Biden/Buttigieg DEI Policies Endanger the Country. They Don't Care.

The FAA is seeking people suffering from "severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities" to be air traffic controllers.

The country currently is in the throes of an epidemic of mass insanity and irrationality. The manifestations of the disorder are too numerous to cite, but the explosion of the DEI plague being pushed by the government, many businesses, and the intellectual pigmies in most of the media, must be included in any list of the most egregious. As currently advocated and practiced by our leftist “elites,”¹ it is incompatible with rationality, common sense, and morality, among other things, and, as the Wall Street Journal, not to mention the Supreme Court, have pointed out, the U.S. Constitution.

There is a brand of this particular wokeness that is relatively unknown to the general public, but that is particularly irrational and dangerous.  It is the Federal Aviation Administration’s relatively young DEI mandates. These Biden/Buttigieg DEI commands now apply to the employment of FAA air traffic controllers in an insidious way, a way that threatens the safety of our skies and of anyone who flies.

WHAT DO AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS DO?

To understand how insidious and dangerous the FAA's DEI policies are, it is necessary to examine briefly just what air traffic controllers do and the nature of the job. The description that follows includes some detail about their tasks. Bear with me because it shows that being an ATC is not a job for dummies, or even for intellectual giants who cannot make crucial decisions in a short amount of time while under great stress.  

First, just to be considered for possible employment, an ATC candidate must first pass a battery of seven tests covering numerical calculations, progressively difficult memory tests, problems involving rapidly changing image relationships, visual computer problems simulating collision avoidance, reading comprehension, logical reasoning, and a personality test. A description of the tests and sample problems are here. Take a stab at some of the sample problems to see how difficult they are and the built-in time limitations and pressures. 

By the time they finish their training, ATCs must be experts in a number of areas that affect safety. These include weather, types of aircraft and their characteristics, navigation and the use of multiple types of navigational aids, effective communications with pilots, and radio and radar operations. To ensure pilot and passenger safety, ATCs must be skilled in, among other things, math, including the ability to make quick calculations in a dynamic environment, problem-solving, effective communication, and split-second decision making.

The ATCs’ ultimate responsibility is aircraft and pilot and passenger safety. That involves a myriad of tasks. Here is just a sampling of tasks from the Department of Labor’s longer list of specific tasks an ATC may be called upon to perform, sometimes at the same time:

• Inform pilots about nearby planes or potentially hazardous conditions, such as weather, speed and direction of wind, or visibility problems.

• Issue landing and take-off authorizations or instructions.

• Provide flight path changes or directions to emergency landing fields for pilots traveling in bad weather or in emergency situations.

• Monitor or direct the movement of aircraft within an assigned air space or on the ground at airports to minimize delays and maximize safety.

• Direct pilots to runways when space is available or direct them to maintain a traffic pattern until there is space for them to land.

• Monitor aircraft within a specific airspace, using radar, computer equipment, or visual references.

• Direct ground traffic, including taxiing aircraft, maintenance or baggage vehicles, or airport workers.

• Contact pilots by radio to provide meteorological, navigational, or other information.

• Maintain radio or telephone contact with adjacent control towers, terminal control units, or other area control centers to coordinate aircraft movement.

• Determine the timing or procedures for flight vector changes.

• Provide on-the-job training to new air traffic controllers.

• Check conditions and traffic at different altitudes in response to pilots' requests for altitude changes.

• Compile information about flights from flight plans, pilot reports, radar, or observations.

• Organize flight plans or traffic management plans to prepare for planes about to enter assigned airspace.

• Complete daily activity reports and keep records of messages from aircraft.

• Analyze factors such as weather reports, fuel requirements, or maps to determine air routes.

The ATCs at a local airport must monitor not only aircraft in the air, but personnel and vehicles on the ground, planes both on the runways and those taking off, as well as approaching aircraft that will be landing soon. They coordinate both inbound and outbound aircraft to assure that they are safe distances apart, vertically and horizontally.

At any given time, there can be many scores of aircraft within the airspace controlled by the local ATC. Atlanta’s controlled airspace, for example, extends thirty nautical miles from the airport. There is over 3,700 square miles under that airspace that they must control. In this airspace, the ATCs must maintain safe distances between aircraft that are flying at wildly varying airspeeds. For example, a small single-engine private plane may have a cruising speed of 90 - 150 knots/hour, while commercial airliners typically are flying at hundreds of miles per hour.² Performing this analysis and giving the necessary instructions to pilots may be particularly difficult in the traffic landing pattern, when a small single-engine Cessna is sandwiched between, perhaps, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air and a commercial airliner, all with different approach speeds.

In short, the ATCs’ role is complex and stressful, sometimes requiring split-second life-and-death decisions. An error, inattention, or even hesitation can cost the lives of hundreds of people both in the air and on the ground.

THE FAA’S DEI POLICIES

The FAA has eagerly embraced the extreme DEI strategies that are now oh-so-popular in “progressive” leftist and socialist circles. On its webpage, the FAA clearly sets out how it will discriminate against the wicked white males. As this article will show below, it does so by seeking to employ people who are clearly less qualified than the general applicant pool.  Less qualified, that is, unless you believe that the average applicant suffers from, for example, a “severe intellectual disability.”

The FAA makes clear the tribes that it includes in the Diversity Nation: It touts that it specifically “targets” for “special emphasis,” in both recruiting and hiring, people with disabilities in “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”

Wait.  It gets worse. Such disabled applicants get even more special treatment because they are eligible for preferential hiring. The FAA calls this “On-the-Spot hiring.” That is exactly what it sounds like – the FAA admits that it is a “non-competitive hiring method.” They are eligible for this non-competitive hiring even if their intellectual or psychiatric disability is “severe.”

The FAA does not attempt to hide its present and future discrimination. It pronounces, “Diversity is integral to achieving FAA's mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond.” And its justification?

“The mission of the FAA involves securing the skies of a diverse nation. It only makes sense that the workforce responsible for that mission reflects the nation that it serves.”

But nowhere does the FAA explain how hiring ATCs with, for example, “severe intellectual or psychiatric disabilities” will enhance its mission of securing the skies, preventing catastrophes, and safeguarding the lives of pilots, passengers and others.

So, if you are a somewhat stupid (i.e., suffering from a “severe intellectual disability”) epileptic dwarf, with a severe psychiatric disability, who cannot see or hear very well, do not be discouraged. Even with those disabilities and even if you are not fluent in English (although it is the universal language for commercial pilots and air traffic controllers), you apparently may still become an air traffic controller. Here is one of the FAA’s employment forms:

Just highlighting the FAA’s policies and statements above is enough to raise serious questions about the risks they pose. Res ipsa loquitur.

The FAA does not attempt to hide its present and future discrimination. It pronounces, “Diversity is integral to achieving FAA's mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond.” And its justification?

“The mission of the FAA involves securing the skies of a diverse nation. It only makes sense that the workforce responsible for that mission reflects the nation that it serves.”

But nowhere does the FAA explain how hiring ATCs with, for example, “severe intellectual or psychiatric disabilities” will enhance its mission of securing the skies, preventing catastrophes, and safeguarding the lives of pilots, passengers and others.

WHAT NOW?

Note that this article does not address or quarrel with equal opportunity for qualified persons in any job. For example, the process of lowering the employment barriers facing women, people of all races, and handicapped persons, and allowing them to compete for jobs previously closed to them, is one of the societal triumphs of our time.

But to cure past sins of wrongful and unlawful discrimination, the governing leftist “elites,” including the top officials at the FAA, have mainstreamed the idea that racial discrimination, which good people fought, bled, and died to end, is now a good thing.  As DEI kingpin, Ibram A. Kendi in his much-praised (by the left) book, How to be an Anti-Racist, has put it,

“The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Read it again and listen:  When “progressives” tell you what they are going to do, believe them. If they tell you they are discriminating, believe it. When they say and show that they will continue discriminating, as both Kendi and the FAA have done, believe them.

Our “elites” are so convinced of their own self-righteousness that they brag about it publicly and lay it out for all the world to see. In the case of the FAA, no contrary conclusion can be drawn from its published DEI policies and its practices. The unseen hands guiding Joe Biden and writing his executive orders, together with their obedient minions in the FAA, will continue with their present and future discrimination, if not restrained (or fired).

1. I put “elites” in quotes for the reasons explained in my prior article, More Mush From the “Elites.”

2. During cross country flying, large commercial jets typically will be much higher than smaller private planes.  But on the approaches to an airport, they frequently are intermingled.