Danger in the Air

~ Clarissa

Air travel is being aggressively undermined. Here’s one of the recent examples of where that leads:

One of the pilots was paying attention, so the unqualified and careless air traffic controller failed to produce a collision. But there’s been a worrisome recent increase in such mishaps.

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Published by Clarissa

28 thoughts on “Danger in the Air”

  1. While I’m glad that tragedy has been avoided. I would be very interested to know if the air traffic controller, was just having a bad day and made a mistake, or if he was a (die) hire that was hired for diversity sake and wasn’t exactly qualified for the job. And quite frankly the fact that we are at the point where I even have to ask this question is astounding.

    • – W

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    1. As far as I know, all US air traffic controllers are trained directly by the FAA at the FAA-Academy. So in that regard, every air traffic controller has exactly the same training.

      Of course, given the falling standards almost everywhere in US education, it’s possible standards are slipping from what they used to be.

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        1. Algebra is taught in tens of thousands of schools, while there is only one school for air traffic controllers. They should be failing the people who can’t master it. If people are coming out poorly trained, that is on the standards of single school that is teaching all of them.

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          1. And what will happen, I wonder, if the people who fail are overwhelmingly in a protected category?

            You know what. So how might people react and what might be the consequences?

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            1. For air traffic control school a fail should be a fail.

              But that’s why I mentioned dropping standards in my first comment, it’s possible fails are getting extra chances or everyone is getting through a little easier.

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  2. “Air travel is being aggressively undermined”

    There’s been a covert media campaign against it for a while now…. almost every day or two there are stories meant to frighten the public away from it.

    Since it hasn’t worked I guess now they’re going passively engineer some ‘accidents’ so that we get the message.

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    1. @cliffarroyo

      Yes, you’re right, but that’s a separate story, that of 15-minute cities, car-free zones, two flights per person per year maximum, decarbonise defossilise no-oil degrowth green-energy quackery. Here we are in compulsory DEI hire territory, I believe.

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  3. DEI hire.

    There is – and there has been for some time now – a sustained campaign both in the USA and in the Anglosphere (in the UK it is even affecting Royal Air Force pilots) to”diversify” the field since it is perceived to be “too male, too pale, too stale”. Fly at your own risk now. I’ll stick to trains.

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    1. And yet, all the major air crashes we’ve heard about were by white male pilots. What’s with the blaming of minorities for what appears to be an American problem?

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      1. lol you’re such an idiot. But you’re tenacious, I’ll give you that. Even the famously right wing fascist newspaper NY Times has started to notice this.

        https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/21/business/airline-safety-close-calls.html

        Airline Close Calls Happen Far More Often Than Previously Known

        Gee, must be a coincidence that the standards for one of the most demanding jobs out there in the aviation industry have been relaxed by the regime.

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        1. People still think it’s cute. Hee-hee, poor “minorities”. And it doesn’t matter that you and I, both minorities in US aviation, are calling attention to what is now a very observable phenomenon. Nah, it’s got to be ray-ceeesm.

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          1. And the gall to say that white pilots are responsible for air crashes. Listen, bud, whatever’s left of this country’s infrastructure is still standing because of the expertise of soon-to-be-retired white boomers.

            Left to their own devices, POC leaders in major urban areas, with the backing of democratic party, can only guarantee more blight and decay. I forgot which city, I think it was Jackson Miss., where the black mayor hired as a city manager/engineer who had no other qualifications other than a Masters on Social Work (maybe the lowest IQ degree after a a B.Ed) and they’ve been unable to provide clean water to their constituents for years now. Of course they get bailed by the Federal government to the tune of billions of dollars, but even for them, this has to be embarrassing.

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            1. So do stats not matter? Or in this case your feelings about DEI matter more?

              Mention the worst airline crashes you’ve ever heard about that is not terrorism. Who’s the pilot? What’s the cause of the crash?

              I’m not against airline safety. Duh, who will be? But this fearmongering has real effects that have nothing to do with safety. I’ve not heard of any minority pilot/airline worker who crashed a plane either from negligence or incompetence. If you have, please show.

              All I’ve read here are innuendoes and conjectures: this may happen. That can happen. DEI-DIE. But hard evidence? None.

              There’s a bigger idiocy in that.

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  4. Have you heard about this?

    https://www.takimag.com/article/die-in-the-air/

    White House officials decided in 2013 to purge the hiring list of over 1,000 graduates of the air traffic control course at colleges like Arizona State who had also passed the cognitive exam for hiring. Instead, it made air traffic control job-seekers start over with a new “biographical” test to “add diversity to the workforce.”

    This was in response to complaints from the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees that only 9.47 percent of FAA workers were black compared with 17.6 percent in the federal civilian workforce. “Thus, the FAA would be required to increase their complement of African American workers by 8.13 percent to reach parody [sic] with the Federal Civilian Workforce.”

    This is not a parody.

    They definitely reached parody.

    https://aviationline.ng/faa-to-appear-in-court-for-throwing-out-air-traffic-controller-applications-based-on-applicants-race/

    In addition, minority candidates were given “buzz words,” which brought their resumes to the top of the pile. These groups were also given the answers to the biographical questionnaire, which was later banned.

    The questionnaire asked several irrelevant questions. According to the Washington Times, one of the questions was “college subject in which I received my lowest grade.” Those who wrote “history/political science” received 15 points. In addition, playing more than four sports in high school netted applicants 5 points.

    In contrast, criteria that would disadvantage African Americans, such as holding a pilot’s license, were worth only two points. An air traffic controller with a pilot’s license understands what happens on the other end of the radio, which is a major advantage.

    Even more blatant is the omission of any points for actual experience as an air traffic controller in the military.

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    1. I still cannot believe they were so blatant about it. Giving more points for being unemployed or having bad science grades, lol. Sounds like a comedy bit from the Babylon Bee but it was federal policy, devised by the Smartest People In The Room.

      This is why I said in the other thread that these people cannot be called Elites.

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    2. Thank you Stringer Bell for bringing some hard facts to the discussion, since Anonymous would have us believe that when people start making reasonable connections between the evidence of their own eyes, it is just “the blaming of minorities for what appears to be an American problem?”.

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      1. I think the era of shouting the word RACIST to win arguments is slowly coming to an end. People are tired of constantly being told to ignore their lying eyes.

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        1. True. They’re only allowed to bring facts to the table. Not just conjectures and hurt feelings that others are getting into new spaces.

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  5. Read SB’s articles and found a link to a really good article: Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis by HAROLD ROBERTSON (June 1, 2023):

     

    At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. …

    In police academies around the country, new recruits are taught to apply an escalation of force algorithm with non-compliant subjects: “Ask, Tell, Make.” … Similarly, the power centers inside U.S. institutions apply a variant of “Ask, Tell, Make” to achieve diversity in their respective organizations.

    The first tactics for implementing diversity imperatives are the “Ask” tactics. These simply ask all the members of the organization to end bias. At this stage, the policies seem so reasonable and fair that there will rarely be much pushback. 

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  6. Another recommended article from the same site, talking not only re Israel but also re America’s current model of creating elites:

    The U.S. Can Learn From Israel’s Cognitive Meritocracy

    if the Israeli state were to survive in the future, they would have to out-think a numerically superior enemy. This would mean developing a level of technological supremacy that would negate the Arab states’ greater military mass. 

    The IDF’s initial idea to meet this challenge was to create an institute modeled after Xerox PARC, the research and development group in Silicon Valley which was responsible for many revolutionary developments in computing, including the personal computer. But the Israelis soon realized they did not have the resources needed to fund such an institute. Instead of an institute filled with established researchers, the Israelis sought to find a small number of the smartest young people in their country and, during their peak in creativity, task them with developing weapons no other country possessed. This program became Talpiot.

    …

    Besides their coursework, each student was tasked with what is called “the Project,” which entailed coming up with an original idea that solves a defense problem, create a budget for it, and then produce it. Many of these student projects would ultimately be developed by the IDF; the famed Iron Dome missile defense system has its roots in an early mockup by a Talpiot student. 

    …

    Despite a total defense budget of only $23.6 billion—compared to the U.S.’s $130 billion annual budget for defense R&D alone—the IDF has consistently been able to develop novel weapons

    …

    The success of Talpiot’s alumni is made more remarkable by their relatively small number; roughly 2000 people have graduated from the program in its lifetime, equivalent in size to the average annual freshman class at Harvard. The success of Talpiot has spurred the development of a similar program in South Korea which explicitly referenced Talpiot as an inspiration. While China has developed a similar program as well.

    …

    A U.S. program of this kind would require cooperation with a top university to play the role that Hebrew University provides to Talpiot. An undergraduate R&D program designed to develop novel weapons would not be a welcome addition to the campus at many U.S. schools, however. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and other universities banned the Reserve Officer Training Corp from their campuses for forty years, only allowing it to return in 2011. Stanford’s business school recently blocked students from even forming a club related to defense technology.

    …

    Ironically, as Talpiot’s founders explicitly sought to emulate America’s Ivy League universities when they established the program, the U.S. was already moving away from this model. The process through which U.S. diplomats are selected is instructive as to why this is the case. [el: do recommend reading the final part of this article]

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  7. Three most important quotes from the 1st article that stood out after I reread the article:

    Promoting diversity over competency does not simply affect new hires and promotion decisions. […]

    a recent paper by McDonald, Keeves, and Westphal … points out that white male senior leaders reduce their engagement following the appointment of a minority CEO. […] When boards choose diverse CEOs to make a political statement, high performers who see an organization shifting away from valuing honest performance respond by disengaging.

    […] a trend that began over a decade ago. High-performing young men will either collaborate, coast, or downshift by leaving high-status employment altogether. Collaborators will embrace “allyship” to attempt to bolster their chances of getting promoted. Coasters realize that they need to work just slightly harder than the worst individual on their team. Their shirking is likely to go unnoticed and they are unlikely to feel enough emotional connection to the organization to raise alarm when critical mistakes are being made. The combination of new employees hired for diversity, not competence, and the declining engagement of the highly competent sets the stage for failures of increasing frequency and magnitude.

    Somewhat counterintuitively, firms with diverse founders are often highly meritocratic, as the structure harnesses the founder’s desire to make money and shields them from criticism on diversity issues.

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  8. This is in reply at Anonymous above… I think you are missing how DEI policies have affected the current pool of ATCs and pilots. I have read up on this issue a bit and everything Stringer posted above appears to be true. But those who scored badly in science etc actually weren’t interested in these high stress jobs. So they didn’t actually make many DEI hires with these bizarre testing and hiring strategies. Meanwhile, they turned away qualified candidates who did want the job. So the issue is not necessarily under qualified ATCs but overworked and understaffed ATCs. And that problem can be traced back to these very weird hiring policies. Overall, (knock on wood) airplane crashes remain mercifully rare. So we can’t blame the race or education level of the pilots. But I believe that we can all agree that these new policies are bananas and not working.

    Overall, I’m fairly politically aligned with you, Anonymous. But we have to recognize the absolute havoc caused by DEI policies and Identity first politics. I firmly believe that Democrats are better on economics, infrastructure, the environment, women’s rights, and are better for the middle and working classes. But they have obfuscated the real and tangible gains made in these areas by digging in too deeply inti practices that turn off many (most?) American voters. For instance, any politician with pronouns in their bio looks so embarrassing. It won’t stop me from voting for them if I like their policies but it does discourage some voters.

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    1. And why, why is it necessary to have more black people among ATC and pilots? These are not particularly well-paid jobs. They are quite badly paid considering the nature of the job. So why are all these efforts even needed? There’s no logic to it other than some bureaucrat wants to put nice-looking numbers on some report and everybody snaps to attention trying to engineer these numbers.

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