The Full Story of the FAA's Hiring Scandal

This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.

Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.

Working effectively in ATC without burnout hanging over your head constantly favours a certain amount of neurodivergence. A certain kind of delight in detail, delight in predictable progression of system. The overload needs to invigorate , not fatigue.

This doesn’t make ATC professionals better people. It doesn’t make them smarter. It doesn’t make them superhuman. It makes them better at a certain specific kind of work, and the same traits probably make them worse at many others.

We need to stop treating neurodiversity as if it’s a scale from good to bad. It’s just a kind of diversity.

Just like physical diversity. Strong, big frames make a person better suited to certain kinds of work. Lithe, diminutive builds make great aircraft mechanics. Thin, tall builds favour other work, short and stocky morphology makes other jobs more comfortable and easier.

Why should neurodiversity be any different? People are good at different things. Genetics plays a huge role in morphological and neurological development. is there really any difference, or is neurodiversity just hidden morphological diversity?

Different is not a value judgement.

> I know, I know. The evidence is unambiguous that the bar was lowered, deliberately, over many years and with direct knowledge. The evidence is unambiguous that a cheating scandal occurred. The whole thing is as explosive as any I’ve seen, and it touches on a lot of long-running frustrations.

This is likely the most common complaint about DEI, it provides grounds for race based discrimination and lowers the bar. I am sure this was not the only government agency that did something like this and it will really hurt the Democrats chances of success for the future. Their core messaging has really boiled down to "black and brown people, women and LGBTQ are our constituency" and predictably this has turned a lot of people off the party. Especially since they haven't really delivered much even for these groups.

The story is really worth a read. The writing speaks for itself:

> The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).

For those curious, you can try the FAA's air traffic controller test for yourself here: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

After trying it, I recommend reading the article for yourself.

I don't have a problem with hiring qualified people instead of meeting quotas but the fact that the ones pushing this are them selves the most unqualified people is just beyond me.

This is so depressing. This is the sort of DEI effort that gives the rest a bad name.

It should never, ever be about hard quotas.

It absolutely should be about using some contextual information (factoring the person's school environment in) and challenging assumptions about stereotypes so that you are not deciding who is best on assumptions but on evidence.

Complaints about controller shortages and 6-day weeks being the norm and whatnot go back into the 00s.

Why the hell was anyone doing anything to restrict the hiring and onboarding pipeline in the first place?

The alleged motivation barely even matters. Heck considering the attrition rate of the career path it would arguably be acceptable if they juiced their hiring pipeline with their preferred demographics. I've seen companies do this and be better off for it. But to do so at the cost of missing qualified applicants is egregious.

America should help its poor and underprivileged groups through stuff like progressive taxation, better social service, and extra resources for schools in poor areas. It’s not perfect, but kind of works. It helps people to achieve better educational outcomes already in their childhood.

Discriminating against everyone else in school or work application processes is just wrong and insane way to handle things.

There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race, nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the isle.

I'm fairly certain this was an example of overfitting and Freedman's Paradox, not deliberate cheating.

Let's say you have a completely random data set. You generate a bunch of random variables x1 through xn and a random dependent variable y. Then you poke around and see whether any of the x variables look like they might predict y, so you pick those variables and try to build a model on them. What you end up with is a model where, according to the standard tests of statistical significance, some of the xs predict the y, even though all the data is completely random.

This is a much more likely explanation for why the answer weights on the biographical assessment were so weird than some conspiracy between the contractors who developed the test, the FAA staff, and the black employee organization.

They had a dataset that was very skewed because historically there have been very few black controllers, and so was very prone to overfitting. The FAA asked the contractor to use that dataset to build a test that would serve as a rough filter, screen in good candidates, and not show a disparate impact. The contractor delivered a test that fulfilled those criteria (at least in the technical sense that it passed statistical validation). Whether or not the test actually made any sense was not their department.

This is a great read - thanks for sharing. This provides valuable context to this whole situation that I was wholly unaware of.

I saw this posted on the aviation subreddit and after gaining a few dozen comments, it seems to have been deleted. Strange times since it is seems this is very relevant there. I'm glad an article like this can exist here.

I look at stories like this and a key moment of failure that is obvious to anyone that has ever deployed code is don't make a change and roll it out to 100% of all devices/servers immediately. Feels like there is just some basic things missing from folks brains that gradual release and validation of the impacted cohort isn't a built in instinct for us.

> Based upon your responses to the Biographical Assessment, we have determined that you are NOT eligible for this position.”

Wow.

> In a moment of dark irony, the sort of diversity-focused work she’s passionate about—not lowering the bar, but inspiring more people and providing them with mentorship and opportunity to reach it

Discrimination by race, gender and sexual orientation (aka DEI, jokingly disabbreviated as "didn't earn it") always results in lowering the bar. No exceptions. Either the candidate earns a position fair and square, in which case you don't need "DEI", or you are discriminating against someone else more deserving, and therefore lowering the bar overall. What's ironic is this is setting minorities back decades. In 2000 nobody cared what color you were or whether you had a penis. In 2025 the assumption is that a minority is a "DEI hire" unless proven otherwise. And bah gawd there are real exemplars out there to support that narrative.

DEI is simply a framework. Like Agile, it can be well implemented if the person implementing it understands the problems it is trying to address, along with its limitations.

And just like Agile, it can be poorly implemented when the person implementing it does not understand its purpose, or hates the framework and cynically implements it under protest.

In both cases, the poor implementations should not justify throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but so it goes.

There's a very high amount of political topics lately, and it's very uninteresting to non-US readers. Please stop.

Related:

America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933840

"Diversity hiring goals" is the pretty new propaganda word for ugly old racism.

One of the reasons that these attempts to increase diversity are such a mess is because it is illegal to have a straightforward quota.

If these agencies could just have a policy like "Group X is %Y of the population. This agency must hire at least %Y/2 from group X", there would be no need to have these sneaky roundabout methods of increasing equity.

Some important points that this article glosses over.

The FAA Academy where all flight controllers are trained is way over-subscribed. Recruiting policies aside, I can find no evidence that the FAA wasn't training as many controllers as it could through its academy. This fact remained true through the Trump 1 administration into the Biden admin, except for COVID. The pandemic was understandably a huge disruption, as were government shutdowns.

We can know this from the FAA Controller Staffing reports from 2019 (Trump 1 before the pandemic but after Obama) and 2024 (Biden). The 2024 report has been scrubbed from the FAA website when I last checked, but is available through the wayback machine:

2019: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20241225184848/https://www.faa.g...

There appears to be no urgency in Trump 1 about this issue in the report. Things changed in 2023 when an external safety report revealed the staffing problem and suggested improvements.

https://www.faa.gov/NAS_safety_review_team_report.pdf

As a result, hiring almost doubled between 2010 and 2024, with 1800 controllers hired in the last year. More importantly, the FAA followed the report recommendation to use CTI schools as additional academies:

https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/10/amid-hiring-surge-...

It seems like the Biden administration took real action to address a problem that had been unfortunately present and unacknowledged for many years.

See a chatgpt analysis comparing the two reports here: https://chatgpt.com/share/679eb87f-c4fc-800a-a883-3b7f79e06d...

Bad examples of DEI do not invalidate DEI, they invalidate bad implementation of policy

Having a workforce the is purely white men is sub optimal and needs to be addressed. But it needs to be addressed carefully and with good management.

It does not need to be addressed like this

If you want to see a good example of DEI in action look to New Zealand. Forty years ago there were almost no Māori lawyers in New Zealand.

The deans of the law schools got together and decided to do something about it.

It worked, now there are many. Now it is much much harder for the state to accomplish the systematic impoverishment of Māori people and things are turning around

It takes decades done properly, but creates huge improvements in society

This story is a story of doing it catastrophically wrong

My brother in law is a pilot, and has colleagues who were impacted by this. What surprised me is that he blames Obama for this. I typically ignore his blame of Obama as some racist tirade, but this seems to point to Obama pushing these changes?

Trace is on here, though not very active (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TraceWoodgrains)

This is a truly excellent article and shines a light on a real problem and how it affects people in a real way. It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways (though the ire was mostly directed at marketing efforts by corporations).

A story of a smaller, not that harmful, example of this laziness and stupidity: I was talking to a friend just a couple of weeks ago who’d left software engineering to become a paramedic around 2012 after experiencing misogyny in the workplace. A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn a few weeks ago about applying to a software engineering role. Her reaction was understandably irritated that the basic skill of reading her work history seemed missing before reaching out.

I do think that, particularly in the USA, the refusal of the left in power to critically engage with this topic in a thoughtful way has left the space open to Trump and people like him to turn it into a toxic rallying cry for supporters. I see something similar in the UK where Labour ministers are slammed by left leaning media for taking positions to address the public’s concerns in a way that’s more thoughtful that how the Tories were handling it, as the far right in the country has toxified the issue for them.

i will prefer driving to taking flights for the coming years

for international flight, i will avoid USA airlines absolutely.

> The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation

Ah yes, we carefully investigated ourselves and we have not found anything wrong. Thank you for your concern.

> Our organization, he said, “wasn’t for Caucasians, it wasn’t for, you know, the white male, it wasn’t for an alien on Mars,” and he confirmed that he provided information “to minimize the competition.”

It's like we're talking about a talent show not air traffic controllers.

I mean, shit, this just fuels Trump and his supporters' rhetoric and validates all the rambling and craziness involved around this topic.

Who needs enemies when you got friends doing this kind of stuff and shooting everyone in the foot. It's like Biden pardoning his son after talking about corruption and nepotism.

I really need a ChatGPT summary of this article

From what I'm seeing, this program started in 2014 and was killed in 2016.

Seems like this is dredging up an old issue to boost today's culture-war narrative.

It's ridiculous to me that we're back in the world of "politician blames bad thing on wokeness" > "everyone has to spend months discussing this as if it's a sane idea."

wow.. our society really has a tendency to overcorrect regarding social issues

I don’t think a test with R^2 of 0.27 should be used to completely reject candidates. It should have weighting proportional to its explanatory power.

Claiming that such a test worked is in my opinion BS. It was clearly being overused.

Exactly what do the liberals (the author) want to happen? He seems to still believe that "lowering the bar" is the right and good thing to do moving forward?

The article presents a dramatic narrative that implies the FAA deliberately lowered its hiring standards by replacing the traditional system with a biographical questionnaire. It’s clear from the account that many qualified CTI graduates (note: CTI schools are third parties) were unfairly filtered out from the applicant pool, and there’s documented evidence of a cheating scandal that casts further doubt on the process. However, the reality is nuanced. Although the new process may have altered who got to start the journey, every candidate still had to pass the FAA’s rigorous and extremely selective training and certification— which remain the true measure of an air traffic controller’s capability. In an ideal world, we could put everyone through this process to see who passes.

Critics argue that this change, driven in part by diversity goals, compromised the quality of candidates entering the pipeline, but the actual FAA hiring and training criteria remained exactly the same as before. It's an extremely difficult and selective program. The ongoing issues in air traffic control, such as understaffing and controller fatigue, stem from a range of systemic challenges rather than a simple lowering of the qualification bar.

This isn’t a straightforward case of DEI lowering standards; it’s about how changing the initial screening affected a well-established pathway. The FAA aimed to broaden the applicant pool, and while that decision led to unfair outcomes in unusual directions, controversy, and discontent among CTI graduates, it doesn’t translate to less competent controllers.

Instead of bickering over who gets a job that fundamentally should be automated by now, they should focus on developing technology that doesn't rely on people. Or at least uses automation for 95% of the job and delegates to a person only when rare exceptions arise. ATC is ripe for disruption from AI, and now that we have LLMs and speech models on par with human ability, its a short walk in the park to imagine a fully automated ATC model.