Free Republic

consider all the times whites are passed over for jobs because of this country’s diversity fetish. The Federal Aviation Administration and the Obama Transportation Department today were smacked with a class action race discrimination lawsuit for systematically purging highly qualified air traffic controller candidates from consideration in order to increase diversity. Mountain States Legal Foundation president William Perry Pendley, whose group filed the lawsuit, said in a statement that, “In abandoning years of hiring the most qualified and adopting a ‘test’ that is the epitome of psychobabble, the FAA told our clients their skills are less important than their race...

The nation’s antiquated, balky, delay-prone air traffic control system could finally be a thing of the past, after a House committee approved a bill to transform the horribly mismanaged government-run Air Traffic Control system into a federally chartered non-profit corporation.

Air traffic controllers are well paid, averaging $136,000 per year. However you have to be under 31-year-old to start, training takes years. ... A major part of the problem is the FAA changed the way it hires controllers about two years ago. They have recently been hiring more of them off the street, instead of candidates with military or college aviation training. Now many of them don't make it through training.

DENVER - Thousands of potential FAA air traffic control trainees, with College Initiative Training (CTI) degrees or previous military experience, have been told by the federal agency they are no longer eligible for job interviews. Instead, the FAA has decided to accept less qualified applicants, apparently to satisfy concerns that the agency needs a more diverse workforce.

As the nation deals with an air traffic controller shortage, some qualified candidates are not getting hired to fill those positions. Officials said Arizona State University’s air traffic management program has seen its enrollment numbers drop 50 percent. That is due to new hiring procedures put in place last year by the Federal Aviation Administration. Until recently, students who attended an FAA-approved college training initiative program like the one at ASU were shown preference in the controller hiring process. Now, those students are in the same applicant pool as anyone from the general public who applies for a controller job....

Hillary Clinton’s email scandal should disqualify her from the Oval Office.At least so says former CIA operative and CNN national security analyst Bob Baer, who is not known for being a political partisan.“If this was on her server and it got into her smart phone, there’s a big problem there,” Baer said during an appearance on CNN International Saturday, noting that the sensitivity of the information reportedly found on Clinton’s private server was likely more secret than what Edward Snowden pilfered.“Seriously, if I had sent a document like this over the open Internet I’d get fired the same day, escorted...

FAA says problem that caused flight delays has been resolved WASHINGTON (AP) -- Air traffic was snarled and passengers' tempers frayed on Saturday as many flights to and from airports throughout a large swath of the Northeast stretching from New York down to the Carolinas were delayed or cancelled. The Federal Aviation Administration blamed the problem on "technical issues" at an air traffic control center in Leesburg, Va. Around 4 p.m., the agency said the problem had been resolved, and that officials were working to lift any remaining orders to hold planes on the ground. Delays began building about...

Officials reported big delays Saturday at New York and Washington airports because of an air traffic control issue. Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport reported that a computer outage was limiting flight arrivals and departures there as well as Washington's Reagan National Airport and Dulles International Airport. The problem also affected flights leaving New York’s LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports, according to FlightAware’s online tracker. By 12:30 p.m. departure delays were at 1 hour and expected to grow, PIX11 News reported. Delays out of Newark International Airport were at 30 minutes and decreasing at that particular time, the station said,...

Washington area airports and others along the East Coast are reporting flight delays due to an issue with the system that routes air traffic, according to the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control Web site. “The FAA is diagnosing an automation problem at an air traffic center in Leesburg, Va.,” according to a statement from the agency. “Some flights into and out of the New York and Washington, DC metro area airports area may be delayed.”

The skies above the U.S. military's counterterrorism hub on the Horn of Africa have become chronically dangerous, with pilots forced to rely on local air-traffic controllers who fall asleep on the job, commit errors at astronomical rates and are hostile to Americans, documents show. Conditions at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the base for U.S. pilots flying sensitive missions over Yemen and Somalia, have become so dire that American warplanes and civilian airliners alike are routinely placed in jeopardy, according to federal aviation experts and documents obtained by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act. Unlike other major U.S....

An obituary in the Washington Post for Robert Poli provides a chance to look back at a decisive moment in Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Poli was the head of the militant Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), which launched an illegal strike in 1981. The Post describes the significance of the action: The strike by PATCO, Reagan’s subsequent breaking of the union and the hiring of replacement workers were among the most significant job actions of their time, said Joseph A. McCartin, a professor at Georgetown University and a specialist on labor and social history. They “helped to define labor relations...

Fire, Apparent Suicide Attempt At FAA Center Snarl Air Traffic By Jason Hanna and Thom Patterson, CNN September 26, 2014 (CNN) -- A contract employee at a Chicago-area air traffic control center apparently set a fire and tried to kill himself, officials said Friday, shutting the facility and stopping all flights at the world's second-busiest airport. The bizarre situation has resulted in a "ground stop," triggering the cancellation of more than 700 flights at O'Hare International Airport and more than 150 at nearby Midway Airport, according to the Chicago Department of Aviation. The employee was being treated after suffering self-inflicted...

Flights at both Chicago airports have been halted Friday morning, due to a fire at Federal Aviation Administration radar facility in Aurora. Emergency crews found a man with self-inflicted wounds while putting out the fire. A ground stop was in place at O’Hare International and Midway International airports as a result of the fire. Flights headed into both airports were being diverted to other airports, while flights departing the airports were being delayed. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said fire investigators were at the scene, as part of the DuPage County Fire Investigation task force. Aurora...

Flights are slowly resuming at O’Hare Airport after a fire at an FAA air traffic control center in Aurora forced a complete halt to flights in and out of O’Hare and Midway Airports. Hundreds of flights are cancelled at O’Hare, and that’s put thousands of travelers in long lines to re-book their trips. Some people stuck in Terminal 3 waited in line for at least one hour to reschedule their flights. Some travelers didn’t receive any notification about the cancellations and delays, and were shocked when they arrived at O’Hare and saw the long lines. Some people got alerts too...

The uncomfortable effects of government actions are being felt everywhere. Obamacare concerns are, anecdotally, delaying hiring, causing firms to change benefits for the people, and increasing taxes on the great majority. On the other hand, in the context of the "sequester", which is merely a slowdown in the breakneck rate of government spending, anyone who has traveled by plane in the last month knows the full court press efforts under way to ensure the American public knows just how 'devastating' the sequester cuts are - with delays rising exponentially with every dollar removed from the FAA budget. But there...

As travellers nationwide are learning, the White House has decided to express its dislike of the sequester—otherwise known as modestly smaller government—by choosing to cut basic air traffic control services. We wrote about this human- rights violation on Tuesday in "Flight Delays as Political Strategy," but the story gets worse the closer we look. Start with the Federal Aviation Administration, better known as the Postal Service without the modern technology. Flyers directly fund two-thirds of the FAA's budget through 17 airline taxes and fees—about 20% of the cost of a $300 domestic ticket, up from 7% in the 1970s. Yet...

This week, the Obama administration furloughed 14,500 air traffic controllers -- staffers will lose two days of work per month -- ostensibly to comply with the 2011 Budget Control Act's $85 billion in sequester cuts this year. The Federal Aviation Administration's share is $637 million. So expect delays at the airport. That's the idea, but it didn't have to be. The Obama administration has chosen to hold airline travel hostage in its never-ending effort to extort further tax increases from the GOP. The administration argues that its hands are tied. By law, the FAA must cut spending across the...

Texas will pay to keep 13 local air traffic control towers that the Obama administration plans shut down in order to play politics with the sequester. Last week, the Obama administration announced it would close 149 air traffic control towers nationwide starting on April 7 to save $600 million. The Texas Department of Transportation said safety and Texas's economy, which relies on air travel, prompted the state to keep the air traffic control towers open. “Safety is the primary reason we felt a need to take immediate action for the air travelers and business aircraft that use these airports," Texas...

A recent spike in air traffic control errors is likely attributable to a change in the Federal Aviation Administration’s chosen contractor for training air traffic controllers, The Daily Caller has learned. That change was likely the result of an government contracting shuffle orchestrated by an FAA official and her lover -- a former FAA official who worked for Raytheon at the time the contract was awarded. Raytheon won the contract, worth nearly $1 billion. Potentially deadly aircraft incidents attributable to control tower mistakes have increased dramatically in recent years. Professor Jack Williams of Georgia State University told The Daily Caller...

Five years ago, a Comair flight taxied onto the wrong runway at the airport in Lexington, Ky., and crashed on takeoff, killing 49 of the 50 people aboard. It turned out that the lone air controller on duty who should have caught the mistake was operating on two hours of sleep. Two years before that, a tired controller nearly let two commercial jets collide on an LAX runway. Now, in the wake of a raft of air traffic controllers caught sleeping on the job, the Federal Aviation Administration issued new rules to combat fatigue. But this problem has dogged the...