The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

The article presents a dramatic narrative that implies the FAA deliberately lowered its hiring standards by replacing the traditional system with a biographical questionnaire. It’s clear from the account that many qualified CTI graduates (note: CTI schools are third parties) were unfairly filtered out from the applicant pool, and there’s documented evidence of a cheating scandal that casts further doubt on the process. However, the reality is nuanced. Although the new process may have altered who got to start the journey, every candidate still had to pass the FAA’s rigorous and extremely selective training and certification— which remain the true measure of an air traffic controller’s capability. In an ideal world, we could put everyone through this process to see who passes.

Critics argue that this change, driven in part by diversity goals, compromised the quality of candidates entering the pipeline, but the actual FAA hiring and training criteria remained exactly the same as before. It's an extremely difficult and selective program. The ongoing issues in air traffic control, such as understaffing and controller fatigue, stem from a range of systemic challenges rather than a simple lowering of the qualification bar.

This isn’t a straightforward case of DEI lowering standards; it’s about how changing the initial screening affected a well-established pathway. The FAA aimed to broaden the applicant pool, and while that decision led to unfair outcomes in unusual directions, controversy, and discontent among CTI graduates, it doesn’t translate to less competent controllers.

A very well-written and persuasive critique, thank you for it.

(And god I hope you’re not a state-of-the-art summarization LLM.)

It's less about lowering standards and more about artificially disqualifying thousands of qualified candidates based on their race.

if people who have been historically quantifiably discriminated against and disqualified based on that discrimination, how can that imbalance be corrected?

By helping to make them qualified to pass the tests.

How many people (in absolute and relative terms) from each cohort passed/failed the training program and how long did they take to do so? Did the numbers change with the two policy changes described in the article?

If there was no change (or an increase) in the absolute numbers of passing graduates, that would support what you're saying. If there was a drop in the absolute numbers, it implies that there's at the very least fewer competent controllers. (And changes in the relative numbers tell us about whether the efficiency of the program changed.)

Given the litigation and FOIA requests around this, it seems like this data should be floating around, and should be fairly conclusive for one side.

> This isn’t a straightforward case of DEI lowering standards; it’s about how changing the initial screening affected a well-established pathway

It seems like you are mincing words, similar to my previous company that wanted to hire more women. They started attending the women-only hiring convention and we could only interview from those candidates (HR filtered out the rest). So while we hired the best candidates we could, on average they weren't that great, they just passed a minimum bar.

But but but I was told that DEI lowered standards

the average engineer is not 10x.

How, exactly? Perhaps by encouraging schools to accept more people from those groups?

more isnt the problem. or its not the first problem.

>predictions suggested only 3% of black applicants would pass.

Thats not '3% of the applicants are black'. It's '3% of black applicants pass the test'

Starting there alone would yield meaningful results - at the end of the day, you gotta pass the test. Changing the test so more people pass is illogical and dangerous.

Okay, but... HOW do you enable more black people to pass the test?

You offer more and better training for everyone. It's not the job of the organization itself to enable their success - just offer a fair test. Others, like the organization mentioned in this article, can and should focus on specific constituent representation. However, the goal of getting more of a specific group into an organization is NOT more important than the safety and efficacy of the organization.