the ATC. Self-driving research shows that at level 2 and level 3, people tune out and need time to get back "in the zone" during a failure of automation.
In doctor's offices it was easy, just listen to the verbal consult and write up a summary so doc doesn't spend every evening charting. What is the equivalent for ATC, in terms of an interface that would help surface relevant information, maintain context while multitasking, provide warnings, etc, basically something that is a companion and assistant but not in a way that removes agency from the human decision-maker or leaves them subject to zoning out and losing context so they're not equipped to handle an escalation?
Depends both on the form the "alarm" takes as well as the false positive rate. If the alarm is simply being told to go around, and if that has the same authority as a human, then it's an inconvenience but there shouldn't be any fatigue. Just frustration at being required to do something unnecessary.
Assuming the false positive rate were something like 1 incident per day at a major airport I don't even think it would result in much frustration. We stop at red lights that aren't really necessary all the time.
Even if it's just a warning to the ATC, distracting them and forcing them to reexamine a false positive call interrupts their flow and airspace awareness. I get what you're saying, that we could err on the side of alert first, out of precaution; but all our proposed solutions would really come down to just how good the false positive and false negative rates are.
BTW, stopping at a red light unnecessarily (or by extension, gunning it to get through a yellow/red light) could get you rear ended or cause a collision. Hard breaking and hard acceleration events are both penalized by insurance driver trackers because of that.
This specific situation I think could instead have been cheaply and easily avoided if the ground vehicle had been carrying a GPS enabled appliance that ingested ADS-B data and displayed for the driver any predicted trajectories in the vicinity that were near the ground. Basically a panel in the vehicle showing where any nearby ADS-B equipped planes were expected to be within the next 30 seconds or so.
> stopping at a red light unnecessarily
Is it not always legally necessary where you live? It certainly is here. When I described them as unnecessary I was recalling situations that would clearly be better served by a flashing yellow.
What you're describing almost sounds like TCAS, a collision avoidance system for planes in the air, and would be a good idea.
As for the redlights, yes, legally you would be required to stop if you're before the stop line. My language wasn't clear, as I was trying to describe those scenarios where a light's turning just as you're getting to/into the intersection. Some people will gun it to get through, others will jump on their brakes to not run what's technically a red.
That is how it is supposed to work. How did it work in reality is an other question of course, and no doubt it will be investigated.
The reason we won't ever have self-driving cars is that no matter how clever you make them, they're only any good when nothing is going wrong. They cannot anticipate, they can only react, too slowly, and often badly.
Self driving cars' reaction times aren't slowed by drugs, alcohol, or a Snapchat notification pulling their attention.
Current systems haven't been proven in all weather conditions and all inclement situations (ie that tesla collision with a white semi-trailer), but it's crazy to say that self-driving cars won't match or exceed human drivers in terms of safe miles driven. Waymo has already shown an 80 to 90% reduction in crashes compared to people.
Compared to unsafe people. It's an important caveat though I agree with the larger point you're making.
As I stated earlier I agree with the broader point you were trying to make. I like what they're doing. It's just important to be clear about what human skill actually looks like in this case - a multimodal distribution that's highly biased by category.
The other person's comment was "we won't ever have self-driving cars" because they aren't good enough: but something like Waymo already is, particularly for the population. If we waved a wand and replaced everyone's car with a Waymo, accident rates would fall, at a population level and at a per-mile driven level.
It's even tough to see that a Waymo would be more dangerous for a good driver: they too have never been the cause of a serious accident and have certainly driven more miles across the fleet than any human driver. All 4 serious injury accidents and both fatalities were essentially "other driver at fault, hit Waymo".
This isn't meant to glaze Waymo, but point out that self-driving cars in certain environments are "solved". They're expensive, proprietary, aren't suitable for trucking or deployment to cold climates (yet?); but self-driving that is safer than people-driving is already here. To your point: human skill in driving is variable: Waymo won't replace Verstappen right now, but just like the AGI argument with LLMs, they're already "smarter" than the average person in certain domains.
You're left with a bunch of planes in the sky that can't stay there forever, and not enough humans on the ground to manually land them.
Now image the outage is also happening at all airports nearby, preventing planes from diverting.
How do you get the planes out of the sky? Not enough humans to do it manually.
Now imagine the system comes back online. Does it know how to handle a crisis scenario where you have dozens of planes overhead, each about to run out of fuel? Hopefully someone thought of that edge case.
Remember when all the Waymos were confused by a power outage? Now do that, but with airplanes that will fall thousands of feet and kill hundreds instead of park in the middle of the street.
I'm not saying we shouldn't automate things. We should. But, it's not easy. If it was, we would have done it already.
I remember.
Do you remember (before Waymo existed) what happened to traffic in SF anytime the power went out?
I remember. It was pretty much the identical situation.
Traffic goes to hell when the traffic lights stop working properly (without Waymo and also with Waymo).
One of the failure modes should not be “guy forgot thing”.
It just feels wrong that the primary form of control in 2026 is voice over radio.
It already is.
> Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.
Planes divert to another airport, passengers grumble, end of story. Airport closures can and do happen all the time for all kinds of reasons, including weather or equipment malfunctions.
An example of a poorly thought-out implementation elsewhere does not exclude the possibility of coming up with a better one than humans coordinating with their mouths over radio.
My suggestion is to restrict the use of smaller jets like crj and turboprops. I know airports like LaGuardia can't handle the big jets either, but they could reduce the slots and require a jet that holds, say, 150 people or more. This would result in fewer flights per day to some airports, but reduce overall congestion while still serving the same number of passengers.
Controller probably should've told them to expedite the crossing or warned that traffic was about to land, but they were managing a lot at once; tower+ground by themselves and an emergency already.
Doing it at LaGuardia or any major airport is absolutely nuts.
Add a few seconds for human reaction time on both ends, I don't think that's really "enough time to cross safely" - maybe if the stars align.
Hard disagree. The ATC initially cleared them to cross the runway. The truck started moving, and just then the ATC realised that they made a mistake and tried to fix it. Even their first attempt at that was unclear, and they only clarified who should stop on the second attempt.
People can’t react in zero second, trucks don’t stop immediately. The ATC mistake was clearing them to cross the runway, whatever happened after was out of their hands.
If the ATC is under staffed they’d charge a far higher premium since the risk of accidents is higher.
I’m not sure who would be liable for this accident, I’m guessing ATC is a government provided industry, and I understand governments don’t insure.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-begins-firings-o...
The real issue is just insufficient slots.
My father works ATC and his schedule has him working overtime, 6 shifts a week, including overnight shifts, meaning that there is literally not a day of the week where he doesn't spend at least some time in the tower.
If that's the reality for even half of the controllers, it's no surprise that we've been seeing more and more traffic accidents lately.