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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3352 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 26, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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If you haven't read tracingwoodgrain's expose of the mid 10s hiring scandal, that would be a good place to start.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ATC/comments/1aeeg2c/the_faas_atc_testing_scandal_a_quick_overview/ https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1884989215244460398

In 2012 and 2013, the NBCFAE continued pushing this process, with members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push diversity among ATCs. By July 2013, the FAA created a "Barrier Analysis Implemention Team" (BAIT, and I swear I am not making this acronym up). Around this time, the FAA decided to pause the hiring of CTI graduates pending the implementation of the biographical assessment.

The TL;Dr is that there was an attempt to hire more ATCs, but affirmative action demands turned it into a decade-long bias and cheating scandal where tests were given random answers that were then leaked to a "black affinity group" to help them pass. "what is your favorite color" had a correct answer that gave you points towards a job controlling air traffic. Most people who weren't given the answers in advance failed.

These were fully qualified people who had already passed the skills assessment, but were not allowed to become ATCs because of a "biographical" test explicitly designed to get rid of the white guys.

Reddit is of course torn between studiously ignoring this and declaring Trace a Nazi trumper.

Most people who weren't given the answers in advance failed

The BBC said that the workforce went from 59% white men to 55% white men since 2016. I would be interested to know how many ATCs hired during the relevant period were actually black. Are we talking like 10% or like 60%?

The diversity of the FAA workforce, on some measures, has gradually increased in recent years, according to the agency's Office of Civil Rights.

In 2016, under Obama, white men made up 59%, external of the workforce and people with targeted disabilities made up 0.7%.

In 2020, the final year of Trump's first term, 57% were white men, external and 1% of the workforce had targeted disabilities.

In 2023, those figures , externalstood at 55% and 2%.

It had already run its course by 2016, which was the year Congress officially banned the biographical "test." That the number of white men kept falling just indicates they kept up all the other well-documented discriminatory behavior even after the biography debacle.

And regardless of the ratios, trace's article shows that faa hiring had been laser focused on race instead of hiring more qualified people to make up their staffing shortfall. The worst part wasn't hiring unqualified people (because they did all pass the same test), it was refusing to hire as many qualified people as they needed because too many of them would be white.

That the number of white men kept falling just indicates they kept up all the other well-documented discriminatory behavior even after the biography debacle.

Given demographic change and the fact that younger zoomers are less than half non-Hispanic white, surely one would expect the number of white men to fall over time.

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