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.
In 2018, the Trump Admin decided to approve military helicopters to turn off the ADS-B transponders while flying near the airport.
Señor Leff’s Senator Cruz inadvertently and indirectly brought this to attention this week, but he didn’t realize it would go back to the Trump FAA.
I have aTRS80 computer from radio shack they can upgrade to. But then musk and trump will just fire eveyone.
America, always obsessed with people’s private lives and perpetually held back by witch-doctor grade religious beliefs, all of which gets in the way of progress, and modernization. The reality is US infrastructure is pitiful. Head to almost any other country and you’ll find better facilities.
LOL – ITT, a bunch of people very convinced, in spite of factual evidence to the contrary, that if only white men were hired by the FAA, they’d have had more staffing.
Like, can you guys read? It’s literally the reason Gary wrote this article. It’s also not the first time he’s made this same point, even recently.
THE FAA COULD NOT TRAIN ATC STAFF QUICKLY ENOUGH!!!
Was that more readable for you guys? You have, ironically, made the exact mistake that FAA management has for years: focusing on the wrong problem. We need more training seats in the short term, and in the long term we need better tech.
Diversity is quite simply irrelevant when you have a staffing shortage and not enough seats available to train hires.
It is true that the FAA’s air traffic control system is archaic in many ways and is in serious need of an update. However, this doesn’t change the fact that the Biden Administration’s DEI kookiness has affected aviation safety. Multiple federal lawsuits from white and Asian controller applicants who were denied jobs despite being at the top of their respective classes can’t all be wrong. The cringy from the FAA’s vice administrator that they tried to hide the moment Trump got elected saying that diversity was the primary goal of controller hiring said it all. Applicants could have psychotic issues and be under the care of a mental health professional and still apply! This was the FAA’s policy! But, a qualified white or Asian applicant? Nope. To the salt mines with you!
When you’re dealing with peoples’ lives, merit matters. If we can get people from different backgrounds involved in aviation, then so much the better, but MERIT MUST CONTROL.
@jcll
‘Promoting DEI hiring as the cause for ATC problems is easy for true believer hacks and gives them all a warm fuzzy feeling that they are good people.’
There, fixed it for you.
I’ll add another prospective…… A candidate who comes from a disadvantaged background and manages to pass the training would in fact have some skills that traditional candidates may or may not possess…. you could make a case the DEI folks can handle adversity better. Make no mistake many of them faced a lot of societal problems that traditional candidates have not and they were able to rise above the subtle racism (and not so subtle!)that still exists in America. .
Diversity in any workforce is a strength, not a weakness.
At some places ATC jobs are not paying enough of a premium to attract talent. Add that to costs associated with traveling a long distance for training and I can see a lot of qualified candidates not even applying. Maybe a training center in NYC or nearby would help.
@jns – pay premiums are an issue, but that’s not the primary problem at the N90 facility out on long island where it’s culture – they reject everyone and work hard to protect their OT.
I graduated in 1999 from one of the colleges that did the initial ATC training, Beaver County CCBC. It was an EXCELLENT program and prepared me for the academy and a successful career. Ended up working at a top level (12) tower for 11 years. Now retired, I look back at my college days and realize it was the beginning to a great career. This is the way to go. Let the colleges do the screening.
It is no use being a DEI apologist. This documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiclZKcCr8g
shows how:
* DEI kept down qualified controller numbers so that percentages looked better through the DEI lens;
* Unqualified controllers were hired;
* DEI was a totally unnecessary cause of less safe airspace since it had no corresponding benefits;
* The agency needs to abolish DEI and get back to meritocracy in order to solve its technology problems.
Those who died in last week’s DC crash are “Buttigieg bodies”. Sacrificed on the altar of DEI.
There have been many stories of classrooms only being 80% full while some scored 100 on their “entrance” exam and weren’t picked. Guess what race they were.
Its 60 year old technology and practices. Sometimes older.
Org problems date back at least 30 years as well.
Not to make excuses or assign blame.
But let’s unify around finally fixing the problem.
@L3 — You are not a serious person.
@GaryLeff “@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.”
The proper question to ask is “why does FAA have limited seats in it’s training facilities? Thanks to the class action litigation Brigida v. Buttigieg filed against the Department of Transportation, brought on behalf of people who trained for years in FAA controller programs but ultimately not hired as a result of being white males, we know the answer relates directly back to the FAA’s diversity fetish. The documents are available on the internet for anybody to see and demonstrate how until 2013 the FAA spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its “Air Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative” (AT-CTI) program in universities around the country that together with military retirees created a steady flow of controller recruits from those interested in pursuing careers as Controllers. These recruits spent tens of thousands of dollars, several years of study, and passed tests which qualified them to be Controllers and work in the system. The only “problem” with this recruiting pipeline was that it produced recruits who were deemed insufficiently diverse and it was stopped suddenly and the recruits informed that they would not be hired even after going through the AT-CTI program. The program that eventually replaced it is a scandal in itself – if you were deemed a good science student you were literally disqualified – but the fact remains that the FAA destroyed it’s own training program at the alter of “diversity,” cannot now train controllers sufficient to replace it, and operates facilities with empty seats while the FAA figures out what to do.
So it is very true that FAA lacks the means to recruit and train Controllers, but those problems were created because the FAA destroyed its own established recruiting and training programs so it could get more diverse candidates, and still hasn’t found out how to do that.
Would the accident at DCA have happened with a full complement of controllers? There is rarely only one cause of an accident. It’s fairly clear already that the first in the cascade of failures seems to be the helicopter pilots flying at the wrong altitude. It also seems likely however that the understaffing of the Tower led to this divergence not being caught in time by Controllers or as well communicated from the Tower to the copter as it might have been if they had every seat filled.
@Gary
While I agree with pretty much everything you said, the outdated ATC equipment is not the primary reason for the DC midair collision. While I agree wholeheartedly ATC is seriously understaffed, and the DCA tower was understaffed at the time of this tragedy, the DCA controller failure to act in the face of an imminent collision alert on his radar screen was a major factor in my opinion.
I am a private pilot and aircraft owner for the past 25 plus years. I am painfully aware of the antiquated issues of our FAA in multiple areas, not just ATC equipment and staffing levels. Let me be clear, I’m not faulting the controller that night for the collision, multiple issues contributed to this tragic accident. In my experience, air traffic controllers are amazing professionals that perform an excellent job despite the hurdles thrown their way: they are the heroes that kept us flying safely all this years.
Here is my personal observation regarding the potential causes that led to this tragic accident over the Potomac:
1. The idiotic decision to locate a low altitude VFR military training route right underneath the arrival lane for commercial aircrafts in one of the busiest airspaces in the nation if not the world; this was an accident waiting to happen from the start. In case of a national emergency commercial traffic will be grounded, and military pilots will not be restricted to use training routes in order to accomplish the mission at hand.
2. The idiotic decision to not use ADS-B on military training flights inside this airspace on a TRAINING flight.
3. The idiotic decision to allow the flight to be communicating on a military frequency rather than VHF where non-military pilots can hear the conversation which helps create a mental picture of where the military traffic is. While operating on terminal areas usually can I hear military traffic in contact with ATC using VHF and is immensely helpful knowing their position and intentions.
4. The idiotic decision to allow the Blackhawk pilot to continue operating under visual flight rules, at night, while in close proximity of the arriving path of the commercial airliner.
5. The failure of the military helicopter pilot and the more experienced instructor to monitor and maintain the route’s prescribed altitude restriction of 200 feet AGL during the last portion of the flight.
6. The likelihood that the helicopter pilots identified the incorrect aircraft given the multiple jets arriving close together to DCA at that time. We are unlikely to know this for sure but I can tell you that at night, in congested areas, sometimes is rather difficult to identify the correct traffic ATC points us to.
7. Is unclear from the ATC communication made public if the controller advised the regional jet pilots of the conflicting military traffic coming from their right side. With the helicopter not broadcasting ADS-B data, pilots will not be able to “see” them on their screen (if they have an ADS-B data receiver on board of course) so they may not have known of the helicopter’s position and direction of flight.
***For non-pilots, ADS-B is a signal transmitted from the ground that relays information to onboard displays. You can receive a variety of weather information and in addition, it provides information of other airplanes’ around you including their position, altitude, speed and direction of flight. Many airplanes are also equipped with TCAS which is not dependent on ground signals (AFAIK all commercial aircrafts have TCAS systems on board). However ADS-B (and I believe TCAS as well) only receive data from the aircrafts that are broadcasting ADS-B signals (as required by FAA regulation inside any Class B airspace as the one in DC) so can only display position information from participating aircrafts.
8. In my opinion, the most significant failure that night was the controller’s failure to issue instructions to either or both aircraft to resolve the conflict. As suggested by the data made public, the controller received a collision warning for these aircrafts on his radar. He did call the helicopter as a reaction to this alert and requested visual confirmation from the helicopter pilots instructing them to pass behind the jet. However, judging from the flight track of the helicopter seems clear they were either focusing on the wrong traffic or maybe didn’t have the visual of the traffic at all (again, we will never know for sure). In my opinion what the controller could have done was to advise the helicopter to either stop until the airplane was clear from their flight path, advise the helicopter to temporarily turn left 10-15 degrees insure better spacing or advise the regional jet to execute a go around (the last option of course since they will need some lead time to spool up the engines before being able to execute a go-around maneuver). The fact that he didn’t issue any instructions to deconflict the traffic at that time is puzzling to me.
We can all agree the FAA is in serious need of reform. Air traffic controllers have an extremely stressful and critical job to keep skies safe for all, made more challenging by the antiquated equipment they are forced to use.
@C Arche “While I agree wholeheartedly ATC is seriously understaffed, and the DCA tower was understaffed at the time of this tragedy, the DCA controller failure to act in the face of an imminent collision alert on his radar screen was a major factor in my opinion.”
The controller spoke to PAT25, who confirmed seeing the AA regional jet and requested visual separation. And by the way the outdated tech doesn’t make it easy to see the altitude of each aircraft and doesn’t update in real time. In any case, not ready to blame ATC for this let alone the controller.
Wow! There is so much corruption and incompetence in our government. For the FAA, ATC, it doesn’t even make sense as I bet they all fly!! Are they really just relying on planes being safer than cars?
“ 2. The idiotic decision to not use ADS-B on military training flights inside this airspace on a TRAINING flight.”
The decision to allow the above was made during the Trump Admin in 2018.
@Gary
“The controller spoke to PAT25, who confirmed seeing the AA regional jet and requested visual separation. And by the way the outdated tech doesn’t make it easy to see the altitude of each aircraft and doesn’t update in real time. In any case, not ready to blame ATC for this let alone the controller.”
Again, we agree!
To clarify, I am NOT assigning blame to the controller, once the helicopter confirmed positive visual ID of the jet the legal responsibility to “see and avoid” is the helicopter pilot’s not the controller’s.
I’m just puzzled as to why the controller did choose not to provide additional instructions to deconflict the aircrafts when the helicopter flight path continued on a collision course with the regional jet in spite of the helicopter pilot’s confirming traffic in sight. I have received such instructions while operating under visual flight rules inside busy terminal areas despite reporting positive visual contact with the traffic in question. Granted, I was not there on the night of the accident to fully know what happened, I believe it was reported the tower was short-staffed at the time making the controller’s workload even higher.
The reality is this was a tragic accident and blaming anyone at this time serves no real purpose. In the end is likely the NTSB will assign responsibility to the helicopter crew for failure to “see and avoid” as instructed. Hopefully the FAA will adopt some or all of the NTSB’s recommendations to enhance safety going forward.
Gary, all of the examples to give are from countries that are tiny by comparison to the US., and which have much higher taxes than the US has. Are you suggesting we should have higher taxes? Seems unlike you…
@David P
Canada is a larger country in the USA and – contrary to popular American myth – has a tax burden that is roughly the same as the USA (and which if anything, is less burdensome in many ways than the onerous US system). Canada has a privatized traffic control system which is far more innovative than the FAA (thank NavCanada for your nonstop flights from the eastern US to Asia), far more user focussed, not a source of political patronage or corruption, not a tool for social engineering, and which requires no public funds. The FAA is extremely backwards technologically and organizationally, lags most of the developed world, and consumers far more public resources.
@Mak — David P is clearly trolling, and if he isn’t, then he should be challenged or ignored.
I’m a proud American, and also love Canada and respect Canadian’s sovereignty. Know that many of us are appalled by the recent hostilities directed at our neighbors and close allies.
On the size of the countries, I was surprised to learn that Canada’s total area (9,984,670 sq km) is slightly larger than the USA (9,833,517 sq km), but both countries are nearly the same size (only 1.6% difference). On population, though, as of February 2025, the USA is 8x larger (346 million to Canada’s 40 million). And on their relative economies, it’s the USA at $24.8 trillion (1st in the world) to Canada’s $2.2 trillion (8th). But what good do all these comparisons do anyway?
I certainty appreciate the missions of the FAA, NavCanada, and all entities like them around the world–The civil servants and hard-working people at those organizations make what we do possible. Without them, modern air travel would simply not be as safe or as possible.
As I’ve said frequently at VFTW, I wish the USA had something similar to Canada’s APPR, the Air Passenger Protection Regulations, which, like EU261, requires airlines to provide monetary compensation to passengers when the significant delays or cancellations are ’caused’ by the airlines. Sadly, the USA is ‘giving up’ on consumer protection these days. Some celebrate it. Not I.
The conflict alert “CA” was flashing for approximately 27 seconds before the collision. The controller failed to issue safety advisories (required) and apply merging target procedures required. The equipment was working as designed. This wasn’t an equipment issue. Apparently, there was a local control assist position also open also. Both the local controller and local assist positions duty priority is separation. The had a duty to monitor the aircraft (including the position and altitude of the helicopter) and assert positive control. Neither did. This is 100 percent air traffic error. There are not enough facts to determine whether or not (at this point) to know if DEI played any role. DEI certainly played a role in the lack of hiring 4,000-5,000 controllers during 201-2014 while DEI ideologues stopped hiring to eliminate the AT-CTI program because they misconstrued the program as too white. This certsily led to understaffing and likely fatigue. If the parties involved had a prior history of operational errors (lack of standard separation between aircraft) a review of the data hidden in the controller immunity program (ATSAP) will be revealing.
@Michael Pearson — ‘There are not enough facts to determine whether or not’…No. Stop this. That was absurd speculation when He said it as it is now. Diversity, equity, and inclusion did cause that tragic accident. We patiently await the NTSB’s report.
1990- Saying there are not enough facts- is not speculation. Speculation is saying there ARE enough facts.
There are “not enough facts” either way at this time and any allegations (either way) have no foundation at this point. Patiently waiting for the NTSB report is good. However, it wont change the underlying errors by ATC. Happy to compare backgrounds and experience with you.
Not sure what your issue is- but you need to slowly read my comment. Everything it is true- whether you like it or not.
@Michael Pearson — I came back for you. And, yes, I do read.
If you are as experienced as you suggest, then you wouldn’t be taking seriously this ‘blame game’ or ‘distraction’ tactic by the President on ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’ immediately following this tragedy, especially as it relates to air traffic control, which is one of the most rigorous hiring and training processes (other than maybe our astronauts, special forces, and neurosurgeons).
We need to actually invest more in the ATC people and in better technology for them/us. Gary’s posts about this so-far have been spot-on. Thankfully, VFTW is welcoming of open discussion in these comments–though, that doesn’t mean everyone is going to agree with you.