FAA is making headway on hiring more ATC's but it will take some time

Aviation Expert Jay Ratliff has the latest travel news from the Airlines including the ongoing investigation into the deadly Air India crash

Episode Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:00):
Jay, Good morning to you. How are you.

Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm doing very well. Pleasy a getmore to see you.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
You know, I was looking at your picture earlier on
your website. Did you use like AI to create eye contact?
Because I swear it's looking right at me. Man if
I move around the studio and your your faces were
following me around the studio, this is kind of freaky.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Well, I guess i'd have to indicate which picture you're
looking at. But no, there's no there's no AI involved.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Now this look actually your your trading page daytrade fund
dot com and the picture, it's a beautiful picture. It's
a wonderful You look so friendly, so warm, so knowledgeable.
But the eyes on this thing are following me.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Well, I guess that's that photo was actually taken on
a cruise. My wife and I were on a row
Caribbean cruise. I think we're going through the Mediterranean for
a couple of weeks and we hired a guy to
take pictures of she and I. So we've got some
beautiful pictures of my wife through that and one of
the shots of me was just kind off by myself.

(00:58):
So when we were looking for a picture sure to
put up for the day trading website. I thought, well,
let me look at that one, and yeah, they did
a pretty good job. But it was I was on
a Royal Caribbean cruise a number of years ago, and
many times I wish I was just out on the ocean,
because you know the day trade. You can day trade
from the ocean as well. It's nice when you're floating

(01:20):
out there and got that scenery as an office and
sit back and relax.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Well, it's a beautiful picture of you. Maybe you we'll
do a cruise show one day. The cruise industry undergoing
some big changes and limiting the kind of people that
are going to be on the ships. I think that's
a great thing that I know. You're an air guy, so.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
I can't talk about anything. Don't worry about that. And
the pictures of my wife are a lot better than
the pictures of age.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
Well, yeah, you have to say that there's valuable bonus points.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
When you say that it's true. But it's true.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
AA is making headway on the hiring of air traffic controllers.
I understand it's a high stress job, but I didn't
know it was all that hard to get people. I mean,
it's a pretty it pays well, and so for I'm
worth and lots of jobs have stress, But has it
been that challenging to find air traffic controllers?

Speaker 1 (02:05):
For decades we've been we've had a shortage of air
traffic controllers for more years than I can count. I've
been doing this for thirty three and a lot of
those years I've been talking about how we have a
shortage of air traffic controllers because from the time you
get higher to the time you're on the job, it
could be three, four or five years.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Now.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
There's a lot of training that goes into this that
you've got to go through. And the FA has facilities
for about fifteen hundred people, And of those fifteen hundred people,
you've got a number of those that quit, wash out, whatever,
So you don't have all that fifteen hundred a year
coming forward. It's a smaller number of that. Plus you've
got individuals that are already air traffic controllers that are retiring.

(02:45):
And that's why when you look across the country you
see where thousands of air traffic controllers short. Now the
Trump administration has identified this as a priority, and I'm
very glad for it. They put forth one hundred million
dollars for training and facilities, and in July alone they
had the highest number of academy students within their training
I think it was five hundred and fifty students that
they're expecting by the end of the month. And they've

(03:08):
also cut i think five months of what they're calling
administrative process cutbacks, meaning that you can get through there faster,
and students that are scored in the top percentile of
their classes are actually being placed into the further training
academy a little bit more quickly. So we've been in
this whole for decades. It's going to take years for
us to climb out, but we are certainly headed in

(03:29):
the right direction. I think the goal for air traffic
controller hirings this year is two thousand, and it's the
facilities can be created to accommodate more, we could see
that number go up even higher.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
And they're starting around ninety ninety five thousand a year.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
Yes, and the air traffic controllers today one hundred and
fifty two hundred thousand dollars, but a lot of that
has to do with them working overtime and when you
talk about the stress that is associated with the jobs
they have plus Remember, these men and women are using
equipment that to call it antiquated is an insult to
the word antiquated. It is old, old, and as a result,

(04:07):
you're being required to do more, especially if there's a
shortage in the air traffic controller tower that you're in.
Plus you're using computers that are, you know, nineteen seventy eighties,
nineties kind of versions of some things, and it's just
it's ridiculous. And that's why I'm thrilled that its presiden
says we're going to address the highering, We're going to
address the technology, and we've got to turn it around

(04:29):
because if air traffic is going to double it the
course in the next ten years and we can't keep
up with where it's at now, some of the things
that are being pushed forward by President Trump now will
live on for the next fifteen to twenty years. And
it again is very needed.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
And we can only pray that if the infrastructure that
controls the air traffic does not technologically advanced, in the
air traffic itself technologically advances to the point where it
doesn't rely so much on antiquated equipment and fewer people.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
Yeah, we can track a drug dealer on the corner
of Fifth and Maine by using their cell phone in
the satellite, no problem. But when you try to track
a two hundred and fifty million dollar aircraft, we have
to do that using World War Two era ground based radar.
Uh huh. Yeah, It's just it's ridiculous. But that's where
we're at, and that's the challenge before us.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
Hey, I know this wasn't on your your little sheet
of stuff we were talking about, but let me ask you,
you have any thoughts on this air Air India situation.
I mean Boeing bashing again. But we're looking at the
fuel switches apparently aren't supposed to be able to be
turned off, but they were turned off. And reports are
that the co pilot asked why that was turned off
and didn't get an answer, and you know a lot

(05:38):
of rumors swirling out there. Do you have any thoughts
on that?

Speaker 1 (05:41):
Well, I've got several. The aircraft itself was operating exactly
as the Bowing airplane should have been. This is a
Dreamliner that had I don't know, five million passengers, million flights,
or billion people traveled. I mean, just the numbers were
just extraordinary. I'm getting those wrong, But it's amazing over
the sixteen years or so that plane's been flying, that

(06:02):
has had the history that it's had, it's incredibly safe.
But we knew that both engines failed, so we thought, okay, check,
was that because of a dual engine bird strike that
could have caused the engines to choke out? No? No,
no evidence of that. Was it fuel contamination that it
could have caused both engines to choke out? No, it
wasn't that. So how do you have a dual engine

(06:23):
failure with all the redundancies built into these modern aircraft?
That was the huge question that we had. So what
we find out in this initial report that just recently
came out more than a month after the crash, is
that the fuel switches for both engines there's a switch
for each engine, was turned off. Now, these switches are

(06:44):
spring loaded, so you can't like, you know, accidentally hit
them or something and off they go. You have to
grab them by the tip, pull them up to release
the spring, bring them down and allow them to go
back in to the next slot. So it requires effort,
and normally anytime something like that's being done, both pilots
are aware of it. The cockpit voice recorder recorded one

(07:06):
of the pilots saying why did you turn the fuel off?
And the other one thing, I did not do it,
And by the time seconds later they put the switches
back where they were supposed to go, which allowed the
fuel to return to the engines. The flights less than
sixty seconds long. At that point in time, they simply
didn't have the altitude to fully get the engines restarted
where they could achieve the thrust that they would need

(07:29):
to get airborne and go from there. So it's indicative
of either a mistake or something that was intentional. Now
that's the initial thoughts at this point, but the investigations
moving incredibly slow and it's not nearly as transparent as
it normally is. The National Transportation Safety Board out of Washington,
DC is part of the multi team assist team, if

(07:53):
you will, that's assisting the Indian government, and a lot
of the NTS investigators are growing very frustrated, saying is
going too slow and there's no transparency in the investigation,
and they're threatening to go home and say, look, we're
no longer going to be able to assist if this
is why it's going to continue. So a lot of
this is leading people of the families to think something happened,

(08:14):
is there's a conspiracy something, are they trying to hide something, whatever.
But if it turns out to be when the final
report comes out maybe a year from now, that it
was simply a pilot doing that, we may never know why.
Was it intentional? Was it an accidental. It's one of
these things that's frustrating because anytime you have a loss

(08:34):
of life, as we did with this particular disaster, you
want to honor the lives of those that were lost
by trying to do everything you can to identify it
and minimize it in future situation.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
I'm going to continue to pray that it was accidental
and competence something like that, and I have to believe
that if it was intentional, would have been done at
thirty five thousand feet, not just leaving the runway.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
At thirty five thousand feet, you've got a chance to recover.
You turn them off right after takeoff your toast, and
that's exactly what happened. As soon as they hit the
rotation point where they lifted the nose off the wheel
is when those two things were turned off to the
fuel flow to both engines, so at that point in time,
the most critical time of flight take off and landing,

(09:17):
the crew just doesn't have a chance to recover at
that low of an altitude