You deserve a Pulitzer. Your reporting is essentially all that kept this story going, and finally made its way into the hands of the current Administration directly leading to an EO to act on something the government should have acted on a decade ago. This us what journalism should be, excellent work.
This is so important. But it is also important to emphasize that this sort of thing has been happening for decades with respect to every single public-safety job for which competence can be a matter of life and death, and for which group differences make the so-called "underrepresentation" of minority groups untenable for the powers that be.
It's uncanny to read about the same playbook that has destroyed the competence of every public-sector job: whining by ethnic lobbies, dumbing-down tests, the glacial federal bureaucracy figuring out how to reward its cronies.
It's one thing to waste countless taxpayer dollars by filling academia with useless Grievance Studies professors who graduate illiterate, incompetent college grads. But it's quite another to have firefighters and police who basically can't do their jobs.
And yes, Steve Sailer is the only reason that anyone would know about most of this, thanks to the Pravdaesque cone of silence enforced by the mainstream media.
Whatever whirlwind Trump has coming for the libs who created this monstrous system, they abundantly deserve it.
"In practice, “Disparate Impact” turns out to be just a fancy name for the kind of 19th Century corruption that Civil Service testing was instituted to abolish in the first place."
Yes the important question is "where else is this kind of thing happening?" I honestly don't know what Trace's opinion is about that. He seems to want to just stick to the facts of this particular case, which might make strategic sense. But don't forget the important question!
"Where else is this kind of thing happening?" Just about everywhere. Governments at all levels and functions. Public education from pre-K through high school. Higher education in admissions at graduate and undergraduate levels, as well as hiring, promotion, and discipline. Any individual or organization that talks about diversity or equity. If you can't see it, it's almost certainly because no one has yet made the details public. If the people at the top of the organizations deny it, it's only because they're hiding it.
It hurts to be so cynical, but I honestly don't think I'm cynical enough.
Trace is a bit too much of a good democrat to fully grok how insanely racist and racism creating this type of shit is.
And he definitely doesn’t really want to fully engage with how corrosive it could be to competent functioning, assuaging himself with a lot of “probably everyone was still qualified” sweet nothings.
This kind of thing has been happening more or less openly in the world of arts nonprofits, plenty of which receive government funding from The National Endowment for the Arts, for a very long time.
When I read Trace's first article about this last year, I thought to myself, "if this was happening at the FAA of all places ten years ago, in relation to a context in which hundreds of lives are at stake at any given moment, what's happening in arts institutions, where this ideology is openly embraced, now?"
Here here. I always know it is dirty when they put bizarre constraints on Asian people. For some reason I cannot understand, progressive have an extreme racist hatred of Asians, and increasingly African immigrants. I think it is because they exemplify the complete failure of leftist ideas on race and racism, but the visceral hatred suggests that it is something deeper and more sinister.
In general, every civil service class should have a base skills exam that all must pass. It is the only fair way forward. Anything else is legalized corruption. The worst I have seen are "small business" set asides in government contracting. That is literally legal corruption. It needs to end.
> In general, every civil service class should have a base skills exam that all must pass.
That's not a solution. We mostly have those now, left over from an era of saner government. But in response to pressure from disparate impact lawsuits, the passing threshold is set at the point where you write your name on the test. You can see that in this very article, where the passing rate on the AT-SAT was 95%. There is a reason they put it there.
Using an unofficial, actually informative passing threshold was an unexpected gleam of good government, but you'll note that they dealt with the fact that blacks couldn't meet the informative threshold by throwing out the test entirely.
It feels like we're incapable of applying adverse impact to the pipeline, rather than to the end result. This whole thing could have been avoided if, instead of saying "there's not enough [minority] air traffic controllers" we said "there's not enough [minority] going to CTI." I'd believe there are structural barriers to, say, poor people (a group which over-represents black people) applying to CTI, even if just lack of exposure. This could have been fixed with some ATCs going to inner city schools for career day.
Of course, that's a solution that would take ~20 years to show fruit, and if you don't accept that the pipeline, not the faucet, is the problem, that's not going to be acceptable.
I hate having given Trump ammo here. Yes, he'll hopefully hit the target and fix the understaffing problem. But his aim isn't so good, who knows what else he'll hit.
You seriously think the giant gaps in the aptitude test would be fixed by "some ATCs going to inner city schools for career day?" The same gaps we see in tests of all kinds all over the place for years? I don't know what to tell you.
I grew up upper middle class, flying at least once a year, and I never considered ATC as a career. I'm sure a lower class kid would be even less likely to consider the ATC career path.
If you expose more of them to it, some bright kids who might otherwise go for another career could instead become ATCs.
Also, I'm assuming anyone who makes it through a CTI would be a well qualified applicant, and furthermore that any motivated person can make it through CTI. The giant gaps in the aptitude test would largely be solved by more minorities going to CTIs, not more of them applying off the street.
The idea that “any motivated person” can always “make it through” a demanding course and become a “well-qualified applicant” in any field that requires intellectual competence is just contrary to all the evidence. There is a very wide spread in people’s intrinsic ability, and this will be overwhelmingly the biggest factor in whether someone can qualify for demanding roles such as doctor, air-traffic controller, competent lawyer, et cetera.
People from upper middle class backgrounds do not like to think about the fact that they inherited their parents' intellect. People like to imagine that they "worked hard" or that they "earned" what they have. It can be difficult for many to accept that they were gifted with intelligence. Studying helps, but there are base intellectual floors below which many jobs simply cannot be accomplished.
wait for a brilliant special person to be atc and you wind up with unmanned towers and shortages. That is also very unsafe.
Lots of people from all over are trainable and intelligent. Cast the net wide and everywhere-put it on the radar everywhere, but don’t drop standards. Whoever makes it through makes it thru.
Yes but this is a job that requires a lot of training. Lots of people from all sorts of places have enough intelligence to be trained well and and to learn things thoroughly. It is ridiculous to think that ATC’s must be geniuses. They should be bright but come on, wait for a genius and you will have very few ppl getting burned out by watching too many planes. I agree with the person above that ATC schools should put feelers out everywhere to try to recruit as many applicants as possible. Whoever makes it makes it but we are in a shortage.
Dei initiatives are decades old at this point and the only time their goal, closing the race gap, is achieved, is when they lower the standards. Nothing else seems to work.
Because the DEI initiatives you're familiar with target the faucet (just give black applicants a boost on their Harvard admissions, that'll solve the problem, right?)
Targeting the pipeline has a much better chance of closing the gap, while also appealing to conservative values (equality of opportunity, rather than outcome).
We have been targeting the pipeline with billions of dollars in investment into underperforming schools. I meant what I said. It doesn't work. Underperforming schools continue to underperforming and high performance schools continue to churn out elite students. The difference is student culture and sending a recruiter ain't changing shit.
Go look at the research from school busing 50 years ago. There was zero impact. Good students do well regardless of school quality. the research finding positive results are like an advert for data mining. They say "women under 5'4" had 9% lower health care costs when they were bussed to suburban schools...'" They had to dig deep to find anything different. They often say "white students never suffered" which is true. But similarly, black children never gained.
Public schools are over-funded in our big cities. Most of that is wasted money. A smart kid will be smart wherever he attends school. The US massively over-funded schools and focuses on BS metrics like "class size" that are irrelevant. The best way to improve learning (putting students into pools with those of similar intelligence) is mostly decried as elitest.
Schools have no impact. Students get what they get, and it is up to the individual student. No one likes to talk about this, least of all teachers.
There is a massive percentage of students who are not thriving that would be thriving if they attended a school with a culture that values academia. The smartest students will do fine no matter what school they go to, yes. Most students are not that. I agree one of the very first changes we need to make is taking tracking seriously and separating students according to ability. And most of the many teachers I've spoken with (my job and family history is closely intertwined with primary education) agree with this. Teachers are very far from being the problem in American education.
Saying schools have no impact is ridiculous. Schools have culture, mostly driven by students in 2025, because just like everywhere else in society, the adults who actually know something about education aren't in charge.
Teachers, or I should say unions, are a major problem here in Chicago, as they are in San Francisco and DC. They have bizarre ideas that all seem to harm students. I am not saying that all teachers are bad everywhere, but their unions are a major problem here in Chicago.
As for culture, I am not sure schools create culture. I cannot say that is not true, but I am not sure it is possible, I do think putting the problem children together in a different facility helps everyone, and letting advanced students learn faster is essential to prevent boredom. I almost became a mid-career teacher, and after getting an up-close view of Chicago Public Schools, I changed my mind. There, much could be done, but it is the teachers unions holding reform back for reasons I cannot understand. They should be negotiating higher pay, not ruining students' lives.
The culture thing, I would like to read more about that. Can you recommend any good articles or books?
It’s always been a pipeline issue, everywhere this comes up. But going back to the beginning is *hard* and takes a long time to see any results and by then several elections have come and gone. Adjusting standards now is *easy* and came be done within a single election cycle.
I'm happy to see this story for a number of reasons! First, you're the reason I know about this to begin with and the story needs to be told as many times as possible. Second, people are talking about the issue now in a way they weren't a year ago. (Which kind of sucks, but.....) And finally, you left me a little wiggle room to add in some unique insights!
>Did anyone truly unqualified make it all the way through the pipeline? There's no reason to think so.
Oh you sweet summer child…
As someone who works intimately with a different but similar part of the federal bureaucracy daily…there absolutely are tons of “unqualified” hires and promotions made on DEI grounds. It might even be the modal HR decision.
Or rather to preserve the myth of “qualification” the hurdles/requirements are changed so that there are basically no standards, thus most candidates are tied and “preferences” can rule the day.
The offices I am familiar with bleed competent white male and Asian staff back out into the consulting world, because unless they are extremely exceptional, their careers go nowhere. Meanwhile obviously less qualified staff some whom are frankly lazy idiots…but who meet the right “preferences”, sail up the promotion path despite struggling at their entry level positions.
As you might imagine the actual impact of this is devastating on the ability of this office to actually competently execute anything. Thus the need for legions of consultants to fix everything their totally dysfunctional processes and staff botch.
Eventually someone has got to get the work done, but it is a very cost inefficient and dumb way to get there and everything works way worse and takes much longer because of it.
Everyone who got an offer still had to pass the aptitude test. You sound like you have a conclusion already that you are trying to force onto this story.
Well maybe that means something maybe not. You can easily futz with the thresholds and still have everyone "passing a test". Say 20 years ago you needed to be 1 SD above the mean score to "qualify", but everyone actually chosen was at least 3 SD above. But now they take people who are only 1 SD above. Sure everyone is still "Passing", but a fucking "C" is passing.
I am triangulating from a few datapoints here.
1) I have seen how this works in the federal and local civil service and academia generally, where it has meant a huge reduction in standards and watering down of what "qualified" means.
2) I know a few commercial/private pilots and even a few army helo pilots, and there is definitely grumbling just beneath the service that DEI considerations have damaged the safety level of both ATC and pilots seats in particular. Where there will be some crash and it will be a woman/minority and more than a few people will mutter under their breath about how they aren't surprised given how the process is these days and the fast tracking that happens for desired types of people. And these are not particularly conservative people making these comments.
3) The actual behavior and advertisements of these industries, which still seem to think this is a major goal/accomplishment and target they should be hitting.
4) There are very commonly assurances this of course isn't impacting quality, but as you see with the FOIA denials, or just generally when it comes to DEI, no one ever wants to get into specifics or share the actual data, because likely the data shows that is a crock of shit. If I tell you I have replaced your steel tools with cast iron ones, but don't worry I assure you they are just the same...but I won't let you test them or tell you how I know this...well you are going to be suspicious. The "these people are just as qualified but it is also vital we lower the qualification standards so we can get more of them" story can only be told so many times before people call bullshit.
Great post, but I feel like you understate the importance of the 2016 law change. Congress passing an act to address this problem directly is a big deal, and the Republican party deserves more credit than you give it for doing so (even though it happened before Trump's election). The Democrats getting spanked in the 2014 midterms was an important step in fixing this disgraceful situation.
(Interestingly among the House Democrats to break ranks and support the bill were Tulsi Gabbard and Tim Walz, so good on them for that)
I retired from ATC in 2020 after 35 years in a busy radar facility (ARTCC), and thought a touch of historical perspective and insight from a long time ATC trainer might be helpful. Or not. I trained literally 100s of controllers for 1000s of hours over my career and watched the training program evolve from maybe 20% of trainees becoming certified to upwards of 80% I would estimate.
The original training program was brutally difficult and very expensive. It burnt through massive numbers of trainees. A fail rate of about 50% at the FAA Academy followed by an equal or higher number of failures at the facility level. All at government expense. But it did produce a very high standard controller (along with losing a lot of good candidates also). But this generation tended overwhelmingly to be very difficult to manage. We were extremely self confident and did not appreciate anyone trying to tell us how to work. It was a loud, aggressive environment to work in and in no way would be acceptable today, nor should it.
In efforts to save money, develop a more manageable workforce, and I believe a workforce more open to technological changes (my generation was not fond of new technology, but I definitely admit the evolution of the ATC software and hardware has been excellent) the FAA began allowing more hours for certification (more than double the hours from the 1980s), more opportunities for “remedial “ training, and an overall effort to retain trainees. The FAA was quite successful at this. Every generation of controller will say that the newer controllers are not as good as they (the previous generation controllers) are, but that is of course debatable. I’m a bit biased towards the old school controllers, but we have a lot of great younger controllers too. And the technology improvements have more than made up for any degradation in skills (if there are any. The job is just a bit different now than in the 80s, 90s and even 2000s and I admit it is difficult to overcome some biases).
Enter CTI. I thought it was a horribly unfair program from the beginning, and its demise illustrated that fact painfully to all the CTI students. The FAA shifted the training cost from the FAA to prospective new hires, forcing them to spend at least 2 years and a significant amount of money for a degree that was applicable to one employer. With no guarantee of a job. I found this unconscionable. To top it off, the CTI students were no better than street hires from a trainer’s perspective. Possibly worse because they had an education that did not necessarily transfer to what our expectations were and what knowledge was important to actually do the job. It was not enjoyable to watch these motivated young people who had already sacrificed to get hired, only to struggle like any other new hire. I think it was confusing to them, and I firmly believe the FAA owes them all a chance to train as an employee at an FAA facility.
The biographical test was covered well in the story. It was ridiculous and harmful. Perhaps well intentioned but totally the wrong way to achieve any diversity goals.
ATC has always been an aptitude. Working radar is akin to a video game, albeit a high stakes game. Designing an aptitude test is not that difficult. Skills to screen for can be seen in the likes of good video gamers and basketball players. Good dimensional perception and quick analysis and decision making. Then get out and give the test fairly to all groups of candidates. Minorities, women, poor, rich. Test the representative spectrum of perspective employees and then pay to train them and you will get a good quality, diverse workforce without any touchy DEI programs.
“Simply based on training performance, a preference for CTI graduates over GP (general population) applicants at both en route and terminal facilities seems warranted.”
Source: Page 13 of the
The Utility of the Air Traffic Selection
and Training Test Battery in Hiring
Graduates of an Air Traffic-Collegiate
Training Initiative Program.
This wasn’t adjusted for caliber of CTI school (elite 3-5 programs vs GP) or first facility assigned.
I am really puzzling about what science being the worst grade and history being the worse in college (many college degrees don’t even have history?!) have to do with ATC success? Can someone explain it to me?
It seems pretty clear that the biographical questionnaire was deliberately set up to be, at the very least, nonsensical in relation to air traffic control, so that the "correct" answers could be leaked to The National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees and its members.
I guess it's also possible that the FAA had some sort of information at their disposal indicating that more "diverse" candidates (candidates who aren't white men) might be more likely to answer the questions with the "correct" answers.
It's all thoroughly racist and it's outright fraud, but leaking the "correct" answers to a group composed solely of black people is a pretty effective way of screening out nonblack candidates if you want to quickly get more black air traffic controllers hired without technically dismissing candidates based on their race.
I'm relatively confident they just did some model in a small sample and over-fit it, because the people behind this aren't smart. So they ended up trying to rig a questionaire to select blacks, but then it probably didn't even really do that very well out of sample.
So you mean that maybe they tried to rig the questionnaire with particular questions and answers to filter out "less diverse" candidates, but then when that didn't appear to work they decided to up the corruption several notches and just leak the answers to The National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation?
I guess that's possible too. Maybe they were just pulling the scheme together as they went along.
I suspect it had something to do with the bigotry of low expectations. They were trying to elevate a certain demographic and the assumption was that that demographic is bad at science.
Why science and not math though? And why only in high school, but history in college? I swear this looks more like an excel sorting error than anything else.
You should be proud of this article, as it pulls together a lot of the threads regarding the Brigida v FAA hiring scandal and it's impact.
My sole suggestion is that if you are as seriously concerned with the impact of the scandal as you are with the facts of the scandal, you should research and write a followup article characterizing the magnitude of the impact on the FAA ATC pipeline.
I think further research is needed because while the section of the current article discussing "long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages" discusses evidence, it offers only three paragraphs of suggestive anecdotal evidence, one paragraph each from a current and two former ATCs. Given the many complex factors impacting the pipeline (some of which I've been discussing in tweets), I think much more evidence is required.
And I think clearer characterization of the impact is needed because, although you previously agreed in a tweet that the impact was only 'somewhere around moderate or significant', not of substantial, major, and overwhelming magnitude, the current article and other of your Tweets will be (mis)read, given the divisiveness of the issue, as claiming the more extreme magnitudes.
Here's your tweet re 'somewhere around moderate or significant':
Because any discussion or even broaching of the costs and tradeoffs of DEI in most professional settings will leave you vulnerable to immediate labeling as a racist. So things needed to get really bad/absurd before a critical mass of society was willing to call “bullshit”.
The democrats making dissension from their policies thoughtcrimes in most of the professional world has really allowed some idiotic and deeply unpopular policies to become widespread and directly lead to Trump.
When only the asshole clown is speaking truth to people’s concerns, well people might just elect an asshole clown.
Help me understand. The Democrat Party forced this DEI initiative down the throats of the American public and made this a partisan issue by refusing to acknowledge the damage or even listening to people like you. You say you voted against Trump 3 times, yet the people you voted for never considered changing their policies on this issue. Did you expect them to suddenly change? They told you what they stood for. Sorry. I don't understand.
It's not difficult. He weights the issues differently than you do, and in other policy areas he aligns with Democratic party positions more than Republican ones.
Trump was president for 4 years and didn’t fix this, which isn’t surprising since he spent all day tweeting. Just because he is willing to break all the taboos of political correctness doesn’t mean he’s actually a competent leader who solves the problems he rants about.
Firstly, you deserve HUGE commendations for reporting on this story honestly, even knowing that it will be handing ammunition to your political enemies (some of whom are quite scummy).
Secondly, given how difficult it was for this story to even come to light in the first place, it stands to reason that there are likely MANY similar skeletons buried all over the place in government agencies, which will never see the light of day. This is a serious and dangerous rot that has infected institutions everywhere.
The real enemy is the idea of "disparate impact" as an important metric by which to judge outcomes. It is not. Merit is all that matters, and disparate impact must be ignored unless there is explicit evidence of discrimination. I hope Griggs v. Duke Power Co will be overturned at some point in the near future, because without that, this problem doesn't get entirely fixed.
If this is a bipartisan issue, what isn't? Is there a single issue in America today that divides more neatly across partisan lines than DEI? I truly and genuinely appreciate all the work you've put into this as a centrist, but ignoring the political realities that both allowed this to happen, and are (hopefully) fixing the problem, strikes me as wishful thinking. It *should* be a bipartisan issue. But it plainly isn't.
But again, thank you Trace for your tireless efforts in exposing what happened here. I don't think it's a stretch to say that your investigation has saved at least one life in expectation. You won't receive even a fraction of the 13.2 million dollars (VSL) you deserve, but you should be tremendously proud.
I don't think he meant "bipartisan" in the sense of "appeals to both Democratic and Republican activists and officials." I think he meant more like "large majorities of voters, seeing these facts, would reject the FAA's practices and the logic underlying them."
You deserve a Pulitzer. Your reporting is essentially all that kept this story going, and finally made its way into the hands of the current Administration directly leading to an EO to act on something the government should have acted on a decade ago. This us what journalism should be, excellent work.
This is so important. But it is also important to emphasize that this sort of thing has been happening for decades with respect to every single public-safety job for which competence can be a matter of life and death, and for which group differences make the so-called "underrepresentation" of minority groups untenable for the powers that be.
It's uncanny to read about the same playbook that has destroyed the competence of every public-sector job: whining by ethnic lobbies, dumbing-down tests, the glacial federal bureaucracy figuring out how to reward its cronies.
It's one thing to waste countless taxpayer dollars by filling academia with useless Grievance Studies professors who graduate illiterate, incompetent college grads. But it's quite another to have firefighters and police who basically can't do their jobs.
And yes, Steve Sailer is the only reason that anyone would know about most of this, thanks to the Pravdaesque cone of silence enforced by the mainstream media.
Whatever whirlwind Trump has coming for the libs who created this monstrous system, they abundantly deserve it.
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/hiring-retention/2022/06/state-department-rethinks-its-foreign-service-hiring-but-what-comes-next/?readmore=1
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-dead-end-of-disparate-impact
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-07-26/california-lowers-bar-exam-score-coronavirus
https://nypost.com/2016/03/20/fdnys-new-entry-exam-asks-about-everything-but-firefighting/
https://web.archive.org/web/20090702035411/http://vdare.com/sailer/090628_bazelon.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20091226122448/http://vdare.com/sailer/090726_fdny.htm
https://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/vulcan-society-v-fire-department-of-new.html
https://www.unz.com/isteve/justice-alioto-delivers-inside-story-of/
"In practice, “Disparate Impact” turns out to be just a fancy name for the kind of 19th Century corruption that Civil Service testing was instituted to abolish in the first place."
Yes the important question is "where else is this kind of thing happening?" I honestly don't know what Trace's opinion is about that. He seems to want to just stick to the facts of this particular case, which might make strategic sense. But don't forget the important question!
"Where else is this kind of thing happening?" Just about everywhere. Governments at all levels and functions. Public education from pre-K through high school. Higher education in admissions at graduate and undergraduate levels, as well as hiring, promotion, and discipline. Any individual or organization that talks about diversity or equity. If you can't see it, it's almost certainly because no one has yet made the details public. If the people at the top of the organizations deny it, it's only because they're hiding it.
It hurts to be so cynical, but I honestly don't think I'm cynical enough.
Trace is a bit too much of a good democrat to fully grok how insanely racist and racism creating this type of shit is.
And he definitely doesn’t really want to fully engage with how corrosive it could be to competent functioning, assuaging himself with a lot of “probably everyone was still qualified” sweet nothings.
Trace wants right-wing policies, but he wants to get them from good, proper left-wing people.
A lot of people are like that.
Yeah in some way that is actually what would be beast for the country.
Like put Obama in office, but he needs to enact the Republican agenda. Would lead to a good place.
The dems are competent (recent candidates excepted) with shit ideas and the Republicans have the right on a bunch of key issues, but are a clown show.
Imagine if instead of what we had, we had had McCain in 00 and 04, then Romney in 16, 20.
I think the country is in a much better place right now.
This kind of thing has been happening more or less openly in the world of arts nonprofits, plenty of which receive government funding from The National Endowment for the Arts, for a very long time.
When I read Trace's first article about this last year, I thought to myself, "if this was happening at the FAA of all places ten years ago, in relation to a context in which hundreds of lives are at stake at any given moment, what's happening in arts institutions, where this ideology is openly embraced, now?"
https://cinematimshel.substack.com/p/ideologically-out-of-line-and-insufficiently
Here here. I always know it is dirty when they put bizarre constraints on Asian people. For some reason I cannot understand, progressive have an extreme racist hatred of Asians, and increasingly African immigrants. I think it is because they exemplify the complete failure of leftist ideas on race and racism, but the visceral hatred suggests that it is something deeper and more sinister.
In general, every civil service class should have a base skills exam that all must pass. It is the only fair way forward. Anything else is legalized corruption. The worst I have seen are "small business" set asides in government contracting. That is literally legal corruption. It needs to end.
> In general, every civil service class should have a base skills exam that all must pass.
That's not a solution. We mostly have those now, left over from an era of saner government. But in response to pressure from disparate impact lawsuits, the passing threshold is set at the point where you write your name on the test. You can see that in this very article, where the passing rate on the AT-SAT was 95%. There is a reason they put it there.
Using an unofficial, actually informative passing threshold was an unexpected gleam of good government, but you'll note that they dealt with the fact that blacks couldn't meet the informative threshold by throwing out the test entirely.
It feels like we're incapable of applying adverse impact to the pipeline, rather than to the end result. This whole thing could have been avoided if, instead of saying "there's not enough [minority] air traffic controllers" we said "there's not enough [minority] going to CTI." I'd believe there are structural barriers to, say, poor people (a group which over-represents black people) applying to CTI, even if just lack of exposure. This could have been fixed with some ATCs going to inner city schools for career day.
Of course, that's a solution that would take ~20 years to show fruit, and if you don't accept that the pipeline, not the faucet, is the problem, that's not going to be acceptable.
I hate having given Trump ammo here. Yes, he'll hopefully hit the target and fix the understaffing problem. But his aim isn't so good, who knows what else he'll hit.
You seriously think the giant gaps in the aptitude test would be fixed by "some ATCs going to inner city schools for career day?" The same gaps we see in tests of all kinds all over the place for years? I don't know what to tell you.
I grew up upper middle class, flying at least once a year, and I never considered ATC as a career. I'm sure a lower class kid would be even less likely to consider the ATC career path.
If you expose more of them to it, some bright kids who might otherwise go for another career could instead become ATCs.
Also, I'm assuming anyone who makes it through a CTI would be a well qualified applicant, and furthermore that any motivated person can make it through CTI. The giant gaps in the aptitude test would largely be solved by more minorities going to CTIs, not more of them applying off the street.
The idea that “any motivated person” can always “make it through” a demanding course and become a “well-qualified applicant” in any field that requires intellectual competence is just contrary to all the evidence. There is a very wide spread in people’s intrinsic ability, and this will be overwhelmingly the biggest factor in whether someone can qualify for demanding roles such as doctor, air-traffic controller, competent lawyer, et cetera.
People from upper middle class backgrounds do not like to think about the fact that they inherited their parents' intellect. People like to imagine that they "worked hard" or that they "earned" what they have. It can be difficult for many to accept that they were gifted with intelligence. Studying helps, but there are base intellectual floors below which many jobs simply cannot be accomplished.
wait for a brilliant special person to be atc and you wind up with unmanned towers and shortages. That is also very unsafe.
Lots of people from all over are trainable and intelligent. Cast the net wide and everywhere-put it on the radar everywhere, but don’t drop standards. Whoever makes it through makes it thru.
Yes but this is a job that requires a lot of training. Lots of people from all sorts of places have enough intelligence to be trained well and and to learn things thoroughly. It is ridiculous to think that ATC’s must be geniuses. They should be bright but come on, wait for a genius and you will have very few ppl getting burned out by watching too many planes. I agree with the person above that ATC schools should put feelers out everywhere to try to recruit as many applicants as possible. Whoever makes it makes it but we are in a shortage.
Dei initiatives are decades old at this point and the only time their goal, closing the race gap, is achieved, is when they lower the standards. Nothing else seems to work.
Because the DEI initiatives you're familiar with target the faucet (just give black applicants a boost on their Harvard admissions, that'll solve the problem, right?)
Targeting the pipeline has a much better chance of closing the gap, while also appealing to conservative values (equality of opportunity, rather than outcome).
We have been targeting the pipeline with billions of dollars in investment into underperforming schools. I meant what I said. It doesn't work. Underperforming schools continue to underperforming and high performance schools continue to churn out elite students. The difference is student culture and sending a recruiter ain't changing shit.
Go look at the research from school busing 50 years ago. There was zero impact. Good students do well regardless of school quality. the research finding positive results are like an advert for data mining. They say "women under 5'4" had 9% lower health care costs when they were bussed to suburban schools...'" They had to dig deep to find anything different. They often say "white students never suffered" which is true. But similarly, black children never gained.
Public schools are over-funded in our big cities. Most of that is wasted money. A smart kid will be smart wherever he attends school. The US massively over-funded schools and focuses on BS metrics like "class size" that are irrelevant. The best way to improve learning (putting students into pools with those of similar intelligence) is mostly decried as elitest.
Schools have no impact. Students get what they get, and it is up to the individual student. No one likes to talk about this, least of all teachers.
There is a massive percentage of students who are not thriving that would be thriving if they attended a school with a culture that values academia. The smartest students will do fine no matter what school they go to, yes. Most students are not that. I agree one of the very first changes we need to make is taking tracking seriously and separating students according to ability. And most of the many teachers I've spoken with (my job and family history is closely intertwined with primary education) agree with this. Teachers are very far from being the problem in American education.
Saying schools have no impact is ridiculous. Schools have culture, mostly driven by students in 2025, because just like everywhere else in society, the adults who actually know something about education aren't in charge.
Teachers, or I should say unions, are a major problem here in Chicago, as they are in San Francisco and DC. They have bizarre ideas that all seem to harm students. I am not saying that all teachers are bad everywhere, but their unions are a major problem here in Chicago.
As for culture, I am not sure schools create culture. I cannot say that is not true, but I am not sure it is possible, I do think putting the problem children together in a different facility helps everyone, and letting advanced students learn faster is essential to prevent boredom. I almost became a mid-career teacher, and after getting an up-close view of Chicago Public Schools, I changed my mind. There, much could be done, but it is the teachers unions holding reform back for reasons I cannot understand. They should be negotiating higher pay, not ruining students' lives.
The culture thing, I would like to read more about that. Can you recommend any good articles or books?
People have been “targeting the pipeline”, throwing large amounts of money and effort at the problem, for multiple decades now.
It’s always been a pipeline issue, everywhere this comes up. But going back to the beginning is *hard* and takes a long time to see any results and by then several elections have come and gone. Adjusting standards now is *easy* and came be done within a single election cycle.
I'm happy to see this story for a number of reasons! First, you're the reason I know about this to begin with and the story needs to be told as many times as possible. Second, people are talking about the issue now in a way they weren't a year ago. (Which kind of sucks, but.....) And finally, you left me a little wiggle room to add in some unique insights!
10/10 for Trace!
>Did anyone truly unqualified make it all the way through the pipeline? There's no reason to think so.
Oh you sweet summer child…
As someone who works intimately with a different but similar part of the federal bureaucracy daily…there absolutely are tons of “unqualified” hires and promotions made on DEI grounds. It might even be the modal HR decision.
Or rather to preserve the myth of “qualification” the hurdles/requirements are changed so that there are basically no standards, thus most candidates are tied and “preferences” can rule the day.
The offices I am familiar with bleed competent white male and Asian staff back out into the consulting world, because unless they are extremely exceptional, their careers go nowhere. Meanwhile obviously less qualified staff some whom are frankly lazy idiots…but who meet the right “preferences”, sail up the promotion path despite struggling at their entry level positions.
As you might imagine the actual impact of this is devastating on the ability of this office to actually competently execute anything. Thus the need for legions of consultants to fix everything their totally dysfunctional processes and staff botch.
Eventually someone has got to get the work done, but it is a very cost inefficient and dumb way to get there and everything works way worse and takes much longer because of it.
Everyone who got an offer still had to pass the aptitude test. You sound like you have a conclusion already that you are trying to force onto this story.
Well maybe that means something maybe not. You can easily futz with the thresholds and still have everyone "passing a test". Say 20 years ago you needed to be 1 SD above the mean score to "qualify", but everyone actually chosen was at least 3 SD above. But now they take people who are only 1 SD above. Sure everyone is still "Passing", but a fucking "C" is passing.
I am triangulating from a few datapoints here.
1) I have seen how this works in the federal and local civil service and academia generally, where it has meant a huge reduction in standards and watering down of what "qualified" means.
2) I know a few commercial/private pilots and even a few army helo pilots, and there is definitely grumbling just beneath the service that DEI considerations have damaged the safety level of both ATC and pilots seats in particular. Where there will be some crash and it will be a woman/minority and more than a few people will mutter under their breath about how they aren't surprised given how the process is these days and the fast tracking that happens for desired types of people. And these are not particularly conservative people making these comments.
3) The actual behavior and advertisements of these industries, which still seem to think this is a major goal/accomplishment and target they should be hitting.
4) There are very commonly assurances this of course isn't impacting quality, but as you see with the FOIA denials, or just generally when it comes to DEI, no one ever wants to get into specifics or share the actual data, because likely the data shows that is a crock of shit. If I tell you I have replaced your steel tools with cast iron ones, but don't worry I assure you they are just the same...but I won't let you test them or tell you how I know this...well you are going to be suspicious. The "these people are just as qualified but it is also vital we lower the qualification standards so we can get more of them" story can only be told so many times before people call bullshit.
Great post, but I feel like you understate the importance of the 2016 law change. Congress passing an act to address this problem directly is a big deal, and the Republican party deserves more credit than you give it for doing so (even though it happened before Trump's election). The Democrats getting spanked in the 2014 midterms was an important step in fixing this disgraceful situation.
(Interestingly among the House Democrats to break ranks and support the bill were Tulsi Gabbard and Tim Walz, so good on them for that)
I retired from ATC in 2020 after 35 years in a busy radar facility (ARTCC), and thought a touch of historical perspective and insight from a long time ATC trainer might be helpful. Or not. I trained literally 100s of controllers for 1000s of hours over my career and watched the training program evolve from maybe 20% of trainees becoming certified to upwards of 80% I would estimate.
The original training program was brutally difficult and very expensive. It burnt through massive numbers of trainees. A fail rate of about 50% at the FAA Academy followed by an equal or higher number of failures at the facility level. All at government expense. But it did produce a very high standard controller (along with losing a lot of good candidates also). But this generation tended overwhelmingly to be very difficult to manage. We were extremely self confident and did not appreciate anyone trying to tell us how to work. It was a loud, aggressive environment to work in and in no way would be acceptable today, nor should it.
In efforts to save money, develop a more manageable workforce, and I believe a workforce more open to technological changes (my generation was not fond of new technology, but I definitely admit the evolution of the ATC software and hardware has been excellent) the FAA began allowing more hours for certification (more than double the hours from the 1980s), more opportunities for “remedial “ training, and an overall effort to retain trainees. The FAA was quite successful at this. Every generation of controller will say that the newer controllers are not as good as they (the previous generation controllers) are, but that is of course debatable. I’m a bit biased towards the old school controllers, but we have a lot of great younger controllers too. And the technology improvements have more than made up for any degradation in skills (if there are any. The job is just a bit different now than in the 80s, 90s and even 2000s and I admit it is difficult to overcome some biases).
Enter CTI. I thought it was a horribly unfair program from the beginning, and its demise illustrated that fact painfully to all the CTI students. The FAA shifted the training cost from the FAA to prospective new hires, forcing them to spend at least 2 years and a significant amount of money for a degree that was applicable to one employer. With no guarantee of a job. I found this unconscionable. To top it off, the CTI students were no better than street hires from a trainer’s perspective. Possibly worse because they had an education that did not necessarily transfer to what our expectations were and what knowledge was important to actually do the job. It was not enjoyable to watch these motivated young people who had already sacrificed to get hired, only to struggle like any other new hire. I think it was confusing to them, and I firmly believe the FAA owes them all a chance to train as an employee at an FAA facility.
The biographical test was covered well in the story. It was ridiculous and harmful. Perhaps well intentioned but totally the wrong way to achieve any diversity goals.
ATC has always been an aptitude. Working radar is akin to a video game, albeit a high stakes game. Designing an aptitude test is not that difficult. Skills to screen for can be seen in the likes of good video gamers and basketball players. Good dimensional perception and quick analysis and decision making. Then get out and give the test fairly to all groups of candidates. Minorities, women, poor, rich. Test the representative spectrum of perspective employees and then pay to train them and you will get a good quality, diverse workforce without any touchy DEI programs.
“Simply based on training performance, a preference for CTI graduates over GP (general population) applicants at both en route and terminal facilities seems warranted.”
Source: Page 13 of the
The Utility of the Air Traffic Selection
and Training Test Battery in Hiring
Graduates of an Air Traffic-Collegiate
Training Initiative Program.
This wasn’t adjusted for caliber of CTI school (elite 3-5 programs vs GP) or first facility assigned.
Amazing work, Trace!
I am really puzzling about what science being the worst grade and history being the worse in college (many college degrees don’t even have history?!) have to do with ATC success? Can someone explain it to me?
It seems pretty clear that the biographical questionnaire was deliberately set up to be, at the very least, nonsensical in relation to air traffic control, so that the "correct" answers could be leaked to The National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees and its members.
I guess it's also possible that the FAA had some sort of information at their disposal indicating that more "diverse" candidates (candidates who aren't white men) might be more likely to answer the questions with the "correct" answers.
It's all thoroughly racist and it's outright fraud, but leaking the "correct" answers to a group composed solely of black people is a pretty effective way of screening out nonblack candidates if you want to quickly get more black air traffic controllers hired without technically dismissing candidates based on their race.
I'm relatively confident they just did some model in a small sample and over-fit it, because the people behind this aren't smart. So they ended up trying to rig a questionaire to select blacks, but then it probably didn't even really do that very well out of sample.
So you mean that maybe they tried to rig the questionnaire with particular questions and answers to filter out "less diverse" candidates, but then when that didn't appear to work they decided to up the corruption several notches and just leak the answers to The National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation?
I guess that's possible too. Maybe they were just pulling the scheme together as they went along.
I suspect it had something to do with the bigotry of low expectations. They were trying to elevate a certain demographic and the assumption was that that demographic is bad at science.
Why science and not math though? And why only in high school, but history in college? I swear this looks more like an excel sorting error than anything else.
Because it wasn’t a proctored test so you could lie. No one looked at transcripts to verify any of it.
Some applicants passed one iteration of the exam but not the other.
(Tweeting this as well: https://x.com/ironick/status/1886850716599284197 )
You should be proud of this article, as it pulls together a lot of the threads regarding the Brigida v FAA hiring scandal and it's impact.
My sole suggestion is that if you are as seriously concerned with the impact of the scandal as you are with the facts of the scandal, you should research and write a followup article characterizing the magnitude of the impact on the FAA ATC pipeline.
I think further research is needed because while the section of the current article discussing "long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages" discusses evidence, it offers only three paragraphs of suggestive anecdotal evidence, one paragraph each from a current and two former ATCs. Given the many complex factors impacting the pipeline (some of which I've been discussing in tweets), I think much more evidence is required.
And I think clearer characterization of the impact is needed because, although you previously agreed in a tweet that the impact was only 'somewhere around moderate or significant', not of substantial, major, and overwhelming magnitude, the current article and other of your Tweets will be (mis)read, given the divisiveness of the issue, as claiming the more extreme magnitudes.
Here's your tweet re 'somewhere around moderate or significant':
https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1885823986191278137
Here's my tweet re other (more substantial) factors impacting the FAA ATC pipeline:
https://x.com/ironick/status/1886512344278425651
So good. I am 100% in your camp. And it’s all so unnecessary. Why do we have to choose between blow it up and sweep under rug? Argh!
Because any discussion or even broaching of the costs and tradeoffs of DEI in most professional settings will leave you vulnerable to immediate labeling as a racist. So things needed to get really bad/absurd before a critical mass of society was willing to call “bullshit”.
The democrats making dissension from their policies thoughtcrimes in most of the professional world has really allowed some idiotic and deeply unpopular policies to become widespread and directly lead to Trump.
When only the asshole clown is speaking truth to people’s concerns, well people might just elect an asshole clown.
Help me understand. The Democrat Party forced this DEI initiative down the throats of the American public and made this a partisan issue by refusing to acknowledge the damage or even listening to people like you. You say you voted against Trump 3 times, yet the people you voted for never considered changing their policies on this issue. Did you expect them to suddenly change? They told you what they stood for. Sorry. I don't understand.
It's not difficult. He weights the issues differently than you do, and in other policy areas he aligns with Democratic party positions more than Republican ones.
Also it's not just policy, he distrusts and dislikes Trump on a personal level, and distrusts those who would join his cult.
Trump was president for 4 years and didn’t fix this, which isn’t surprising since he spent all day tweeting. Just because he is willing to break all the taboos of political correctness doesn’t mean he’s actually a competent leader who solves the problems he rants about.
Firstly, you deserve HUGE commendations for reporting on this story honestly, even knowing that it will be handing ammunition to your political enemies (some of whom are quite scummy).
Secondly, given how difficult it was for this story to even come to light in the first place, it stands to reason that there are likely MANY similar skeletons buried all over the place in government agencies, which will never see the light of day. This is a serious and dangerous rot that has infected institutions everywhere.
The real enemy is the idea of "disparate impact" as an important metric by which to judge outcomes. It is not. Merit is all that matters, and disparate impact must be ignored unless there is explicit evidence of discrimination. I hope Griggs v. Duke Power Co will be overturned at some point in the near future, because without that, this problem doesn't get entirely fixed.
If this is a bipartisan issue, what isn't? Is there a single issue in America today that divides more neatly across partisan lines than DEI? I truly and genuinely appreciate all the work you've put into this as a centrist, but ignoring the political realities that both allowed this to happen, and are (hopefully) fixing the problem, strikes me as wishful thinking. It *should* be a bipartisan issue. But it plainly isn't.
But again, thank you Trace for your tireless efforts in exposing what happened here. I don't think it's a stretch to say that your investigation has saved at least one life in expectation. You won't receive even a fraction of the 13.2 million dollars (VSL) you deserve, but you should be tremendously proud.
I don't think he meant "bipartisan" in the sense of "appeals to both Democratic and Republican activists and officials." I think he meant more like "large majorities of voters, seeing these facts, would reject the FAA's practices and the logic underlying them."
Bravo! As a pilot and citizen, I thank you for researching and bringing this story to the public.
FWIW, your "trouble in the skies" FOX link has a busted video, but you can find the report here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZJ-vjfXnVE