Improve ATC

I am an en route controller at Houston ARTCC. What frustrates controllers is that aircraft are routed directly through TS all the time. Then pilots then ask us “how are people getting around it?” I took the airline dispatching course at Riddle. I know the dispatchers share 50% of the responsibility for the safety of the flight. To me, sending the pilots the dispatch paperwork with the weather pre flight is just checking a box that alleviates them from liability. At what point are dispatchers going to be responsible for the fact they consistently route aircraft through thunderstorms? When are we going to get to the point of making real safety decisions such as, today isn’t a good day to fly over Florida? And another thing – The scariest and most unsafe thing I’ve seen in air traffic is when cold fronts come through as a solid squall line well down into the gulf. The Q routes are shut down. Every AC in the air is pushed south into the gulf. Everyone is deviating. I’ve seen a sector get more than 30 handoffs at once. I’ve seen AC deviate so far south they are hugging the FIR (which is non-RADAR with northbound AC coming up from Mexico). Nothing about flying through thunderstorms is safe. And nothing about every AC in the sky deviating south of a cold front into the gulf is safe. I’ve said it many times before: on weather days there is no way an objective observer could stand in that control room and objectively say that what they are witnessing is a safe operation. Catastrophic loss of life is only because of the sheer skill of the ones behind the RADAR scope and the fact no one dies is NOT the same as a safe ATC operation. And the airlines are 100% complicit in this. And to that point it isn’t right that ATC pay continues to lag behind inflation year after year. Health insurance goes up more than 10% every year. And every time there is a government shutdown we have to show up for work, used as political leverage, and not get paid until the shutdown ends. Sometimes that means going as long as month on pure savings. We are currently part of the 2027 federal pay freeze with 0% pay raise scheduled.