[atleastoptimal]

Air traffic is up this year only 4%, would that naturally correspond to a 65% increase in significant incidents?

The issue isn't whether or not people are tacitly insisting certain people "deserve" to be in certain positions due to their race/background, and those against DEI are lamenting the loss of the soft apartheid we had in the US that gradually eroded with the civil rights movement. The issue is: in chasing demographic targets, are jobs lowering their standards for employment, and are those lowered standards causing a hazard for those impacted by the performance of those who work those jobs?

[sparcpile]

The load on the National Airspace System (NAS) has been growing each year, with slight a dip due to COVID. The FAA has provides 20-year outlooks for a set of metrics, including the number of operations performed with the NAS. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-06/FY2022_42_FA... See Page 33 and 34 for a breakdown in the numbers. We're looking at 50 million to 62 million operations per year within the NAS.

The question asking if DEI is lowering standards is bunk because it is pre-loading the assumption that the best qualified workers are the what was there traditional (straight white males) and that somehow allowing others in requires lowering some standards.

For the purposes of the FAA air traffic control specialists, everyone who applies must go to the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, OK and pass the the courses and tests provided there. They are then transferred to their home facilities where they must become certified for the position that they have been hired in. This requires additional tests, training, simulations, shadowing, and fully supervised workloads. If you become certified for a position and sector, it means that you can safely manage air traffic. Failure at any step along the way means that you wash out. The FAA does not lower standards for ATCS. See the following research paper on ATCS failure rates, rationales, and percentages. https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi...

[z7]

>The question asking if DEI is lowering standards is bunk

>The FAA does not lower standards for ATCS.

What's your take on this then?

>The hiring process for aspiring federal air traffic controllers from approved Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative (AT-CTI) institutions has undergone several revisions in recent years. Prior to 2014, graduates from AT-CTI programs were given preferential hiring from the FAA. In 2014, the FAA announced that AT-CTI graduates would equally compete with thousands of people the FAA calls “off the street hires”--anyone can literally walk in off the street without any previous training and apply for a federal air traffic control job. To apply, the FAA requires that a candidate has United States (U.S.) citizenship, a high school diploma, speaks English, and passes the FAA’s new Biographical Questionnaire (BQ).

>Another concerning perspective from AT-CTI administrators is that CTI graduates are at an employment disadvantage with the new hiring initiatives. One of the responding administrators expressed concern that off the street applicants have increased odds of employment over CTI applicants because CTI students are combined in track one with Veteran’s Readjustment Appointment (VRA) applicants putting CTI students second while all off the street applicants are grouped as one and have an equal opportunity for selection.

>The new FAA hiring protocol for federal air traffic controllers that was implemented in February 2014 included several significant changes. In particular, the FAA reduced the role of the CTI-approved program; therefore, the only remaining advantage for CTI graduates is that they are eligible to bypass the Air Traffic Basics Course, which is the first five weeks of qualification training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City (FAA, 2018). In addition, the FAA introduced the Biographical Questionnaire which was envisioned to predict controller performance through a process of asking individuals to recall their typical and/or specific behaviors from earlier times in their lives. But due to the lengthy process of hiring and training an air traffic controller which can take several years, it is too soon to conclude whether the FAA’s new hiring policies improved the ability to hire individuals who are more likely to successfully become federal controllers (FAA, 2017b).

https://ojs.library.okstate.edu/osu/index.php/CARI/article/v...

This publication specifically questions whether the new hiring process selects more qualified individuals than the old hiring policies. It also seems to corroborate some of the claims made in the Wall Street Journal article:

https://archive.is/lDyOB