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The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed to WTOP it is investigating a near collision that occurred Thursday morning at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Virginia. Two passenger jets came within 400 feet of each other before controllers took last-minute evasive action and immediately stopped the two planes. It’s not clear why the jets were authorized to be on the same runway at the same time.

House Republicans took action this week to reverse an Obama administration policy that critics claim prioritizes diversity over skills for hiring air traffic controllers and could be “risking passengers’ lives to advance their woke agenda.” In passing the $4 billion Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill Thursday, the House included a provision to eliminate the “biographical assessment.” Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, sponsored the amendment. The assessment reportedly gives more points to applicants who have not been employed for the last three years than to an applicant who answers that he has been a pilot or a veteran with an air traffic...

Denver, Colorado — Mountain States Legal Foundation today announced a major step forward on an effort to hold the Federal Aviation Administration accountable for Obama-era hiring practices that were designed to exclude better-qualified air traffic control candidates, in favor of less-qualified candidates, all due to the color of their skin. Federal judge Dabney Friedrich of the Federal District Court in the District of Columbia today approved class action certification for MSLF clients Andrew Brigida and Matthew Douglas-Cook and other aspiring air traffic controllers who scored highly on qualification tests but lost out on their dream jobs due to the FAA’s...

Multiple air traffic controllers in New York heard a chilling threat Monday in audio obtained exclusively by CBS News: "We are flying a plane into the Capitol on Wednesday. Soleimani will be avenged." The threat refers to Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general killed last year in a U.S. drone strike ordered by President Trump. It was made on the one-year anniversary of Soleimani's death, for which Iranian officials have long vowed revenge. It's unclear who sent the threat. While the government does not believe the warning of an attack is credible, it is being investigated as a breach of aviation...

Multiple air traffic controllers in New York heard a chilling threat Monday in audio obtained exclusively by CBS News: "We are flying a plane into the Capitol on Wednesday. Soleimani will be avenged." The threat refers to Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general killed last year in a U.S. drone strike ordered by President Trump. It was made on the one-year anniversary of Soleimani's death, for which Iranian officials have long vowed revenge. It's unclear who sent the threat. While the government does not believe the warning of an attack is credible, it is being investigated as a breach of aviation...

For those who are interested.....I monitor and track airplanes that fly over North Florida where I live, Civilian Passenger Planes, Military Planes and Private Aircraft, using a Raspberry Pi, ADS-B software from Flightaware.com, it's a hobby... Yesterday during a very busy day, all the traffic I was tracking just dropped off to almost nothing, I was convinced it was my equipment and started to investigate, changing cables, rebooting the Raspberry Pi, etc....nothing worked. I went on the Flightware Discussion boards looking for a solution and ran into an article just posted by someone else from Jacksonville who was reporting the...

When we were in the local Lidl last week, the meat counters were practically wiped out – especially the chicken. But if you’ve got chick, this from Food Wishes looks like a great, fast-to-put-together recipe: Chicken a la Crema: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m457svJVDQw ******************************************************* As I’m sure many have been, over the past weeks of teleworking I’ve experienced periods of furious (and frustrating) work; and many slow hours where nothing was happening or could be done. The oddball things that one becomes interested in, while sitting at home with hours to fill, are fascinating. I happened to find some posts to YouTube about...

It’s nearly impossible to have even a short conversation with a college administrator, politician, or chief executive without the words diversity and inclusion dropping from their lips. Diversity and inclusion appear to be the end-all and be-all of their existence. So, I thought I’d begin this discussion by first looking up the definition of diversity. Here’s my question to those who are wedded to diversity and inclusion: Are people better off the less they have in common with one another? For example, women are less likely to be able to march 12.4 miles in five hours with an 83-pound assault...

The union representing the United States' air traffic controllers is suing the Trump administration over pay that's frozen as part of the partial government shutdown. The Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic controllers are among the 420,000 federal employees who have been deemed essential and have been ordered to work without pay during the shutdown, which began on Dec. 22 due to an impasse over funding for a wall along the U.S. southern border. This story developing. Check back for updates.

ATCs must necessarily be among the most skilled and competent federal government employees. In accordance with an Obama administration plan to “transform” the Federal Aviation Administration into a “more diverse workplace” however, the FAA has abandoned its merit-based hiring program for ATCs, as it implements a plan to hire 1,000 ATCs a year to replace a generation of retiring controllers. Congress can and should intervene in this unfortunate plan to restore sanity and safety to the skies, because it endangers people’s lives. ... It is expensive and time-consuming to train ATCs, and many candidates who believe they have what it...

My column a fortnight ago, titled "Diversity and Inclusion Harm," focused on the dumbing down of science, technology, engineering and mathematics curricula to achieve a more pleasing mixture of participants in terms of race and sex. Heather Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote about this in her article titled "How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences." MacDonald quoted a UCLA scientist who said, "All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by 'changing' (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?"...

Shame on Trump for continuing Obama’s insane policy of hiring air-traffic controllers based on race instead of merit! When Obama was president, he abandoned the old system of hiring qualified air-traffic controllers who had a college degree in air-traffic control and/or were military veterans with aviation experience, because too many of these people were white males. Obama then replaced the old system with a new system that tried to achieve racial diversity by asking applicants how many different sports they had played when they were in high school. I explain this below in detail.But first, I want to post this new...

Obama administration makes changes to Federal Aviation Administration because too many white males were passing their air traffic controller classes The Obama administration has abandoned the old system for getting qualified air-traffic controller applicants because too many of them were white males, and replaced it with a new system that asks applicants how many different sports they played when they were in high school.The Federal Aviation Administration has stopped giving preferential treatment to air-traffic controller applicants who had passed classes from the 36 FAA-approved college aviation programs across the U.S., because too many of the people who passed these classes were...

As a small-plane pilot, I keep up on aviation news, subscribing to multiple magazines, websites and podcasts devoted to flying. So it is a measure of just how hard the Obama admin worked to hide this outrageous story from the public that I had never heard about it until Tucker Carlson brought it to light this evening. Turns out, diversity activists during the Obama era decided that there wasn’t enough diversity among air traffic controllers. So, without a vote, the Obama FAA scrapped its merit-based rules and replaced them with a system contrived to benefit “diverse” applicants. As Tucker explained...

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump—like his opponent Hillary Clinton—spoke glowingly about infrastructure spending, alluding to Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration and Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System as examples of how spending on roads, bridges and airports helped unite the country. For 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers has given America’s infrastructure an overall grade of D+, estimating it would cost more than $4 trillion to upgrade properly. But President Trump’s $1 trillion dollar, 10-year infrastructure plan has so far moved along at a halting pace. This tortoise-like process may offer an opportunity to think more strategically about...

Sen. Charles Schumer says President Donald Trump’s plan to privatize the nation’s air traffic control system could mean higher costs for consumers. The New York Democrat and Senate minority leader said Sunday that the plan Trump announced on June 5 would give airlines too much control over costs. He also said that during any national security emergency, privatization could hamper communication between air traffic controllers and the Department of Defense. …

Greater reliance on user fees, federal loans rather than grants, and corporatization are three keys to the Trump administration’s infrastructure initiative released as a part of its 2018 budget. The plan will “seek long-term reforms on how infrastructure projects are regulated, funded, delivered, and maintained,” says the six-page document. More federal funding “is not the solution,” the document says; instead, it is to “fix underlying incentives, procedures, and policies.”In building the Interstate Highway System, the fact sheet observes, “the Federal Government played a key role” in collecting and distributing monies to “fund a project with a Federal purpose.” Since then,...

ALTADENA, CA -- An air traffic controller error sent a jet from LAX into the flight path of another plane and flying low over the mountains above the San Gabriel Valley... an EVA Air Boeing 777 that left LAX around 1:20 a.m. heading to Taipei was given an incorrect instruction by a controller based in San Diego to turn left instead of right. That sent the airliner toward the mountains above Altadena, as well as toward the flight path of an Air Canada plane that had just taken off. Audio traffic indicates the same controller realizing the problem and telling...

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating why pilots trying to land at the Boise Airport were met with silence from air traffic controllers during the early hours of Nov. 19. Boise Police officers and paramedics were called out to the air traffic control tower at 2:41 a.m. for a welfare check after learning that pilots and airport officials had been unable to reach the tower operators, despite trying multiple radio frequencies, telephone and the emergency "red phone." The first officers on scene wrote in a report that after reaching a locked gate, they used a spotlight to flash the tower...

A House committee chairman says President-elect Donald Trump likes the idea of spinning off air traffic control operations from the government and placing them under the control of a private, non-profit corporation chartered by Congress. Rep. Bill Shuster, head of the House transportation committee, told The Associated Press that he spoke to Trump about the idea several times both before and during the presidential election. He said he believes the president-elect would be supportive, although details would have to be worked out. …