When last week’s air disaster happened in D.C., the spotlight was thrown quickly on air traffic control – even without having any inkling that controller error contribution to the collision. That’s because there’s been a lot of attention paid recently to diversity efforts at the FAA, and because the President has railed against those sorts of efforts.
There’s a lot of misinformation about what happened. Here’s the basic truth, and how much it matters today.
- Starting in 2014, the FAA shifted from prioritizing graduates of Collegiate Training Initiative schools to hiring ‘off the street.’ Attending a college program with air traffic control curriculum no longer helped get hired at the FAA. It had been the primary way controllers started their careers.
- That came after Obama FAA Administrator Michael Huerta announced a piority to “transform the (FAA) into a more diverse and inclusive workplace that reflects, understands, and relates to the diverse customers” it serves.
- To screen applicants, the FAA introduced a ‘biographical assessment.’ I’m not going to detail that here – it’s readily available on a Google search, with as much as has been written about it since last week. But it’s true the FAA in 2018 removed the biographical assessment as a screening tool.
- Some minority candidates were fed “buzz words” to bump their resumes up to top priority. 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.
- Candidates still met qualifications and went through proper training. There’s no indication that unqualified controllers were hired. The problem isn’t the quality of controllers, but the quantity of them. FAA wasn’t hiring enough – they didn’t have enough training seats. (There is an argument that some of the controllers hired might have taken longer to get placed, or that retention may have been lower, but I don’t believe any data has been released that substantiates this.)
There are now hundreds of near-collisions per year. Staffing is an issue, but why? Twenty years ago the agency’s Inspector General told them to lean into Collegiate Training more. This would have solved for the bottleneck of the FAA’s own introductory program. They did not do this. The diversity focus, causing them to move away from a component of the solution, did not help.
A year ago, then-FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker announced a program – the Enhanced AT-CTI initiative – to once again leverage Collegiate Training – allowing graduates to skip the FAA’s three-month introductory classroom program at their Oklahoma City Academy (which is the step prior to being assigned to an FAA facility).
The Enhanced Initiative was created to allow qualified institutions to provide their students with equivalent FAA Academy air traffic control training. The Enhanced AT-CTI graduate, with FAA oversight, will be placed directly into a facility if hired as Air Traffic Control Specialists. After graduating from one of the approved schools, new hires can immediately begin localized training at an air traffic facility. These graduates still must pass the Air Traffic Skills Assessment (ATSA) and meet medical and security requirements.
Three schools have signed agreements for this (Embry-Riddle, Tulsa Community College, and the University of Oklahoma). This should begin to help with the FAA’s own bottleneck in hiring, but doesn’t go far enough.
DEI mattered in the sense that the FAA turned away from leaning into programs that developed air traffic control talent. But they wouldn’t have had enough controllers either way. The agency finally ‘got’ that.
My worry with the focus on DEI – which based on what we know so far had nothing to do with the tragic collision of a military helicopter and a commercial airliner last week – is that while the focus is on appalling behavior (the behavioral screen, and in some cases giving cheat codes for it) that’s not the primary safety issue in air traffic control.
- FAA technology upgrade projects that date to the early 1980s haven’t been completed (and won’t be for years)
- Procurement processes are a mess
- There’s little accountability, because the agency regulates itself which is never a best practice.
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 inability 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.
These are real issues. Diversity hiring was a detour and distraction but not the major issue. There were plenty of qualified candidates to hire, and only so many spaces given FAA’s constraints that they never overcame (and which are a big reason for today’s understaffing).
We aren’t giving controllers the tools that they need to do their jobs. We need more controllers to make up for lack of technology at their disposal. And we shouldn’t let political lightning rod issues distract from the real work that needs to be done. Fix those too! But it would be terrible to let them become the only focus.
Qualified talent isnt the same as having the best available talent.
This post is really whistling past the graveyard. Of course there are multiple problems with FAA beyond it’s insane diversity fetish, and most stem from the ultimate problem that unlike NAV Canada and many other air traffic authorities in Europe and Asia, the FAA is still run by politicians for political reasons and has never been privatized or run by professional management for the benefit of users.
But that doesn’t change the fact that FAA’s diversity fetish has in fact resulted in shortages of controllers at nearly every one of its facilities as well as the fact that the Tower at DCA was understaffed that fateful night – because it refused to hire the qualified “white men” who would have filled those roles. We can accept for sake of argument that each of the controllers actually on duty that night was “qualified,” but that avoids the issue that there were too few controllers in the Tower and the possibility or likelihood that it contributed to the accident, or that proper staffing that would have accepted all qualified candidates regardless of race would have avoided the necessity of controllers doing double duty and might have avoided the collision.
The full insanity of the FAA’s diversity policies are well beyond the space allowed here, but for those interested take a look at “Tracing Wood Grains” work on this issue which is posted on Substack and Twitter. I guarantee that his articles will leave you very angry and less trustful in the government generally, and the FAA specifically.
Thank you, Gary. No notes. Safety first in aviation and elsewhere. Invest in and actually improve critical systems for this industry and others. Diversity can be strength, too. However, blaming perceived enemies following a tragedy is and was inexcusable. Stop the disinformation, folks.
The DEI issue is political. If the government wants to address it, they can still modernize ATC. Just like people can eat and watch TV at the same time, not just do one thing.
Don’t you know Gary, The US does not need anything that Canada has.
Promoting DEI hiring for the partisan true believer hacks is easy and gives them all a warm fuzzy feeling that they are good people.
Improving and replacing the control hardware and software systems is very difficult and challenging work, and the DEI folks in the government are simply not capable of doing that type and scope of work. Or even overseeing that work.
@farnorthtrader — I imagine that was in jest, but seriously, I wish we had APPR in the US. Better to get paid for delays and cancellations when the airlines are at fault (maintenance, staffing, etc.)
@Mak “But that doesn’t change the fact that FAA’s diversity fetish has in fact resulted in shortages of controllers”
No, it didn’t. Because the FAA had limited seats in its training facilities. They filled those seats. FAA training throughput was the binding constraint that gives us controller shortages.
They had a certain number of slots to fill. They went out of their way to choose to fill them with more diverse candidates, walking away from collegiate programs that had traditionally been their pipeline. BUT THEY DID NOT HIRE FEWER PEOPLE.
Eliminating DEI doesn’t solve the problem because we need greater capacity to train controllers (and we need better tech) and so far FAA has failed at this.
One of the biggest issues at the FAA is of technology, and that new technology can break something. No one is getting called in front of Congress because old technology hasn’t been replaced, as that’s at least Congress’ fault for not funding it. But the FAA makes new technology very expensive to introduce. I don’t want to see a technology that’s promoted as working, when it’s really not (cough, cough self driving cars), but I also don’t want to see everything stuck in 1960s technology.
There was Congressional approval to introduce a new NOTAMs system passed in 2023. Where that stands is anyone’s guess. It was supposed to be completed by September 2024.
When a decision is made to NOT hire white men that’s going to shrink the number of applicants to be hired. There are women controllers but this job seems to skew more men and there are some jobs that will always attract more men than women and vice versa.
The job is probably tough enough to find quality and qualified applicants. Very high stress, not 9-5, can’t be done from home in your jammies, can’t even get up and go take a piss when you have the urge, can’t respond to your spouse’s text until a shift break. The pay is not bad but not huge either.
So start hiring white dudes again, along with “diverse” candidates-WTF that means.
The equipment and technology looks like something out of museum dedicated to 1980s.
There is no reason for all this hatred in America. It is repulsive and directly contrary to what America was founded for.
This neo-fasicist should be ashamed
I’ve worked with the FAA.for over 30 years, though not with ATC. The energy and entropy generated by the FAA decades-long extreme focus on diversity hiring has presumably interfered with the actual job duties and addressing of emerging issues.
When a substantial majority of an FAA manager’s performance goals are allocated to hiring diversity candidates (commonly poaching minimally-experienced candidates from the industry they are overseeing) as opposed.to performing their core job responsibilities, there are going to be problems.
I can only assume ATC – where the diversity-candidate focus has been much more transparent – is worse.