Chances are someone in your family is a gamer. Maybe you are a gamer yourself. After all, somewhere between two-thirds and three-fourths of Americans play video games, and if you just looked at young men, it’d be closer to 100%. Grumpy older people don’t get it, complaining that gaming is just a waste of time, but gamers believe it helps with their problem solving (although at a cost of sleep).

Does this qualify you to be an air traffic controller? Maybe. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Well, the good news is that if you are, indeed, a gamer, the Federal Aviation Authority (F.A.A.) is looking for you.

Last Friday Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced the F.A.A.’s campaign to attract “the next generation of air traffic controllers,” It is looking for people “who possess useful skills that are transferable to a career in air traffic control, including:

• Demonstrated high cognitive functions
• Multitasking
• Spatial awareness
• Strategy and problem-solving”

By all that, they mean gamers. The announcement goes on to add: “…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’s a slick YouTube ad too.

“When you bring on someone who has gaming experience, particularly with air traffic control, they have an edge up,” Michael O’Donnell, an aerospace consultant who previously worked as a senior F.A.A. official focused on air traffic safety, told Karoun Demirjian of The New York Times. “They’re coming in with a skill set. But it doesn’t replace aptitude, or discipline, or decision making under pressure.”

Surprisingly, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association supports the effort, with its president Nick Daniels telling BBC:: “Our union welcomes innovative approaches to expanding the candidate pool, including outreach to individuals with high-level aptitude skills such as gamers, so long as all pathways maintain the rigorous standards required of this safety-critical profession."

To be fair, both the F.A.A. and the NATCA probably would welcome anything that might drive people to apply. The F.A.A. only has about 75% of the target number of controllers, leaving it several thousand short. Individual airports may be staffed even lower, as might certain times of day. It’s not a new problem and it is not a problem that is going to be quickly fixed; it is not as though today you can play a video game and tomorrow you can be an air traffic controller. There is definitely a learning curve.

It also doesn’t help that air traffic controllers aren’t usually paid during government shutdowns, which Congress seems to increasingly allow. "The failure to pay air traffic controllers for 44 days created uncertainty, drove many experienced controllers out of the profession and harmed the recruitment pipeline," a spokesperson from the Department of Transportation told CBS News in November.    

Nor does it help that air traffic controllers rely on technology is that likely to be older than they are. The F.A.A. is trying, for example, to replace its outdated radar system, but NBC reports: “The FAA has been spending most of its $3 billion equipment budget just maintaining the fragile old system that still relies on floppy discs in places. Some of the equipment is old and isn't manufactured anymore, so the FAA sometimes has to search for spare parts on eBay.”

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chair Jennifer Homendy complained: “This is 2026. The secretary talks about upgrading our air traffic control system. We have an old air traffic control system. This is why he talks about that. We need to upgrade.”  

I was surprised to learn that gaming might not just be an asset to become an air traffic controller, but also an asset for air traffic controllers. Josh Jennings, a supervisor at the F.A.A.’s air traffic command center in Virginia, told Ms. Demirjian that gaming is both a way for controllers to stay sharp, and as a form of “social currency” among them. “I would say it’s probably tenfold on how fast this new generation is able to pick up on our physical tech, our radar scopes,” he said. Controllers apparently often play video games on their breaks.

In similar approaches to look for unconventional backgrounds, the Marines are looking at dirt bikers to become drone pilots, while Russia is looking at university students for its drone pilots.     

I can see the argument for recruiting gamers to be air traffic controllers. Both are used to obsessively monitoring multiple screens with lots of activity, requiring quick reactions, and with lives on the line. The difference, of course, is that for air traffic controllers, those virtual images represent real things, and the lives that may be lost are real people’s lives.

Still, given a choice between a controller who was a gamer versus some middle-aged college grad who is used to looking at spreadsheets, give me the gamer every time.

I think about all this, oddly enough, in regards to health care. Some of you may also be fans of “The Pitt.” One of my favorite characters is head nurse Dana Evans, and I sometimes wonder if she would ever get tired enough of covering for ineffective/incompetent doctors that she might opt to become one.  You can’t tell me that she isn’t smart enough and you probably couldn’t convince me she didn’t have enough medical knowledge, but in our system if she wanted to make such a change, it would mean sending her to medical school, then internship and residency – years of her life and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.

Who, exactly, would that help?

You know she'd be a good doctor

Where is the “gamers, please apply” equivalent to medical training, where non-traditional but potentially appliable backgrounds count? Could, for example, people with exceptional pattern recognition skills but perhaps not so good in chemistry or biology become excellent radiologists? Might biologists do well as pathologists, without all the years of physician training?

For many decades a college degree was seen as the ticket to middle-class (or more) success, but we’re seeing that’s less true now. We’re living in a digital world, and people are gaining skills and knowledge from that world that we’re not fully recognizing.

So kudos to the F.A.A. for recognizing how gamers might be good candidates, and I can only hope the subsequent training program isn’t so tradition-bound that it scares them off. And I’m waiting to see how healthcare and other industries might learn from -- not just copy -- its approach.

 

P.s. If you are wondering, “1337” is gamer slang for “leet,” which is itself slang for :elite,” as in gaming prowess.