Candidate Identities for Air Traffic Controller Jobs: The Failure of the Air Traffic Training Standards in the First Four Years of the Aviation Industry

The rigorous standards for hiring pilots, mechanics and air traffic controllers were never relaxed to meet diversity goals, but rather that the previous administrations have worked to remove barriers to entry.

The only black pilot to become a commercial pilot was the one who made up the Tuskegee Airmen. And segregation prevented Black men and women from working in the industry until the civil rights movement and lawsuits.

Robert Fowler Jr., a pilot and professor at Middle Tennessee State University, said that there were still significant obstacles to overcome to get a pilot’s license. Diversity efforts have not been all that successful despite the industry trying to give scholarships and cast a wider recruiting net.

“Historically, there has never been an incident, big or small, where D.E.I. or diversity has ever been attributed as a sole cause or contributing cause,” said Tennessee Garvey, a pilot and the chairman of the board of directors for the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals.

According to a Medium post from the agency, one of the program’s first three candidates graduated in 2021 from the F.A.A. Academy and became an air traffic controller trainee that year. It is unclear how many people who graduated from that program are air traffic controllers today.

“The candidates in this program will receive the same rigorous consideration in terms of aptitude, medical and security qualifications as those individuals considered for a standard public opening for air traffic controller jobs,” the F.A.A. said in 2019. A medical exam and an air traffic skills assessment are included in those standards.

A person who was an advisor to a former Transportation Secretary says that it was done that way in the Biden Administration. Any hiring of people with disabilities at the FAA, Buckland told NPR, “would only be qualified people with disabilities, with the emphasis on qualified.”

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump was referring to information that is not widely known, but at the time of his remarks, the identities of the pilots and air traffic controllers involved had not been made public.

“This was in the Obama administration, just prior to my getting there — and we took care of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, we took care of everybody at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. It’s one of the reasons I won — but they actually came out with a directive. Too white.

“This was before I got to office recently, the second term, the F.A.A. is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.”

President Trump excoriated the diversity goals of his predecessors and Federal Aviation Administration as he updated the public about the deadly collision over the river on Thursday.

While he acknowledged that he had no proof, he suggested that changes to the F.A.A. and more people with disabilities were to blame for the accident.

Buttigieg responded to a post on X by saying it was despicable. Can we say where Trump should be as families grieve? We’d put safety first, we grew Air Traffic Control, and had no commercial airline crash deaths out of millions of flights.

Trump criticized Buttigieg, Biden’s secretary of transportation. “He’s run it right into the ground with his diversity,” Trump said.

Trump suggested diversity efforts at the FAA, including the hiring of people with disabilities, had compromised air safety. He said the crash of a commercial jet and a military helicopter Wednesday night “could have been” caused by diversity in hiring, but noted that the investigation into the cause is still going on.

In his press conference about Wednesday night’s accident, Trump quoted that Fox News article to say, falsely, that unqualified people with disabilities were being hired in positions like air traffic controller.

There is a recent history of some people trying to link air safety problems to diversity – including the hiring of people with disabilities – not just with Wednesday’s crash but also when a Boeing aircraft lost a door while in flight last January.

“To suggest people with disabilities were responsible for this tragedy seems to be inconsistent with the facts”, says the chief executive officer of The Arc of the United States.