There hasn’t been a fatal commercial airline accident in the US since 2009. We’re due for one. We’re due for a lot. The New York Times has published the results of its own study that found 300 near-collisions in the most recent year for which there were data.
Over the last 10 years, that number has more than doubled. Incompetent air traffic controllers are a big part of the problem.
Controllers tell pilots which runways to use, when to take off and land, and where to fly. If a controller gets it wrong, he can tell two planes to smash into each other, like a case from New Orleans this summer.
A controller told the green plane coming in from the left to land on the same runway from which the purple plane was about to take off.
The green plane aborted the landing and just avoided crashing into the purple plane.
In July, a controller told an Allegiant Air Flight cruising at 23,000 feet to turn right into the path of another plane.
The pilot had to make such a violent turn than a flight attendant fell and was injured so badly, the pilot had to land so she could get medical treatment. Passengers on board were praying and crying.
A US senator thinks he knows why there is so much incompetence. “Ted Cruz Asks Government Watchdog to Investigate DEI Hiring’s Role in FAA ‘Near-Misses’.”
Yes, DEI. I will explain.
Air traffic controllers work for the FAA, or Federal Aviation Administration, which is part of the Department of Transportation. Too many controllers are white. And so, in 2012, our black president, Barack Obama, ordered our Hispanic transportation secretary, Michael Huerta, to order the FAA to solve that awful problem.
Secretary Huerta ordered a Barrier Analysis Report.
You see, if there aren’t enough blacks or women it is always because of malicious barriers. The very first sentence of the report says that the secretary “made an historic commitment to transform the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) into a more diverse and inclusive workplace that reflects, understands, and relates to the diverse customers we serve.”
When you fly, you never see a controller. Controllers never see you. But they must reflect, understand, and relate.
The racism detectors found what they were looking for. White people – and Asians – were scoring too high on the controller aptitude test, called the AT-SAT. And they were getting better! “More troubling, there is evidence that the percentage of people scoring 85 or higher on the AT-SAT in certain RNO classifications – that means “race and national origin” – has been steadily increasing over the last three years at a higher rate than others.”
White people were pulling ahead!
Here is proof of racism: the percentages of various groups that scored 85 or better out of 100 on the AT-SAT. The previous three years had been grim.
Look at those pesky whites. In 2009, 68 percent scored 85 or better, and in the next years it was 74 percent and then 78 percent. And look at blacks: poking along at 37 percent, 36 percent, and 38 percent. Asians were another disaster; in the previous two years, they had the audacity to score as high as whites.
And, uh oh, women, in red, scored worse than men, in orange. So the AT-SAT was racist and sexist.
Look at the subject tests: dial reading, applied math, angles, air traffic scenarios. These are all spatial-mathematical tests. Men are better at them than women and whites and Asians are much better at them than blacks. So, the barrier analysts did what good barrier analysts do: They declared that “the AT-SAT is a barrier to RNO and gender diversity.”
So, in 2014, the FAA ditched the AT-SAT – which it had used for decades – and told all the people who had scored 85 or better and were waiting for a job offer that they had to take a brand-new test, called the Biographical Assessment.
This was an online personality test of 114 questions. It asked such things as: The number of different high school sports you played. The number of college credit hours you had in art, music, dance, or drama. Whether you had a job in any of the last three years. It was graded pass/fail, according to mysterious, never-acknowledged criteria.
My guess is that if you played a lot of sports and took no art classes, you were more likely to be black, so you passed.
The first year of the new test, 28,000 people took it and only 2,200 passed. They were then invited to the FAA air-traffic control school in Oklahoma City. If you failed the Biographical Assessment, too bad. Imagine the fury of people who scored well on the AT-SAT but failed this fluffy, nonsense test. Most of them had gone through two- or four-year college-level air traffic training at 36 schools officially approved for affiliation with the FAA. Many had huge student debts. More than 2,600 top-scoring candidates – overwhelmingly white – were purged from the list of highly-qualified potential hires.
According to this article, a number of veteran, working controllers took the test to see what it was like.
They failed.
But wait. There’s more. “Black Union Lobbied For New Air Traffic Test, Then Helped Its Members Cheat On It.”
There is something called the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees. It claims to be in the business of “promoting equal opportunities.” We know what that means.
The black coalition had been screaming loudly for the new test. The trouble is, the test couldn’t come right out and ask “Are you black?” That would be too blatant. Instead, it asked about art and sports, and black test-takers might give the wrong answers. The Inspector General of the Department of Transportation found that the FAA fed the right answers to the black coalition, which fed them to black test-takers so they could cheat (and, of course, lie, if they had taken art and played no sports). It’s a crime to cheat on a federal exam or help someone cheat, but there was no punishment. This guy, Joseph Teixeira, resigned from the FAA, and the cheating scandal disappeared like the morning mist.
But he left behind such a stink that in 2015, the Mountain States Legal Foundation filed Brigida v FAA, which became a class-action suit.
The named plaintiff, Andrew Brigida, shown here with one of his lawyers, graduated from Arizona State University’s FAA-approved aviation program, scored a perfect 100 on the AC-SAT, and washed out on the Biographical Assessment.
More than 2,000 other plaintiffs have joined the case.
In 2020, Federal Judge Dabney Friedrich found that the plaintiff “has alleged sufficient facts to satisfy the intentional discrimination element of his hiring preference claim.”
