Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine one of your buddies comes up to you with a big smile on his face and tells you he just got a brand-new job. He’s vague on the specifics, but he says it’s a federal government gig that pays six figures. It didn’t require any kind of bachelor or associate degree, or a physical fitness test. But your friend does tell you that, as part of the application process, he had to complete a couple of computer exams.
Then, as the conversation goes on, your friend recounts a few of the questions from one of those exams. He tells you the questions went something like this: “Would more classmates remember you as humble or dominant? What age did you first start making money? How many high school sports did you participate in?”
At this point, you’re thinking to yourself, this is a little odd. What kind of job would ask questions like this? This all sounds kind of dumb and unserious. So your friend reassures you that he had to complete a second test as well. This second test asked slightly more challenging questions, like, “What’s the difference between the numbers 8 and 6?” If you answered “2,” then congratulations, you could also pass this test.
Now, at this point, if you had to guess what job your friend just landed, what guess would you make? Based on all of the information provided, and knowing this is a government job, what would you think? Well, you’d probably make some obvious assumptions right away. You’d think, at a minimum, that whatever job your friend is gunning for in the federal government, it can’t be that important. And, indeed, there are a lot of very unimportant jobs in the federal government. Jobs that were made for incompetent and unimpressive people. Maybe your friend got a gig in the Department of Education, for example, or the IRS. That would make sense.
But then imagine that your friend informs you that he is not working in some frivolous government agency that contributes nothing of value to humanity. Imagine he tells you that, in act, he applied to be an air traffic controller. And after just a few months of training, very soon, he’s probably going to be directing planes with hundreds of people onboard. This may be a hypothetical thought experiment, but it is very much grounded in reality. I didn’t make up any of the test questions I mentioned earlier. They’re all based on real air traffic control exams or practice exams.
Now ten years ago, this little hypothetical scenario would’ve been unthinkable. But everything changed very quickly in 2013, when the Obama administration embarked on a plan to diversify the ranks of air traffic controllers. Obama’s FAA chief announced that he intended to “transform” the agency, which includes air traffic control, into a, “more diverse” workplace. As part of that plan, air traffic controllers no longer needed to take a more demanding cognitive assessment before being hired. Instead, all they needed was a high school diploma and the ability to speak English. All of the tests were dumbed down to the point of being absurd.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
The result, over the past decade, has been exactly what you’d expect. The number of air traffic controllers who are not white men has significantly increased, according to the FAA. Coincidentally, so have the number of near-collisions involving commercial airlines. According to a database maintained by NASA, which relies on data self-reported by pilots, the number of “near misses” has more than doubled over the past ten years.
In just the past year, there have been more than 300 near misses involving commercial airlines, averaging more than five per week. Just to emphasize that point again: they diversified the FAA, and near-misses immediately doubled. Correlation does not prove causation, but it can point towards it. And in this case there is a giant, glowing sign pointing in that direction.
Of course, only a handful of these incidents receive any major media attention. So it’s easy to underestimate the scale of the problem, no matter what media outlets or social media platforms you frequent. That’s why, in a moment I’m going to go through some of the near-misses that have gotten very little coverage.
But I’ll start with an incident that did get some attention from the national news media, because it helps put the broader problem into some context. This incident happened in July, when air traffic controllers put two aircraft — an Allegiant air passenger plane and a Gulfstream jet — on a collision course, shortly after the Allegiant plane took off from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. Watch:
The report goes on to mention that the pilot’s last-minute evasive maneuver was so extreme that it sent one flight attendant to the hospital.
If there’s anything reassuring in this clip — something that might make you feel a little better if you, like me, plan on boarding a plane in the near future — it’s that automated software called “TCAS” saved the day. This is a system that relies on transponders that are installed on all domestic aircraft. As you heard, it’s capable of sounding an alarm in the cockpit, and directing planes away from one another if there’s a risk of an imminent collision. It’s a failsafe for when air traffic controllers mess up and command planes to fly into one another.
But TCAS isn’t perfect. It certainly doesn’t prevent all mid-air collisions. In 2002, for example, a passenger jet and a DHL cargo plane collided over Germany, because one pilot followed TCAS while another listened to the Swiss air traffic controller — who, incidentally, was later murdered by a surviving family member of several passengers. In fact, just this year, TCAS failed to prevent a mid-air collision at an international airport in this country — Houston Hobby. Fortunately, and miraculously, no one died as a result of that collision, but it was very close to being disastrous.
This incident illustrates the obvious, which is that the failsafe is not capable of solving all mid-air collisions, nor is it designed to. Particularly when planes are close to the ground, and covering a lot of ground very quickly in close proximity to one another, things can happen too quickly for the system to respond.
Those are the kind of incidents that are happening more and more often. A month ago, at Portland International Airport, for example, an Alaska Airlines jet turned directly into the path of a departing Skywest airliner. Air traffic controllers didn’t notice this until the planes were right on top of each other. In that case, the Alaska plane was trying to land, but it had to execute a “go around” because of high winds. Around the same time, the air traffic controller tells a departing Skywest plane to turn right. But for some reason, the Alaska pilot responds to that command, and turns to the right — straight into the path of the Skywest plane. And the controller completely misses it until pretty much the last possible moment. Radar data shows that the planes came within 250 feet vertically and less than 2,000 feet horizontally.
An even closer near-miss took place in August at San Diego International Airport. Controllers cleared a private plane to land right on top of a Southwest plane. They noticed their mistake just before the private plane hit the Southwest jet on the runway. The plane got within 100 feet of the Southwest passenger jet. There’s no TCAS system that can prevent something like that, either. If the visibility had been worse, and if the controllers didn’t notice the problem, there would have been a collision. Hundreds of people would likely be dead.
You can go to YouTube and find many clips showing these near misses. We won’t review all of them here, but I do want to share one that may be the most shocking recent example. It’s from JFK airport in New York City earlier this month, which is one of the busiest airports in the world. An American Airlines passenger jet was lining up for its approach, when air traffic controllers told a small private plane to line up for a parallel runway. But the private plane didn’t follow that instruction. Instead it made a beeline for the same runway the American Airlines plane was going for. At no point in this process did controllers notice the problem. They also didn’t notice that the private plane didn’t read back the right clearance. Instead, the only person who noticed anything wrong were the pilots of the American Airlines jet, when the private plane was right on top of them:
“If we hadn’t bailed out, we would have collided.” That’s what the pilot of an American Airlines Airbus said, just a couple of weeks ago, at JFK airport. There was apparently no TCAS instruction to take evasive action. (If there had been, the pilots should have called it out. But they didn’t.) There was certainly no ATC warning. One of the pilots just looked out his window, or maybe saw something on his screen, and realized a plane was coming right for him. And he realized it just in time, to save a lot of lives.
I could go on and on. There’s the Southwest Airlines flight on July 2nd, which had to abort its landing at New Orleans International Airport because a Delta plane was taking off from the same runway. The passenger planes came within seconds of hitting each other. That same month, an American Airlines plane nearly crashed into a Frontier Airlines jet on takeoff, because nobody — including the ground controllers — noticed that the nose of the Frontier Airlines jet was jutting out into the runway. Earlier this year, in February, an air traffic controller routed a Spirit Airlines flight within 200 vertical feet and 700 horizontal feet of a cargo plane. You get the point.
It’s true that we can’t blame this dramatic rise of near-misses solely on diversity and equity efforts, single-variable explanations are rarely sufficient. This is a complex issue. For one thing, when Ronald Reagan fired more than 10,000 air traffic controllers who went on strike in 1981, in violation of federal law, a bunch of new controllers needed to be hired. And many of those controllers recently hit retirement age — all at once. That creates a staffing crunch. That’s all true.
But that staffing crunch was foreseeable. It’s been obvious it would happen since Reagan fired the controllers more than four decades ago. The problem is that, instead of providing incentives for competent people to become air traffic controllers — say, by raising the salary, and providing more training and offering better hours — the government chose to do what it always does. It drastically lowered standards, in the name of equity.
And the Biden administration is still proud of it. Right now, on the FAA’s website, you’ll find this line:
The mission of the FAA involves securing the skies of a diverse nation. It only makes sense that the workforce responsible for that mission reflects the nation that it serves.
Actually, that doesn’t make sense at all. The job of the FAA, and air traffic control, is preventing catastrophic accidents where a lot of people die. It doesn’t matter what the workforce looks like. Everyone knows this, because deep down, everyone knows that diversity doesn’t matter. That’s why no passenger on a plane has ever cared in the slightest about the racial makeup of the guys in the cockpit, or the ones on the ground directing the plane. Just like nobody has ever cared about the diversity of fire departments when they’re trapped in a burning building, and nobody has ever cared about diversity among brain surgeons when they have a tumor that needs to be removed.
When it comes down to it, when it really matters, diversity doesn’t matter. And we all know it.
But that’s all the FAA has been focused on lately. Just a year ago, the FAA launched yet another initiative to “diversify” the ranks of air traffic controllers — meaning to hire people based on qualities other than competence. The FAA calls this the “Be ATC” campaign. The agency says in a press release that:
Building on last year’s successful campaign to receive more applications from women and other underrepresented groups, the FAA will again work with diverse organizations, host Instagram Live conversations, and work with social media influencers.
That’s what the FAA is working on right now. We’ll be getting more women and more “underrepresented groups,” courtesy of Instagram influencers. That much is clear. What’s not clear is whether we’ll be getting a workforce that’s capable of preventing two jetliners, full of passengers from colliding with one another while they’re each going in excess of 500 miles per hour. And that’s alarming, to say the least, because every single week we’re discovering that the existing crop of air traffic controllers is barely capable of doing that.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILY WIRE APP
Keep in mind that this is all happening even as airlines also begin their own quest to add more equity to their ranks. It was only a couple of years ago that United Airlines pledged to diversify its pilots. Many other airlines have followed suit. Soon we will have diverse air traffic controllers directing diverse airline pilots, while thousands of lives hang in the balance — and inevitably many are lost in the process.
You often hear aviation experts say that nothing ever gets fixed until a lot of people die, which is not a thought that will help cure your anxiety about flying. But it’s true and it’s been true throughout the history of aviation. Planes didn’t have wind shear detectors until commercial airliners started crashing in bad weather, just shy of the runway. TCAS wasn’t mandatory until there were a lot of mid-air collisions. Pilots didn’t have to de-ice until an Air Florida plane nose-dived into a Potomac after sitting for too long on the tarmac on a snowy day.
What this means is that, if history is any guide, soon enough, we may finally start to get some solutions to the air traffic control debacle we’re seeing right now all over the country — from Portland to San Diego to New Orleans to New York, to pretty much any other major metropolitan area in this country. That’s because, as problematic as it may be for the Biden administration’s equity agenda, we’re closer than we’ve been in more than a decade to a disaster of truly historic proportions. And when that happens, a lot of people will die. And then, and only then, when it’s too late, will anything be done about the problem.