DEI In The Sky

Selecting For People Who Flunked Science

A recurring theme we've covered here has been the impact of affirmative action in aviation, such as in this post last November ("How COVID And Affirmative Action Gutted Aviation Safety"). 

The roots of the problem date back before COVID, to the Obama Administration. As Steve Sailer explained recently. After describing the FAA’s original hiring test for air traffic controllers, 

[T]he Air Traffic Control Selection and Training aptitude exam, which probed for “numeric ability, prioritization, planning, tolerance for high intensity, decisiveness, visuality, problem-solving, and movement detection,” all good things in an air traffic controller.

Sailer described how the Obama Administration gutted it, 

So, as I predicted in 2008, after a moderate first term helped Barack Obama get reelected in 2012, in 2013 Obama let loose his people to pursue their agenda of Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE).

White House officials decided in 2013 to purge the hiring list of over 1,000 graduates of the air traffic control course at colleges like Arizona State who had also passed the cognitive exam for hiring. Instead, it made air traffic control job-seekers start over with a new “biographical” test to “add diversity to the workforce.”

This was in response to complaints from the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees that only 9.47 percent of FAA workers were black compared with 17.6 percent in the federal civilian workforce.

And replaced it with a ludicrous biographical questionnaire designed to figure out of the applicant was black: 

The Obama administration’s new biographical test was blatantly rigged to boost blacks and hurt whites by leaning in to anti-black stereotypes. From the lawsuit against the FAA filed by the Mountain States Legal Foundation:

…a candidate could be awarded 15 points, the highest possible for any question, if they indicated that their lowest grades in high school were in science…. In contrast, an applicant was awarded only 2 points if they had a pilot’s certificate and no points were awarded for having a Control Tower Operator rating or having Instrument Flight Rules experience…. In addition, one question on the Biographical Questionnaire awarded an applicant 10 points, the most available for that question, if the applicant answered s/he had not been employed in the prior three years. Another question awarded 4 or 8 points if the applicant had been unemployed five or more months in the prior three years. Statistics from the Department of Labor indicate that African Americans had the highest unemployment rate in 2010–2014.

Even the federal organization that made up this absurd biographical test reported to the FAA that it hadn’t been validated.

More Details Come To Light

Now, a pseudonymous law student has gone through the lawsuit in detail, highlighting other things the FAA and its allies at the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees did to put their thumbs on the scale for black applicants (such as giving them certain buzzwords to include in their resumes to get to the top of the pile). 

Toward the end of his post, this law student admits he was a donor to Pete Buttigieg, and claims that this isn't a partisan issue, and that everyone wants competent air traffic controllers. That's clearly false, as the Obama Administration was partisan and obviously elevated race above competence. Nevertheless, hopefully this lawsuit leads to the FAA going back to the old method of hiring competent air traffic controllers, before its identity politics gets a lot of people killed. 

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