Links - FAA (trouble in the control tower)

Tragedy might beget needed reform.

There is a sad irony in that the tragic aircraft collision over the skies of Reagan National Airport might bring the biggest reform to that agency since Reagan himself fired about 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers.

John Tierney writes that America’s air-traffic control system is an international disgrace:

The problems were obvious 20 years ago, when I visited control towers in both Canada and the United States. The Canadians sat in front of sleek computer screens that instantly handled tasks like transferring the oversight of a plane from one controller to another. The Americans were still using pieces of paper called flight strips. After a plane took off, the controller in charge of the local airspace had to carry that plane’s flight strip over to the desk of the controller overseeing the regional airspace. It felt like going back in time from a modern newsroom into a scene from The Front Page.

It was bad enough to see such outdated technology in 2005. But they’re still using those paper flight strips in American towers, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization plans have been delayed so many times that the strips aren’t due to be phased out until 2032. The rest of the system is similarly archaic. The U.S. is way behind Europe in using satellites to guide and monitor planes, forcing pilots and controllers to rely on much less precise readings from radio beacons and ground-based radar.

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The basic problem, which reformers have been trying to remedy since the Clinton administration, is that the system is operated by a cumbersome federal bureaucracy—the same bureaucracy that’s also responsible for overseeing air safety. The FAA is supposed to be a watchdog, but we’ve put it in charge of watching itself.

He highlights in the piece the problems associated with DEI practices that exacerbate the already problematic structure. I agree with his conclusions that reform here would be a worthwhile endeavor for DOGE and the Trump administration generally. Maybe, just maybe certainly, the FAA’s duties for air traffic control should follow the successful path of many other nations and be privatized.

Expanding upon the DEI link to problems in the FAA is Tracing Woodgrains (a.k.a. Jack Despain Zhou). This is an excellent exposé of DEI in its most damaging form.

Andrew Brigida, a 2013 graduate from Arizona State’s CTI program, had just aced the AT-SAT, getting perfect marks while meeting all other job requirements. He was fully qualified, poised to become an air traffic controller.

Then, on New Year’s Eve, 2013, while students and professors alike were out for winter break, the FAA abruptly sent an announcement to the presidents of the CTI schools. The announcement came, without warning, as an email from one Mr. Joseph Teixeira, the organization’s vice president for safety and technical training. "The FAA completed a barrier analysis of the ATC occupation pursuant to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) Management Directive 715,” the email read,¹ then went on to spell out some changes:

First, every past aptitude test applicants had taken was voided. Andrew Brigida’s perfect score was meaningless.

Second, every applicant would be required to take and pass an unspecified “biographical questionnaire” to have a shot at entering the profession.

Third, existing CTI students were left with no advantage in the hiring process, which would be equally open to all off-the-street applicants—their degrees rendered useless for the one specialized job they had trained for.

The rules had changed, and students and program managers alike were left scrambling to figure out what was going on.

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The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).

Reilly, Brigida, and thousands of others found themselves faced with the questionnaire, clicking through a bizarre sequence of questions that would determine whether they could enter the profession they’d been working towards. Faced with the opportunity to cheat, Reilly did not. It cost her a shot at becoming an air traffic controller. Like 85% of their fellow CTI students, Brigida and Reilly found themselves faced with a red exclamation point and a dismissal notice: “Based upon your responses to the Biographical Assessment, we have determined that you are NOT eligible for this position.”

Their plans had been upended. No chance for appeal. No way around it short of waiting another year and trying again. Despite their qualifications and their passion, they would not be air traffic controllers.

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The 2014 change materially shifted applicant quality on net. While it is technically and tautologically true that everyone who makes it through training is qualified, the “qualified” bar on the AT-SAT eliminated very few candidates, with quality maintained mostly by the “well qualified” bar. Higher scores were genuinely predictive of better performance, and 2014 shifted applicant population.

Not only that, it shattered the pipeline the FAA had built with CTI schools, making the process towards becoming an air traffic controller less certain, undercutting many of the most passionate people working to train prospective controllers, and leading to a tense and unclear relationship between the FAA and feeder organizations.

Did anyone truly unqualified make it all the way through the pipeline? There's no reason to think so. Did average candidate quality decrease? There's every reason to think so. Would that lead to staffing issues? Unambiguously yes.

The current air traffic controller shortage has many causes and many partial explanations, and the hiring scandal is only one piece of the picture, but even thorough investigative reporting from outlets like the New York Times has failed to consider the role of the hiring scandal at all.

Not in any way a Trump supporter, Zhou ends the piece with a message to both liberals and conservatives. He rightfully stresses that this is a bipartisan issue, one we all have a stake in, and that finger pointing and spiking footballs will not solve any issues.