From Newsgroup: rec.aviation.piloting

pothead <pothead@snakebite.com> wrote in
news:vnmbjn$askm$3@dont-email.me:

On 2025-02-01, Leroy N. Soetoro <democrat-insurrection@mail.house.gov>
wrote:

https://manhattan.institute/article/affirmative-action-lands-in-the-ai
r- traffic-control-tower

The Obama administration forces the Federal Aviation Administration
to move away from merit-based hiring criteria.

When a plane start

quit.

s its final descent, are the passengers more concerned

about the competence or about the skin color of the air-traffic
controllers on the ground who will help the pilot land safely? The
answer may be obvious to readers, if not to the Obama administration.

A recently completed six-month investigation by Fox Business Network
found that the Federal Aviation Administration has quietly moved away
from merit-based hiring criteria in order to increase the number of
women and minorities who staff airport control towers. The changes
come despite the fact that the FAA's own internal reports describe
the evidence for changing the hiring process as -oweak.-o

Until 2013, the FAA gave hiring preference to controller applicants
who earned a degree from one of its Collegiate Training Initiative
schools and scored high enough on an eight-hour screening test called
the Air Traffic Selection and Training exam, or AT-SAT, which
measures cognitive skills. The Obama administration, however,
determined that the process excluded too many from minority groups.
In May 2013, the FAA's civil rights administrator issued -obarrier
analyses-o of the agency's employment procedures, which recommended
-orevising how the AT-SAT is used in establishing best-qualified
lists.-o

By the start of last year, the FAA was using a biographical
questionnaire (BQ) to initially vet potential hires. The
questions-u-oHow many sports did you play in high school?-o, -oWhat
has been the major cause of your failures?-o-useem designed to elicit
stories of personal disadvantage or family hardship rather than
determine success on the job.

-oThe FAA says it created the BQ to promote diversity among its
workforce,-o reported Adam Shapiro of Fox Business. -oAll air traffic
control applicants are required to take it. Those who pass are deemed
eligible and those who fail are ruled ineligible.-o

The FAA would not tell Fox Business what the biographical test is
trying to measure and did not return my phone calls. But an FAA
report released in October, -oUsing Biodata to Select Air Traffic
Controllers,-o concluded that the AT-SAT exam, not the biographical
questionnaire, is a much better predictor of performance. -oThe
biodata items assessed did little to improve our ability to select
applicants most likely-o to complete training successfully, said the
study. -oIf biodata are to be used to select controllers, additional
research is required to identify those biodata items that will add to
the prediction of controller training performance over and above the
effect of AT-SAT score.-o

Given that training an air-traffic controller can cost more than
$400,000 on average, selecting candidates based on who is likely to
complete the process makes economic sense. Hans Bader, a legal
scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes that the
FAA's focus on diversity is not only inefficient but may be a
violation of the Civil Rights Act. -oThe FAA's jettisoning of
merit-based hiring criteria violated the Supreme Court's Ricci
decision, [Ricci v. DeStefano, 2009] which limits agencies' ability
to discard hiring criteria in order to increase minority
representation, especially when there is no strong evidence that the
criteria are not job-related,-o said Mr. Bader.

After the FAA changed its screening process in 2014, thousands of
applicants who were already in the pipeline-upeople who had obtained
an FAA-accredited degree, taken the AT-SAT exam and had been
designated -owell-qualified-o to become air-traffic controllers-uwere
told by the government that they would have to start the process
again. -oBut this time, when they applied for a job, their college
degrees and previous military experience would mean nothing,-o
reported Fox Business. -oThey would now compete with thousands of
people the agency calls -aoff the street hires'; anyone who wants to,
can walk in off the street without any previous training and apply
for an air traffic control job.-o

In other words, the current policy is to deliberately favor
less-qualified applicants over more qualified applicants in the name
of obtaining the -oright-o racial and gender mix among air-traffic
controllers. Advocates of -odiversity-o insist that discounting
objective measures of ability and competence is harmless, but history
shows that it can be deadly.

In 1973 Patrick Chavis was one of five black students admitted to a
medical school in California through an affirmative-action program
designed to increase minority enrollment. Allan Bakke, a white
applicant who was rejected despite having much higher test scores
than the black applicants, sued. In 1978 the Supreme Court struck
down the program, but Chavis would go on to earn his medical degree
and become a poster child for advocates of racial preferences. In
1995 he made the cover of the New York Times magazine. Sen. Ted
Kennedy called him -othe perfect example-o of how affirmative action
worked. In 1998 the California medical board revoked Chavis's medical
license, noting his -oinability to perform some of the most basic
duties required of a physician-o after several patients in his care
died or were severely injured.

Admitting poorly qualified students to medical school increases the
number of incompetent doctors. A selection process for air-traffic
controllers that favors race and gender over ability is no less
dangerous.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

DEI is a disaster and does nothing good for anyone.

What did Trump do about it in his first term?
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