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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38532 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Recently, the tremendous U.S. record for air safety established since the 1970s has been fraying at the edges. The first three months of 2023 saw nine near-miss incidents at U.S. airports, one with two planes coming within 100 feet of colliding. This terrifying uptick from years prior resulted in the FAA and NTSB convening safety summits in March and May, respectively. Whether they dared to discuss root causes seems unlikely.

So how many of those near-miss incidents can be tracked to diversity hires? Surely it should be possible to find out who the people involved were. If they all turn out to be WASP guys, I would find the putative fallback case that they didn't care about their job because they were demoralised by seeing a black transwoman manager somewhere to be rather weak.

That's the question indeed. Should we take anything from the fact that we aren't getting the names and career histories of any of the people responsible for these events? If there were WASPs behind any of them, do you think they would be immediately named and publicly fired to demonstrate the organization's commitment to "reversing structural racism" instead of obscuring the details, brushing the events under the rug, while insisting that we have no idea what's going on but it's definitely not a competency crisis due to diversity-based hiring practices?

I don't know if it's even possible to track that data with any specificity, but it's worth noting that the FAA is currently defending itself from a 1000-person class action lawsuit from applicants whose test scores were purged and were prohibited from even applying to work as air traffic controllers, because the FAA's HR department had decided its applicant pool was too white. So I'd guess there are, at the very least, about a thousand diversity hires who were chosen over more qualified applicants.

Surely it should be possible to find out who the people involved were.

If you have access to who was Landing Control, Ground Control in the tower at a particular airport on a particular day or who was the pilot of what flight for any of those given incidents. None of that information is publicly available. FAA RWS reports aren't providing any of that (even the involved airlines are not in those).

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