The FAA and Department of Transportation have been desperate to hire new air traffic controllers.
It’s a high-stress job that requires special skills, including the ability to juggle a lot of variables in your head, incredible concentration, quick reflexes under pressure, and the ability to stare at screens for long periods of time without losing situational awareness.
Sound like anything you can think of?
That’s what Sean Duffy and his aides thought. Who better than gamers to take on this challenge?
Who said that people who spend all day playing computer games have no discernible skills?
Imagine what this country could accomplish if we plugged talent gaps with the massive pool of untapped talent we have in this country…
Instead of trying to plug a gay, black, Latinx, pansexual, disabled immigrant woman into every slot. https://t.co/tWnTSt2C3C
— Douglass Mackey (@douglassmackey) August 10, 2026
So the FAA put together an accelerated program to recruit gamers for the job, which can pay pretty well after a few years. $155,000 a year, in fact, which to me seems to be a good deal for all concerned. It’s good pay for most people outside Wall Street, comparable to high skill jobs in the trades, and definitely worth it to the public if they are good at it.
I don’t know about you, but if it took twice as much to get the right people to keep aircraft from crashing, I’d be all for it. 10 million people a day fly, and there are over 100,000 flights a day worldwide. Keeping them safe and separate is a big job, and the FAA is hiring 2,000 new controllers from this recruitment drive.
More than six times that number applied within 24 hours of the program being announced.
I’d call that a pretty genius idea, and no doubt they will keep up the recruitment to get as many skilled controllers as they can; I suspect the bottleneck is how many can be trained at a time.
The biggest problem I can see is that many gamers haven’t seen the sun in years, so maybe they will have to be confined to underground bunkers. We can recruit lifeguards to man the towers.
Editor’s Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America’s kids get the education they deserve.
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