After last night’s horrific collision of an American Eagle jet and a Black Hawk helicopter, there’s been a rush to pushing pet agendas.

• Some people want to shut down Washington’s National airport, or curtail flights. This is especially true for those who were against adding a mere 5 new slots there as part of FAA Reauthorization (flights that haven’t started yet, by the way). It’s at least as good a question what purpose having so many military aircraft operating inside the approach path of that airport serves.

• Others (on the left) are quick to blame President Trump, because the FAA Administrator chose not to serve into Trump’s second term and – a mere 10 days into the new administration – there’s not yet a new, permanent, Senate-confirmed leader at the agency.

• While a pet issue on the right points to diversity hiring of air traffic controllers as an issue, when there are much bigger issues with air traffic control in the U.S. and the individuals hired by the FAA were qualified.

Mostly, though, we don’t have a sufficient understanding of the causes of the incident yet to jump on a pet horse. Be very skeptical of anyone pushing solutions of laying blame at this stages.

It’s worth laying out further the ‘diversity hiring’ angle to this discussion, because as I wrote a year ago, every time we wind up talking about DEI and aviation, we get stupider.

• There is an issue here
  
• But it’s not what most people think that it is

The Major Air Traffic Control Problem Is Technology And Bad Regulation

U.S. air traffic control is antiquated. They’ve done a terrible job managing technology upgrades for several decades. Airspace is congested in the Northeast, so many processes are manual, and they don’t have enough people to manage the manual process. There are strategies to address this, but those mostly get rejected (like remote towers). And there are now hundreds of near-collisions per year.

Unlike in much of the world, the federal government doesn’t just regulate air traffic control it performs the service itself. That means they regulate themselves. Plus, they’re captive to annual congressional appropriations cycles which makes capital investment difficult.

FAA air traffic control still uses paper flight strips. They’ve been trying to go electronic since 1983. And they won’t get most of the way even this decade, as transportation researcher Bob Poole notes:

On July 17, the Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report on the slow progress of FAA’s program to equip U.S. airport control towers with electronic flight strips (to replace traditional paper flight strips physically handed from one controller to another). The bad news is that instead of only 89 towers scheduled to receive this improvement by 2028, there will now be only 49 towers equipped by 2029.

Wait until you explain paper flight strips!https://t.co/fyU7aSILWr pic.twitter.com/gOBIHME3oK

— gary leff (@garyleff) July 2, 2023

The FAA set out a plan in 1983 “to equip 150 to 250 airport control towers by 2000.” They went way over budget and didn’t accomplish much. Most recently, a “contract with Lockheed-Martin (now Leidos) was to equip 89 towers with TFDM by 2028.” That’s been scaled back to 49 towers, but “only 27 of them will get the full version that includes surface management functions, while the other 22 will get only the electronic flight strips.”

They’ve cut airports including Honolulu, New Orleans, San Juan, Anchorage, Burbank, Hartford, Ontario, Orange County and Sacramento among others.

Meanwhile, all of Nav Canada facilities went electronic 15 years ago (and all control towers and TRACONs even earlier). Their solution is used in Australia, Italy, the U.K. and Dubai. We could license the Canadian solution, or other commercial ones, but instead the FAA has been working on contracting for their own solution since three years before the Beastie Boys were fighting for your right to party.

In addition to an ability to make capital investment decisions as easily as NavCanada, FAA’s procurement systems are byzantine and ineffective.

Look at NavCanada. How many primary radar types do they have for terminal surveillance? One. How many does FAA have? Three, dating back to the 1980s. The manufacturers of two of them are out of business. FAA has four types of secondary/beacon radars. NavCanada does a wholesale replacement, launching a project at the end of life to replace them all at once. NavCanada has one primary switch for all systems: tower, approach, and en-route. One backup switch for all. They just did a replacement tender for them all…FAA is never a single buy. All are indefinite quantity contracts. So suppliers deliver 10 to 20 systems a year.

We don’t have enough people given the limited technology, and better technology would promote safety. FAA has chosen not to use technology, as well, that would limit the need for more staff at particular facilities. And since FAA regulates itself, there’s little accountability. While some prefer a NavCanada model, it would be an improvement even to split out regulation and standard-setting from service provision into different agencies.

So What’s The Diversity Hiring Issue?

During the Obama administration, the FAA moved to ‘off the street’ hiring with diversity as a criteria, passing over graduates of FAA-approved university air traffic control programs.

• The FAA launched the Collegiate Training Initiative in 1997, working with colleges and universities to offer air traffic control degrees, and making their graduates the primary source for hiring controllers. This trumped the previous requirement of a high school degree and three years of (unrelated) work experience.

• In 2005 the FAA Inspector General recommended adding coursework to these schools to reduce training time at the FAA’s academy. The FAA didn’t do this, and Congress directed a study of the move in agency’s 2012 reauthorization.

• Instead, during the Obama administration, the FAA started an Air Traffic Controller Recruitment Campaign which bypassed graduates. A decision made by the FAA, and not by the Air Traffic Organization, meant that both high school graduates and those with air traffic control degrees had to apply through the same program and pass both the standard aptitude test for controllers and a biographical test.

This was done for diversity. The people hired still were qualified. But they were less experienced, when the FAA Inspector General was calling for greater experience prior to application (in part because the FAA’s own training academy lacked sufficient spaces to fully train controllers to meet demand given technology in use). Note that leaving behind qualified applicants from Collegiate Training isn’t why we don’t have more controllers, since the FAA doesn’t have enough spots to train people.

Facing pressure to diversify an overwhelmingly white workforce, the FAA began using a biographical test as a first screen of candidates. Minority candidates were fed “buzz words” to bump their resumes up to top priority. Apparently saying your worst subject in school was science served as a golden ticket. Correct answers to the take-home biographical questionnaire were given in their entirety. These questionnaires were later banned. This was dumb, but it’s not the problem.

Pinning Last Night’s Disaster On Diversity Hiring Is Unsupportable

First, we don’t have enough information to explain what happened to the American Eagle CRJ-700 and the Sikorsky helicopter. We have some limited information, that supports theories which are then worth investigating, but we can’t yet offer conclusions.

Second, there’s not any indication that diversity hiring at the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization has led to unqualified controllers. Controllers don’t work with the best equipment possible, under the best standards and conditions possible, and the FAA doesn’t have enough throughput to train sufficient numbers of controllers to meet staffing needs given current technology.

Alternative hiring paths wouldn’t change that, even if you’re reasonably outraged by FAA hiring policies started under Administrator Michael Huerta the second Obama administration who sought to “transform the (FAA) into a more diverse and inclusive workplace that reflects, understands, and relates to the diverse customers” it serves.