January 14, 2024 - 8:00am
Several stories and tweets went viral this week calling into question the competency of airline pilots over DEI concerns. Critics such as Elon Musk have pointed to diversity hiring initiatives for airline pilots, assuming that standards are lowered for underrepresented groups, but federal regulations on pilot qualifications are still as strict as they’ve ever been, and diversity training programmes are still bound by these rules.
But where DEI may play a more significant — and dangerous — role is not among pilots but in air traffic control.
Air traffic controllers are badly understaffed and overworked. As of June, 77% of ATC centres are understaffed, and it’s common for controllers to have mandatory overtime, 10-hour shifts and 6-day workweeks. Controllers are manning multiple frequencies at once and often don’t have the bandwidth to monitor runways as effectively as one would hope.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) blames the problem on the six-month closure of its academy in 2020 and a two-year pause in on-the-job trainings. But the crisis appears to have emerged about a decade into an Obama-era push to diversify the industry. Under the Obama administration, the FAA scrapped its hiring process based on aptitude test scores and training in 2013 and replaced it with one that considered applicants’ biographies, resulting in an ongoing class action lawsuit on behalf of about 1,000 applicants who were passed over under the new regime. The biographical component gave an advantage to applicants who had been unemployed for the past three years, among other traits the FAA believed would result in more opportunities for racial diversity.
The classes admitted under the system of racial preference are still occupying air traffic control jobs. From 2011 to 2017 the FAA reported an 83% rise in runway incursions — “incidents involving unauthorised aircraft, vehicles, or people on a runway”. Near-misses on runways have also become commonplace. There were at least 46 near-collisions on airplane runways in July 2023 alone; in some cases pilots steered clear of crashing into other planes with only seconds to spare.
The FAA scrapped the biographical component in 2018, and it’s unclear whether the agency is still considering race in its hiring practices. The personality test component of the AT-SA test, which asks applicants if they like to attend parties and if they like to follow instructions, could be an avenue through which this is achieved.
An FAA spokesperson told UnHerd that the agency keeps “extremely conservative standards” for avoiding aircraft collisions through air traffic control, with the goal of having zero close calls, but refused to answer questions about the agency’s use of racial metrics in hiring practices; she told me I would have to file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain this information.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeWe know when affirmative action has actually taken place because of the increase in performance of the recruited cohort over a cohort where many talented potential recruits had been dismissed for consideration because of bias in the application process.
Is this meant to be satirical? Racial quotas decrease performance
Come on guys and gals, it’s so obviously satirical, hence the phrase “where many talented potential recruits had been dismissed for consideration”.
I really do shake my head at times, as this lack of understanding of irony is followed by the usual amount of up- and down-ticks.
This said, you often do get a report of increased performance as the criteria for best practice gets changed to fit the output figures. But yes, many seem to have had irony-bypass surgery or similar.
No. Not satirical. He spells it out for those of us who mistake dogma for dry humour – I added the quotation marks and italics after posting this comment to make it very clear: these are NOT my thoughts:
I stand corrected.
Affirmative action was designed to increase performance, by appointing people who failed to qualify for a job simply because of bias.
That was the point of Martin Luther King’s dream where people were judged on the content of their character, not on the colour of their skin.
I don’t have an issue with affirmative action, if it is applied in a very narrow way. If you have two jobs candidates with similar experience and education. I don’t have an issue tipping the scale in favour of someone in a minority group. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is how it works in the real world.
“Tipping the scales” is racism, as is the misnomer “affirmative action”. Competence, talent, and brains come in every skin color.
You can’t have it both ways. Affirmative Action = Judging by skin colour. MLK’s aspiration =judging by content of character (or in this case, ability to stop planes crashing).
As a passenger on a plane, I know which I’d prefer. Couldn’t care less if they were green so long as I arrive in one piece.
I’m with MLK all the way on this one.
You are confused.
Seeing as how deconstruction is all the rage these days, perhaps it’s time to put him through the process…
Affirmative action IS bias in the application process. Did you not actually know this?
So it’s only bias if a white man isn’t hired, because we known that they are all competent.
Recruitment for ATC, and indeed most jobs, must start with ensuring the applicant has the ability to be trained and carry out the job.
Look at all your DEI criteria afterwards if you must but hiring people to fill diversity slots will never bring about equality – it just papers over failures elsewhere.
This. Jobs where people’s lives are literally at stake, from ATCs to surgeons, should be pure meritocracies, not laboratories for well meaning but foolish policies.
Affirmative action in my opinion serves two purposes.
Firstly, it’s a far easier undertaking than reforming the abysmal public schools or the indifferent, ineffectual social welfare policies that created the need for AA in the first place.
Secondly, it prevents the “wrong sorts” of whites – those with working class parents, or Roman Catholics, or those who grew up in the American interior, from getting into selective universities. And our selective universities are the gateways to the elite levels of both corporate America, and the upper tiers of the federal government.
Worse: it makes all the achievements of DEI candidates doubtful, even if they never tried to use the DEI card. I know from fighting off the label 30+ years ago.
I am not sure I will follow the argument to the intended conclusion here. I would be persuaded if I can see a deeper analysis that adjusts properly for the effects of the pandemic, and isolates any effect due to affirmative action by comparing regions where population diversity is lower, eg North Dakota, Utah etc, with the most diverse, eg California, Texas and Florida.
If an effect is still visible after this work is done, I’ll take it seriously.
I can only say that the quote in the final paragraph doesn’t support the writer’s thesis at all. I’m not sure why she included it.
Sometimes life experience just informs us. Your saying that if some study is done (and how such a one as you propose be made scientific is very doubtful – Casper Wyoming and LAX airports are not really even on the same planet) you could take it seriously….
The thing is we know when meritocracy is discarded for meeting quotas, it just does not have the same outcomes.
I have no idea why you think what I’m suggesting couldn’t be scientifically robust. It is basic statistical category analysis that any competent researcher could do. It just requires access to the relevant data, that’s all.
You appear to mistake my scepticism for bias towards the opposite conclusion but you are quite wrong: I have no time for progressive politics in any form and affirmative action is one of the worst examples of it. However this particular claim here today isn’t defended with sufficient rigour, and I therefore reserve judgement.
Oh great – Simon has some feelings about this!
How old are you ?
Don’t feed the trolls.
Articles like this simply serve to prove that the right are desperate to try to justify their racism despite all the evidence to the contrary.
The FAA and the pilot quoted both clearly state that the issues are caused by understaffing and the pandemic closure of the academy. But this “reporter” thinks she knows better and decides to blame some vague changes in the recruitment process. Why? Because she is a racist who thinks that people of colour can’t do the job and she has to try to twist the facts to fit her bigotry.
Pretty standard right wing disinformation piece, interesting only for how it shows that these people are liars and racists.
At least here you have actually said something – even if it’s bilious nonsense. I suppose Claudine gay was sacked because of racism also?
Understaffing is a direct consequence of the hiring changes. If you have a rigorous training process but exclude competent applicants in favor of the “diverse” (who are by definition less competent, otherwise there’d be no lack of diversity that needs solving), then what happens is the washout rate goes up. Fewer candidates make it through the training and assessment to the final job, so you end up missing hiring targets and the existing staff have to carry more burden as existing pros hit retirement (which is early in the USA for this profession).
So there’s a direct line between the things people have discovered and the current situation. Will the FAA ever admit it? No. Planes could crash every day because of incompetent diversity hires and they would still never defy DEI ideology – everyone knows that. Their assessment of the situation is simply worthless.
Are people just less able to concentrate than in the past? Has the dumbing down of western populations been too effective?
I suspect if you’re doing 60 hours a week for all but a few weeks of the year, you’ll likely get tired and lose concentration. We should also consider that air traffic will have increased substantially within the last couple of decades.
Certainly seems to have worked in your case, dearie!
Yes. I suspect the underlying cause here is the same as with most problems that the US faces: you can’t run the developed world’s most complex economy with the products of its worst education system.
‘ But the crisis appears to have emerged about a decade into an Obama-era push to diversify the industry. Under the Obama administration, the FAA scrapped its hiring process based on aptitude test scores and training in 2013 and replaced it with one that considered applicants’ biographies, resulting in an ongoing class action lawsuit on behalf of about 1,000 applicants who were passed over under the new regime. The biographical component gave an advantage to applicants who had been unemployed for the past three years, among other traits the FAA believed would result in more opportunities for racial diversity.’ Did you miss this part?
DEI in air-traffic control means DIE in the air.
Or on the ground. Take offs and landings are the most dangerous manoeuvres in an aeroplane, and as the wife of a private pilot (my husband is American and we spend several months in the US), I have some unique insights. ATC is most definitely overburdened, and I know because I work the radio, and communicate with both ATC and other pilots. Our plane is in a hangar in northern Virginia, and when we depart the ATC centre is Potomac Approach, which handles the arrivals and departures of the busy Washington, DC airspace. For some months in 2022 and early 2023 there was a female controller whom nobody could understand. She mumbled, gave confusing instructions, had to correct herself numerous times, and there were a number of almost accidents that we witnessed over the radio. When we flew to Hilton Head in August of 2022, she gave me the wrong frequency to transition us to Washington Centre. I tried multiple times to contact the new controller, and ultimately received the correct frequency from another pilot who was close enough to overhear my attempts. Our neighbour here in Virginia is a commercial pilot for Southwest who flies out of IAD (Washington Dulles), and he had encountered her, too. She disappeared in March of last year, and there was a collective sigh of relief amongst the pilots at our airport.
Spoof article almost certainly, but a certain Unherd subscriber will lap it up. And that’s why the Unherd Editor uses such a Headline.
The big problem in US currently is an IT/database failure. More interestingly the role of AI in air traffic control may well transform things.
What on Earth are you talking about?
“… but refused to answer questions about the agency’s use of racial metrics in hiring practices; she told me I would have to file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain this information.”
So the answer is “yes”.
Whether the FAA has been required, directly or indirectly, to try to hire from an applicant pool that includes many more under qualified or even unqualified people could explain an increase in ATC errors or the shortage of controllers or both. Plausible theories. But this article does not cite any data or studies that could possibly prove the points.
Data or studies to prove DEI failure? Are you serious? I am not being sarcastic.
If you want to see how e.g. gender quotas cause global threats, look at the performance of Clare O’Neil, Australia’s Minister for Cyber Security and Home Affairs (no less).
Matt Walsh’s report contained more detail and many more examples – diversity obsessed recruitment leading to mechanics who couldn’t adjust torque wrenches correctly; informal policies of making sure known incompetent Dei hires were partnered with seasoned pros; an airline recruiting only black women and so relying on a pool of candidates from only two colleges at the very very bottom of the league table of universities…. The moment you downgrade competence … disaster strikes, eventually
Why does “increasing diversity” always seem to involve scrapping an actual exam or qualification requirement, and replacing it instead with something “mushy”?
Because some people are thicker than others!
Will runway conflicts and doors popping out mid-flight be what finally concentrates the public’s mind about the fundamental idiocy of diversity hiring? I hope we don’t have to lose a bunch of lives to bring the point home.
Classic example of hitting rock bottom–and starting to dig:
https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/15/biden-faa-dei-employees-disabilities/
AKA how to demonise people who are meant to benefit from DEI initiatives.
FAA:The Secretary of Transportation has set a hiring goal of three (3) percent per fiscal year for individuals with targeted (severe) disabilities.
Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring. The targeted disabilities are:
Hearing (total deafness in both ears)Vision (Blind)Missing ExtremitiesPartial ParalysisComplete Paralysis, EpilepsySevere intellectual disabilityPsychiatric disabilityDwarfismIndividuals with targeted disabilities have the greatest difficulty obtaining employment. This is the only protected group for which Federal agencies may have a hiring goal.
Back to top
On-the-Spot Hiring InformationThe “On-the-Spot” special appointment authority is a non-competitive hiring method for filling vacancies for people with disabilities. Full benefits are awarded to the non-competitive appointee.
In the end only the activist-types masquerading as saviours of the less fortunate benefit. See Australia’s Aborigines how unearned money & praise affect motivation, quality of life.
This piece is based on the classical logical fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc.
That has been understood for centuries, but it rarely seems to prevent people jumping to conclusions that bolster their political views.