The Full Story of the FAA's Hiring Scandal

Inside a decade of struggle to bring a scandal to light

After my story on the FAA’s hiring scandal went viral, many of the people impacted and involved in bringing it to light reached out to me to share their stories in detail. While I initially intended to publish this in another outlet, after a couple of instances of radio silence and with life getting in the way, I put it on the shelf. Now, in the wake of the tragic plane crash on January 29 and a resurgence of focus on this topic, it’s more important than ever to get the story straight. I neither have nor claim to have answers about the cause of the crash, but the memorandum Trump signed in the wake of the accident referenced the hiring scandal directly. As such, it’s time to complete the story I started a year ago.

Audio version available here, courtesy of Askwho Casts AI.

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On New Year’s Eve, 2013, after years of furtive work, the FAA abruptly threw a grenade into its air traffic control hiring pipeline.

Moranda Reilly always wanted to work in aviation. She read books on aviation heroes, watched air disasters, she listened to live air traffic control in her car. Around her neck, she wore an airplane necklace, a gift from a friend that she’d mended repeatedly. In her 20s, she elected to take the plunge and do whatever it took to make it happen. She quit her full-time job, took out student loans, and moved to attend a university that offered a two-year degree as part of the FAA’s collegiate training initiative (CTI) for air traffic controllers.

The FAA had established its CTI program in 1989, working together alongside a select group of universities and community colleges to build a better-prepared, college-educated workforce. By the early 2010s, when Moranda and other aspiring air traffic controllers entered the program, CTI was the primary way by which people would enter the field, with the FAA accepting virtually no off-the-street hires. On its website, the FAA instructed aspiring air traffic controllers that if they got CTI degrees, passed the profession’s aptitude test (the AT-SAT), and met other eligibility requirements, it would place them into a priority hiring queue, giving them first opportunity every time employment slots opened up. Students understood that the FAA hired virtually everyone who completed the program and passed the assessment.

As the CTI program ramped up with increasing success in the mid-2000s, Florida State College of Jacksonville applied to join, and in 2008, Sam Fischer launched their program. By 2013, he had settled into a comfortable rhythm, training wave after wave of successful students.

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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Days after the announcement, Reilly launched a Facebook group for CTI students and instructors to grapple with what was happening. “This page doesn’t support the ‘angry mob’ mentality or anything but positive ‘We believe in CTI schools’ vibes,” she wrote. “We believe that all of the simulator hours spent, materials studied, and education taught in C.T.I. schools has value and is of worth.”

More than a hundred people joined in the first day. Brigida and Fischer jumped on quickly, helping Reilly to organize the group and walking the anxious crowd through everything they were learning. Fischer provided status updates, Reilly jumped in with rallying cries and organization (“Save CTI! Save CTI! Save CTI!”), and Brigida gave the group a public face. The next hiring wave would be in February 2014, and the CTI graduates and students waited anxiously, grasping at every bit of information they could find to understand what was going on.

As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly’s friends in the program encouraged her to join the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE), telling her it would help improve her chances of being hired. She signed up as the February wave started. Soon, though, she became uneasy with what the organization was doing, particularly after she and the rest of the group got a voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:

“I know each of you are eager very eager to apply for this job vacancy announcement and trust after tonight you will be able to do so….there is some valuable pieces of information that I have taken a screen shot of and I am going to send that to you via email. Trust and believe it will be something you will appreciate to the utmost. Keep in mind we are trying to maximize your opportunities…I am going to send it out to each of you and as you progress through the stages refer to those images so you will know which icons you should select…I am about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question in order to get through the first phase.”²

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.”

“Based upon your responses to the Biographical Assessment, we have determined that you are NOT eligible for this position as part of the current vacancy announcement.

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.

It was clear something odd had happened. But what? The CTI Connection group members worked to fit the pieces of the picture together. In the meantime, a conservative lawyer and former air traffic controller, Michael Pearson, pulled together a website and began recruiting for a class action lawsuit, attracting applicants with a blunt header: “You Have Been Intentionally Discriminated Against.”³

So what happened? Why did the FAA upend a stable hiring process, undercut the CTI schools it had established to train its workforce, and throw the plans of thousands of eager would-be air traffic controllers into disarray? I give a bare-bones accounting of the background in another article, but there are a few more details worth adding in this one.

Throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s, the FAA faced pressure to diversify its field of air traffic controllers, historically a profession that has been primarily white men, notably from the NBCFAE.⁴ In the early 2000s, this pressure focused on the newly developed air traffic control qualification test, the AT-SAT, which the NBCFAE hired Dr. Outtz to critique from an adverse impact standpoint. As originally scored, the test was intended to pass 60% of applicants, but predictions suggested only 3% of black applicants would pass.⁵ In response, the FAA reweighted the scoring to make the test easier to pass, reducing its correlation with job performance as they did so.⁶ In its final form, some 95% of applicants passed the test.⁷

This was a bit of a shell game. In practice, they divided it into a “well qualified” band (with scores between 85 and 100 on the test, met by around 60% of applicants) and a “qualified” band (with scores between 70 and 84), and drew some 87% of selections from that “well qualified” band.⁸ Large racial disparities remained in the “well qualified” band. As a result, facing continued pressure, the FAA began to investigate ways to deprioritize the test.

Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” outperforming “most other strategies in predicting mean performance,” and it was low cost and low time commitment. On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute. When they tested alternative measures like biographical data, they found that the test scores predicted 27% of variance in performance, while the “biodata” predicted only 2%. It just didn’t do much.⁹

The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss.¹⁰ They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”

FAA meeting - Controller Hiring by the Numbers, April 2013.

Finally, in May 2013, Dr. Outtz returned after a decade of advocacy against the AT-SAT to release a “Barrier Analysis” for the FAA, pulling all of this together and encouraging the organization to open the hiring process to the general public instead of relying on CTI schools, use other filtering tools before the AT-SAT, and eventually phase the AT-SAT out.¹¹

The FAA, under the leadership of Anthony Foxx (who spoke of the need to “widen the aperture” for potential candidates¹²) took Outtz’s recommendations. They weighed adverse impact against predicted job performance, decided the performance hit was worthwhile, and prepared the New Year’s Eve letter as a result.

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The CTI program was popular and successful before the barrier analysis. After 2013, though, the FAA began to treat its CTI schools as a liability. After the biographical questionnaire, per conversations with CTI administrators, the FAA simply tried to pretend the CTI schools did not exist. The FAA cut off communication, treating them tersely and with disdain.

The schools were not bastions of privilege. The programs were often at community colleges and junior colleges, with diverse student bodies and professors who worked long hours helping them. They were successful and effective at what they did, and had provided a steady stream of applicants who saw a clear path into the profession. Suddenly, though, they were left scrambling to justify their existence. Fischer talks about how he used to get lots of calls from students asking how to become an air traffic controller, but after 2013, that mostly stopped. He emphasizes that the FAA was never there to give him a job, and if they wanted to change, that was their prerogative. A lot of the problem, and a lot of the sore feelings between the FAA and the CTI schools, came because of the abruptness of the change, the lack of communication, the sudden cutting off.

Fischer, alongside other program directors like Joe Eichelberger, began to organize the CTI schools and take meticulous notes. What were success rates like before the scandal? What about after? What had happened, and why? How could they continue to justify their programs to students who could no longer trust that there would be jobs waiting at the other end?

The CTI Connection people working to bring the story to light wanted it to remain focused and nonpartisan. They struggled to get media coverage until Adam Shapiro of Fox Business took note of their story, releasing the investigation Trouble in the Skies in 2015, in which he told Reilly’s story and outlined everything understood about the hiring scandal up to that point. Other than Shapiro, no media figures took particular notice of the scandal, no matter what Reilly, Fischer, and the others did. CNN considered the story, then declined to run it.

Reilly kept folders of CTI class member’s stories, rushing around DC trying to get them in the right hands. She handed one folder to New Jersey congressman and Aviation Subcommittee Chairman Frank LoBiondo before the Fox Business report hit the press. Immediately after the report, LoBiondo gave a few remarks:

It’s an incredible safety concern… what we’re dealing with here is a shortage of air traffic controllers. We had a process by which to provide candidates, who were very well-qualified, who were spending a lot of money on their own… and the FAA has apparently decided to arbitrarily abandon that process. And now when you add onto it the cheating scandal, which clearly is a huge problem, and an FAA official who is trying to pretend it’s not part of what they have to worry about… that’s ludicrous.

In June 2015, fourteen members of Congress led by LoBiondo sent a letter demanding the FAA respond to the cheating allegations, requesting they fully investigate the wrongdoing.

The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation.¹³ Or, more specifically, they concluded the following:

Snow was the one in the recording Reilly obtained. He explained to people how they should answer the biographical questionnaire. He advertised the telephone conference process via text, emphasizing that it was for members only, and saying things like “If you don’t answer that your friends feel you are well respected you can cancel yourself out of this announcement.” He instructed people to mention that they were NBCFAE members, as he explained it, “so the FAA would know […] this applicant is being groomed […] by an […] FAA-approved and recognized association.” Our organization, he said, “wasn’t for Caucasians, it wasn’t for, you know, the white male, it wasn’t for an alien on Mars,” and he confirmed that he provided information “to minimize the competition.”¹⁴

All of this is included in the investigation report.

In 2016, after years of work from Fischer, Reilly, Brigida, Shapiro, LoBiondo, and others, Congress passed an act overturning the use of the biographical assessment when hiring and requiring the FAA to provide opportunities for affected individuals to reapply.¹⁵

Per Fischer, applicants declined year-over-year from 2014 onward. In 2016, hiring was divided into two pools: Pool 1, veterans and CTI students (4021 applicants, 1451 offer letters) and Pool 2, for general population (25,156 applicants, 6799 who passed the biographical questionnaire, 1500 offer letters). By 2019, only 9265 applied, with 6419 (923 from Pool 1, 5496 from Pool 2), with 234 Pool 1 offer letters and 680 in Pool 2.¹⁶

Why do we have access to the questionnaire, the investigation report, and other critical documents necessary to pull together this story? Ask Jorge Rojas.

Jorge Rojas always wanted to be an air traffic controller. He went to CTI school right after high school and saw all of the 2014 chaos from a distance. In 2015, when he became eligible to take the questionnaire, he did so. Failed. Took it again in 2016. Failed. It was only after Congress explicitly passed a law rejecting the FAA’s use of the biographical questionnaire that he had an opportunity to enter the role. He worked for the FAA for five years before returning to become a government contractor. But he was frustrated—frustrated on his behalf, frustrated on the behalf of others who had had their lives thrown into turmoil. So he began filing FOIA requests.

Rojas filed hundreds of requests over the course of multiple years. The FAA delayed some, rejected others, and per Rojas, took the stance that “he’s not going to sue us for all of them.” Sometimes, he even went back to FOIA his FOIAs, to see what was taking so long and how they were responding. Five separate times, he took the FAA to court over refusals and delays.

In 2021, one of Rojas’s court battles made it all the way up to a petition for a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court. The question: could the FAA hold that “intra-agency memorandums or letters” included documents provided by APTMetrics, a private, outside consultant? Per the 9th Circuit, it could.¹⁷

After long delays and repeated sanctions, the FAA finally produced some of the key documents. He got the questionnaire, the answer key. He got the investigation into Shelton Snow. As of last year when I spoke with him, the FAA was still gradually, periodically, releasing documents to him, responding to FOIAs from back in 2016.

Along the whole way, Michael Pearson, soon aided by attorneys from the Mountain States Legal Foundation, worked diligently on the case. Mountain States Legal Foundation is a small non-profit firm; the case is an ambitious one. They have spent years gathering evidence, arguing in court, pushing for class certification, and preparing to bring the case to trial. The case is scheduled to go to trial next year.

After a tragic airplane crash last Wednesday, President Trump and Vice President Vance ensured the hiring scandal could not possibly be forgotten any longer, referencing it explicitly during their remarks on the crash before Trump signed a memorandum demanding immediate investigation into DEI tactics in the FAA, referencing the biographical questionnaire by name. Brigida was glad to see Trump draw attention to the scandal. Others in the class are frustrated to see the way it’s been weaponized to attack not just initiatives that lower the bar, but initiatives that give opportunities for exposure and mentorship to people who would never otherwise realize aviation is an option.

Caleb Benner, who graduated in 2012 from Purdue University’s Aviation Management program, one of the FAA’s designated CTI programs, spent his entire childhood dreaming of becoming an air traffic controller. When other kids responded “firefighter” or “police officer” when asked “What do you want to do when you grow up?”, he always said “air traffic controller.” He took the AT-SAT after graduation and got a score in the high 90s, only for hiring to be hit by sequestration before he could apply. When they came out of sequestration and he was preparing to apply properly, he learned about the Biographical Assessment after the New Year’s Eve announcement. He took it. He failed.

After failing the assessment, he spent multiple years working a job paying $10 an hour, one he specifically chose so it would be easy to uproot and go to the Academy to train when he got the call. The call never came. Eventually, he gave up, paid to get his aircraft dispatcher’s license, and moved on.

Benner hates that this accident brought the scandal to the forefront after a decade in the courts, and is not fond of how Trump has handled it. But, as he puts it, “That doesn’t change how blatantly wrong it was what the FAA did. And I spent what seems like every day of my career dealing with the consequences of those decisions.”

Others tell similar stories. Another CTI grad tells me he became a police dispatcher (“to sate my need to talk into a headset for 8 hours a day”) and worked on getting a private rotorcraft license afterward—explained that he didn’t feel bitter, exactly, but he felt wronged. Robbed.

Reilly has remained a passionate advocate for the issue over the years. She reached out to me almost immediately after I published my original article, providing an extensive look at the years of conversations, advocacy, and work the scandal has taken. She has moved on to work in air traffic management. She remains a passionate advocate for women in aviation and spends time volunteering on youth outreach programs. Last year, she organized an event at the Reagan airport in DC, busing in 150 girls from a Title 1 school. Many, she said, had never seen an airplane up close before.

In a moment of dark irony, the sort of diversity-focused work she’s passionate about—not lowering the bar, but inspiring more people and providing them with mentorship and opportunity to reach it—is threatened by Trump’s memorandum.

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Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages? Likely yes.

An active air traffic controller reached out to me at the end of January last year, talking about his frustration that so many qualified individuals were eliminated from entering training, contributing to a dire staffing shortage. His facility was operating at less than 75%, with controllers fatigued from working 6-day weeks. As he explained it, training can take 1.5 to 2.5 years at larger facilities, with washout rates from 30-60%, and when we spoke upper level facilities were only accepting transfers from lower level facilities, adding years to preparation time. Every issue compounds and adds to the problem over time, and the FAA’s 2013 changes set staffing back years. The FAA, he said, simply is not bringing in enough people to match the number leaving, with some air traffic controllers believing the agency is failing on purpose to find an excuse to privatize them.

A controller who worked for 25 years and retired in 2015 spoke with me last January as well. He had been offered a position at Oklahoma City to instruct new students. Per him, the ideal candidate can go from street to fully certified in about 4 years, while some trainees during his last few years had been training for 6-8 years. He alleged a pattern where some students were trained for years longer than others, rarely washed out, and were quietly checked out and promoted away from direct air traffic control positions into management.

Another retired controller and supervisor who formerly worked at the Chicago ARTCC echoed his story, claiming the FAA would regularly change the “best qualified list,” with those responsible for promotions changing requirements depending on who they wanted to promote. He was never told to certify an inadequate trainee, he said, but “the pressure was mounting.”

Applicant quality matters in several ways. Weaker applicants are more likely to drop out in training, to take longer going through the pipeline and in on-the-job training (where experienced controllers have to work directly with them, taking other bodies off the job), and to wind up working in less busy airfields. This matters particularly because there are fixed numbers each year and the pipeline takes several years to get through, so real problems take a few years to filter through the pipeline and be felt.

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.

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As I write this story, we are in a moment of intense partisan divide, with everyone mad and very few terribly inclined to give grace or look for nuance. In part because of that, I don’t think this story can be treated as complete without making the undercurrent of its interaction with political partisanship clear and speaking directly to those sympathetic to one side or the other.

First, to liberals:

I dislike Trump as much as anyone. Maybe I’m not supposed to play my hand like that while reporting a news article, but it’s true. I’ve wanted him out of politics since he entered the scene a decade ago, I voted against him three elections in a row, and I think he’s had a uniquely destructive effect within US politics. So I understand—please believe, I understand—just how disquieting it is to watch him stand up and blame DEI after a major tragedy.

But Democrats did not handle it. The scandal occurred under the Obama administration. The FAA minimized it, obscured it, fought FOIA requests through multiple lawsuits, and stonewalled the public for years as the class action lawsuit rolled forward. The Trump administration missed it, too, for a term, and it’s likely most officials simply didn’t hear about it through the first few years of the Biden administration. No outlets left of Fox Business bothered to provide more than a cursory examination of it, and it never made much of a dent on the official record. Even when the New York Times ran a thoroughly reported article on air traffic controller shortages late last year, it never touched the scandal. It was possible to miss it.

I was optimistic, then, when the story went viral again last year. I badly wanted the Biden admin to rise to the occasion, speak plainly and frankly in response to the scandal, and defuse this time bomb. I wanted other, more mainstream outlets to cover the story, but none did so. I found that a source familiar with the department’s operations learned the story from my article for the first time, but when I reached out to the FAA and the Department of Transportation with specific questions for comment, they told me they could not comment on pending litigation and provided me only boilerplate to use.¹⁸ After that? Radio silence.

The class members have mixed sentiments as things stand. Some are thrilled that what they see as the scourge of destructive DEI initiatives is finally being addressed. Others are liberals who are frustrated and hurt that something they worked so hard to keep nonpartisan, a real scandal that hurt them, can now be little but a partisan wedge, and they’re not happy with the way Trump is handling it.

Trump isn’t handling the scandal how I would, but when is that not true? I expect collateral damage, I expect intense partisanship and noise, I expect chaos. But at the core, fundamentally, I can’t be unhappy that after a decade, a President finally brought attention to the scandal.

I realize political expediency makes talking about the scandal a losing battle for Democrats now that the Biden admin declined to fix it, but a lot of the class members were badly hoping it could be resolved in a nuanced bipartisan way. It's a partisan cudgel right now because the FAA elected to sweep it under the rug for three administrations in a row rather than frankly and honestly cutting out the rot.

Fundamentally, people should not be forced to choose between “burn it all down” and “sweep it under the rug.” People should not be forced to choose between lowering the bar and rejecting all outreach to struggling communities. Given the recent election, Democrats have years to build a vision of diversity that involves providing more opportunities for everyone to reach a high bar, not lowering the bar—one that involves making institutions work, not obfuscating institutional failure until it can no longer be hidden.

The time is right for this, and not only can it happen, it should happen. The right way to draw a contrast with Trump is not denying that there was ever an issue, but showing that people who fundamentally believe in the value of institutions and in extending opportunity to a diverse citizenship understand the issues and are prepared to solve them better than bomb-throwers ever could.

Finally, to conservatives:

I know, I know. The evidence is unambiguous that the bar was lowered, deliberately, over many years and with direct knowledge. The evidence is unambiguous that a cheating scandal occurred. The whole thing is as explosive as any I’ve seen, and it touches on a lot of long-running frustrations. Drink my lib tears, rub it in my face—this happened, the institutions covered it up and danced around it for years, conservative organizations were more-or-less the only ones who rose to the demand to help bring justice for it or cover it over the course of a decade, and administrations diligently ignored it until Trump made it impossible to ignore. The people who played roles in bringing this all to light and ensuring it couldn’t simply be forgotten all deserve credit—yes, including Steve Sailer, whose feud with Will Stancil a year ago is what brought it to my attention.

All of that is true. But please, as you’re handling this—as you’re digging up the corruption, understanding the failure, rooting through the mess—remember that without principled, brave, honest people like Moranda Reilly, all of this might have stayed hidden forever. It all could have died in obscurity. Remember that at root, this really is a bipartisan issue, and many of the class members really do believe in the value of diversity programs that provide a wider range of people opportunity to meet a high bar.

I know Democrats had a chance to clean it up, and they didn’t, and now you’re going to do things your way. I get that. But please remember the people at the root, and remember that it took a whole lot more than just conservatives to fight this.

All the best.

1. See the letter in full here:

2. Adam Shapiro, Trouble In the Skies (FOX Business Network), mirrored here.

3. CTI Class Action, archived here.

4. NBCFAE Historical Journal - From the Beginning, available in Brigida v. Buttigieg 157 (Plaintiffs’ Motion to Compel), Exhibit 2. Excerpted on my Twitter.

5. Brigida v. Buttigieg 141 (Defendant’s opposition to plaintiffs’ motion for class certification). Excerpted on my Twitter.

6. Andrew R. Dattel and Raymond E. King, Reweighting AT-SAT to Mitigate Group Score Differences. Available here and excerpted on my Twitter.

7. Brigida 141.

8. Brigida 141. Excerpted on my Twitter.

9. Note that this “biodata” was still not the biographical questionnaire used, which had no apparent validation and no legitimacy. Brigida 141, Exhibit D: Dana Broach, Incremental Validity of Biographical Data in the Prediction of En Route Air Traffic Control Specialist Technical Skills. Available here and excerpted on my Twitter.

10. Brigida v. Buttigieg 141 (Defendant's opposition to plaintiffs' motion for class certification), Exhibit E - David M Finch, Bryan D Edwards, and J Craig Wallace, Multistage selection strategies: simulating the effects on adverse impact and expected performance for various predictor combinations. Available here and excerpted on my Twitter.

11. Dr. James L. Outtz, Dr. Paul J. Hanges, Barrier Analysis of the Air Traffic Control Specialists (ATCS) Centralized Hiring Process. Available here.

12. As quoted here.

13. Adam Shapiro, FAA Admits Emails Missing in Air Traffic Control Cheating Scandal. Available here.

14. Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General, Report of Investigation, August 9, 2016. Available here.

15. H.R. 636 - FAA Extension, Safety, and Security Act of 2016. Available here.

16. Via conversations with Sam Fischer

17. Via SCOTUSBlog.

18. From the FAA, February 7, 2024, in response to a series of pointed and specific questions:

One of the FAA Administrator’s top priorities is hiring more air traffic controllers, one of the most specialized professions in the federal government. After a decade of staffing declines, we’re starting to bend the curve. We hired 1,500 controllers last year, and we are working to hire 1,800 controllers this year.

The safety of the U.S. aviation system is due in large part to our skilled and dedicated air traffic controllers. To maintain our safety record, we are accelerating the pace of recruiting, training, and hiring to keep up with increased demand on the national aviation system, with more travelers and the growth of commercial space launches. Our hiring efforts will maintain the highest standards of qualified controllers to meet these challenges.

The FAA is filling every seat at the Air Traffic Controller Academy, expanding advanced training at regional facilities across the country, making it easier to hire experienced controllers from the military and industry, and expediting the onboarding process for new hires.  And this spring, we will take applications from the public to become air traffic controllers.

The Air Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative (AT-CTI) Program is a valuable source of applicants for air traffic controller positions. We are now working to enhance the AT-CTI Program to ensure graduates have the skills to immediately begin on-the-job training at a facility.