When a military helicopter and a commercial airliner collided over Washington earlier this year, it sparked a flurry of conspiracy and counter-conspiracy. To President Donald Trump, though, there was an obvious likely culprit: DEI hiring in air traffic control.
Predictably, the media-left lost their minds. How dare the Bad Orange Man! Well, sure, it did come across as opportunistic snarking.
But did the Donald actually have a point?
Writing in 2023, Steve Sailer made an ominous prediction: we were coming to the end of a golden age of airliner safety and DEI is to blame. There hadn’t been a fatal crash of a commercial flight of an American airline for 14 years. Getting there took a lot of hard work by the sort of diligent, hard-working, heterosexual men who are the Untouchables of modern culture.
Congressmen tend to fly a lot to get home to their districts, so they’ve often taken airline safety fairly seriously. For example, after the 2009 crash, which involved a poorly paid, inexperienced copilot, Congress greatly increased the number of hours of flight time that pilots need to become airline pilots. At this point, it’s hard to get those prerequisite hours without either being a military pilot or the kind of guy who loves flying so much he works long hours as a flight instructor in small planes.
Similarly, back in 1989, Congress had the Federal Aviation Administration develop with three dozen colleges the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative. This provided education for non-engineers in what you need to know to be an air traffic controller.
But you then still had to pass the FAA’s hiring test, the Air Traffic Control Selection and Training aptitude exam, which probed for “numeric ability, prioritization, planning, tolerance for high intensity, decisiveness, visuality, problem-solving, and movement detection,” all good things in an air traffic controller.
That era has come to an end. Like so much of the corporate world, Air Traffic Control recruitment prioritises ‘diversity’ far above such footling, ‘white’ stuff, like competence or diligence.
Not surprisingly, America’s biggest demons, straight white men, are those most likely to love aviation so much that they make these sacrifices to attain their dream job of airline pilot. Similarly, those damn white men flocked to air traffic control programs at colleges.
The biggest culprit in the prioritising of ‘diversity’ over ability was Barack Obama, who had spent his whole career leveraging his blackness to his advantage.
So, as I predicted in 2008, after a moderate first term helped Barack Obama get reelected in 2012, in 2013 Obama let loose his people to pursue their agenda of Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE).
White House officials decided in 2013 to purge the hiring list of over 1,000 graduates of the air traffic control course at colleges like Arizona State who had also passed the cognitive exam for hiring. Instead, it made air traffic control job-seekers start over with a new “biographical” test to “add diversity to the workforce.”
Blacks were complaining that less than 10 per cent of FAA workers were black. Obviously the problem couldn’t be because blacks tended to not ‘act white’ by, y’know, studying hard and doing their homework, instead of shooting hoops. It had to be ‘racism’.
Which makes it doubly ironic that the new ‘biographical test’ panders so hard to anti-black stereotypes. Under the Obama regulations, candidates got maximum points if their lowest grades were in science. On the other hand, they got just two points if they had a pilot’s certificate and no points were awarded for having a Control Tower Operator rating or having Instrument Flight Rules experience. If they were unemployed for at least three years – maximum points again.
They tackled ‘racism’ by literally rewarding blacks for being lazy, dumb and unemployable. Totally not racist at all.
It doesn’t help that we’re fast losing the few remaining Boomers in the workforce (short pause while Good Oil regulars recover).
A lot of industries were getting by before Covid by keeping competent baby boomers employed into their dotage. But air traffic controllers have a mandatory retirement age of 56, so the oldest controllers are now Gen-Xers born in 1967. The coming Competence Crisis is on track to hit air traffic control earlier than many other professions.
By 2025, apparently. Just two years after Sailer warned us.
But I’m sure we’ll all feel better, as we plummet to Earth in fiery, screaming hell, that we were killed by a disabled black tranny instead of a dull, old, white-male heterosexual.
