How diversity politics undermined federal air traffic control skills-based testing

Just the News ^ | 1 Feb, 2024 | Steven Richards

[MtnClimber]

A lawsuit that has flown under the radar for years shows how the Federal Aviation Administration undermined a skills-based test to help select air traffic controllers in an effort to promote workforce diversity.

The Federal Aviation Administration under the Biden administration has pledged to continue diversifying its workforce under its Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility goals.

At the same time, a lawsuit that has long flown under the radar provides a glimpse into just how far the agency is willing to go to achieve those goals, even at the expense of skills-based tests for air traffic controllers.

In December 2013, thousands of students who had participated in the FAA’s Collegiate Training Initiative (CTI)—a program specifically designed to prepare individuals to become Air Traffic Control Specialists—were informed that their previous scores on a cognitive and skills-based test—known as the AT-SAT—would be discounted. Instead, these students would have to pass a biographical survey before retaking the cognitive portion of the test.

“Recently, the FAA completed a barrier analysis of the ATC occupation pursuant to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's (EEOC) Management Directive 715. As a result of the analysis, recommendations were identified that we are implementing to improve and streamline the selection of ATC candidates,” an email sent by the FAA to CTI programs in 2013 reads.

What the program graduates did not know is that only 14% of them would pass this new biographical questionnaire, despite half of them having previously passed the skills-based test and met all of the FAA pre-qualifications to be referred on the next step to becoming Air Traffic Control Specialists.

Eventually, one of the CTI graduates, whose career was derailed by the biographical questionnaire, sued the FAA for discrimination in a class action lawsuit.

The lawsuit uncovered a years-long plan by the FAA to diversify the pool of Air Traffic Control Specialists after the barrier analysis concluded that minority candidates were hindered by the cognitive test.

The efforts to achieve increased diversity in physical characteristics came at the expense of many CTI graduates, which in the FAA’s own studies concluded were likely to succeed at higher rates than candidates recruited from other sources.

Concerns about FAA’s hiring practices have recently taken center stage again. In 2023, the FAA recorded 19 “near misses” at airports across the country that could have led to deadly air disasters. An internal review, conducted, in part because of these near-fatal accidents, found that staffing shortages and low funding levels were contributing to rising danger levels.

Yet, some elected officials view the FAA’s prioritization of diversity, equity, and inclusion in its hiring practices as a potential cause of the agency’s failure to fulfill its responsibilities.

Last week, Utah Senator Mike Lee, along with Ohio Senator J.D. Vance and Indiana Senator Mike Braun, wrote a letter to the FAA raising questions about the agency’s use of hiring quotas to achieve its Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) goals.

Highlighting the near misses and a system-wide outage in 2023 that grounded hundreds of aircraft, the senators expressed concern that the “FAA has struggled to fulfill its core function of keeping the American people safe while traveling the skies.”

“That is why it is particularly disturbing to learn that the FAA is pursuing an identity-based hiring strategy that places an individual's personally identifiable characteristics over their merit,” the senators wrote.

[MtnClimber]

White men don’t typically vote for the ‘RAT party. That makes them the “ENEMY”.

[GOPJ]

Excellent comment...