I have a cool app called Flightradar24, which tracks all commercial airline flights. I use it a lot because my kids travel a lot. One of the things that becomes patently obvious is that there are a lot of planes in the air at any given time and the vast majority don’t crash. When they do, though, it’s absolutely devastating, and shakes people’s faith in the entire air travel industry. That faith is shaken even more when we learn that merit may have nothing to do with the air traffic controllers directing those planes.

Part of the reason people are shaken by air crashes is because, when a commercial flight crashes, the casualties are so high. The recent collision between a helicopter and a commercial flight at Ronald Reagan National Airport killed everyone involved, both on the plane and the helicopter.

These crashes are also devastating because they remind us how utterly helpless we are. When we drive, even though there’s always the possibility of a rogue driver doing something so horrific that there’s no avoiding the accident, we still feel as if we have some control. If we’re smart, responsible, and attentive, and if we maintain our cars well, we can mostly be safe.

Air traffic control center on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Public domain.

The thing about airplanes, though, is that our safety is entirely out of our hands. We must trust the airline maintenance policies and workers, the pilots, and the air traffic controllers to do their jobs right. We’re most likely to trust the pilots—as long as they’re not suicidal—because their immediate fates are tied to ours. It becomes more dicey when we’re looking at people who control our lives, without their decisions directly affecting them.

That gets us to the air traffic controllers (“ATCs”). If you’ve been around awhile, you may remember when the ATCs went on strike in 1981, something President Reagan defined as a “peril to national safety.” When 90% refused to return to work, he fired 11,345 of them. People were terribly worried about whether travel would be safe after that, but, while there were accidents, there were surprisingly major downstream safety problems. That’s probably because the new hires were properly qualified.

And that brings us to the point of this essay, which is the real possibility that, in the name of DEI, many current ATCs attained their positions through race-based applications and fraud, rather than actual qualifications. That, at least, is the only conclusion to be drawn from a Daily Mail exposé about a DEI activist who gave minority applicants to the ATC program the answers to an entry exam that was already tailored to exclude white men.

The story begins in 2014, during Obama’s presidency, when the government rejiggered the questionnaire for determining which people should enter the air traffic training program. You and I might expect that the questionnaire tested people on their ability to do mathematical calculations (i.e., speed and distance), who had good visual skills (i.e., reading the radar), who were intelligent and had previously related experience, who had quick reactions times, and who showed coolness under pressure. I mean, I’d want that in an ATC.

But that’s not what the Obama administration was looking for. Instead, it created a questionnaire that was intended to find and give preference to minority applicants without explicitly asking their race:

The aspiring controllers were given extra credit for being ‘risk takers’, in the bizarre multiple-choice quiz to secretly prioritize DEI applicants.

It required virtually no knowledge of aviation to pass but top marks were awarded to candidates who ‘need a great deal of time to complete assignments’ and ‘take chances very often’. 

And playing three or more sports in high school was rated more valuable than having a stint as an air traffic controller in the military.

[snip]

The majority of controller jobs had previously gone to veterans or standout graduates from government-accredited college programs who earned a place on a ‘qualified applicant register’.

They had all passed a rigorous, peer-reviewed aptitude test, the AT-SAT, which prioritized numerical ability, decisiveness and complex problem solving.

‘You might get a question saying an airplane takes off and is climbing at 380 feet per minute at 230 miles per hour, how high will it be after 28 minutes?’ explained Sam Fischer, a professor in the aviation department of Florida State College at Jacksonville.

‘You had to do that in your head. There was no pencil, no pen, no calculator.’

When a 2012 ‘barrier analysis’ suggested the AT-SAT posed a problem for minority applicants, lobbyists from the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE) succeeded in getting it scrapped.

Potential hires would still have to take a shorter cognitive test known as the AT-SA - but first they had to navigate a ‘biographical assessment’, taken online with no time limit.

To emphasize its importance, the biographical score was worth 2.5 times the cognition portion when determining whether a candidate would land a job and progress to the FAA’s Air Traffic Controller Academy.

Read the whole thing here if you want a look at the last ten years of hiring in our dystopian DEI ATC system.

Given the mass racial pander that the entry exam had become, you’d think that would be sufficient to favor a whole new cohort of minority applicants. Sadly, though, some were still struggling—and that’s where Shelton Snow comes in. According to the Daily Mail, Snow is “a top ‘DEI’ activist” and “air traffic operations supervisor.” He was “caught on voicemail allegedly offering minority air traffic controller candidates the chance to cheat in a make-or-break entry exam.”

The audio-clip alleged shows Snow offering screenshots to minority applicants showing how to answer specific questions.

The Daily Mail acknowledges that it doesn’t know how many—if any—people took advantage of Snow’s alleged help. What is known is that, because the test was so weird, and had little to do with people who had actually useful skill sets, everyone was struggling to pass it:

Critics say the quixotic blend of multiple-choice questions was designed to screen out elite, mostly white students from FAA-accredited college courses who excelled in traditional aptitude tests.

Nonetheless, it was proving incredibly tricky for anyone to pass – with a 90 percent failure rate – when Snow decided to intervene.

Maybe no one cheated. Maybe the ones who cheated still become top-flight ATCs. But we don’t know.

What we do know is that, when it comes to flying, not only are we, the passengers, out of control, but we are at the mercy of people who have opted to staff our life-or-death ATC system with people chosen for the color of their skin, rather than their actual abilities.