A few days ago I came across this tweet from Matt Yglesias during a stretch of bad weather that was tying up air travel:
This has been followed by a bunch of edgelord conservative types complaining that DEI initiatives are making it unsafe to fly. Is this just an offshoot of the recent right-wing kvetching about DEI in general?
No! By an odd quirk I happened to get sucked down a rabbit hole today, and among other things learned that Black air traffic controllers have been an obsession on the right for more than a decade. Here's the story, as briefly as I can possibly tell it.
The FAA hires air traffic controllers from a variety of sources: veterans, retired military controllers, the general public, and—notably—something called the College Training Initiative (CTI). Since 2002, both CTI grads and the general public have been required to take the Air Traffic Selection and Training test (AT-SAT) when they apply to the federal air traffic academy.
You will be unsurprised to learn that the air traffic community has long been almost all white and all male. The FAA has studied this off and on for years, and in 2013 published a "barrier analysis" report that came to a few conclusions. First, nearly all CTI grads were white. Second, something was wrong with the AT-SAT test. When it was given to actual air traffic controllers, a whole bunch of them failed. The test was reworked to fix that, but the result, contrary to expectations, was that close to 100% of everyone now passed. So the FAA increased the passing standard, and the result of that was significant bias in favor of white applicants.
Third, there were particular features of the AT-SAT that seemed to favor white applicants more than others. In particular, white applicants did better on some of the cognitive tests but Black applicants generally did better on parts of the test that measured personality traits (composure, work behavior, concentration, decisiveness, etc.). This portion of the test was confusingly called the Experience Questionnaire.
Long story short, in 2014 the FAA gutted the CTI program and created a longer version of the Experience Questionnaire called the Biographical Assessment. This was also confusingly named, since it was designed to test things like decisionmaking, handling pressure, teamwork, efficiency, and so forth. In any case, applicants were now required to take the BA first, and only if they passed did they move on to the AT-SAT.¹
And there was one other thing. Before all this, CTI students had been allowed to take the AT-SAT while they were in school. Now those scores were tossed out. They had to retake it under the new rules, and some of them washed out on the BA. They were understandably infuriated and filed a class-action lawsuit against the FAA. Here's how this is typically described on the right:
Candidates who had trained for years and who had scored high on aptitude tests were dropped from consideration, in favor of lesser-trained people who fit the right biographical profile.
....The FAA’s new hiring regime abandoned the CTI program as a basis for hiring new controllers, and instead based hiring on a “biographical questionnaire” designed to screen out candidates who weren’t members of a preferred minority racial group.
The lawsuit is ongoing, with briefings scheduled throughout 2024. There's no telling how long it will be until a trial is actually held.
In 2016 President Obama signed a bill that discontinued the Biographical Assessment and allowed anyone who had failed it to reapply. In 2020, as part of that year's defense bill, Congress passed the bipartisan ATC Reform Act, which reinstated the preference given to CTI grads.
There are lots of other little details here and there, including a weird quasi-cheating scandal, but they're mostly of minor interest. The nickel summary is that (a) the FAA has never included race in a "biographical questionnaire," but (b) they have changed their testing to emphasize traits that show less bias in favor of white applicants. It remains a matter of controversy which version of the test is better at predicting success as an air traffic controller.
However, this is all moot since the 2014 changes have now all been reversed. What's more, by far the biggest concern at the moment is general understaffing of air traffic controllers. There's currently bipartisan agreement that the FAA just needs to figure out a way to hire more controllers regardless of race or gender.
So that's the story. The idea that Black hiring is making the skies unsafe has been rattling around on the right for years, and the recent discourse about DEI and affirmative action in universities and corporations has just given it an opportunity to pop into mainstream consciousness. It's not brand new racism, just the usual old kind.
¹In the end, the result was a small uptick in the hiring of Black air traffic controllers. Maybe a few percentage points or so.
