The source article includes primary material that strongly contradicts your anecdote. The policy change arrived in 2013, and there are materials from that same year indicating DEI.
For example, here's an FAA slide from 2013 which explicitly publishes the ambition to place DEI as the core issue ("- How much of a change in jo performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?"):
The evidence in this source does not discuss cronyism, although I believe you that it could have been relevant to your personal experience; it's just false to claim the issue as a whole was unrelated to DEI.
Actually the source article is quite clear about the implementation of cronyism - friends were emailed the answers to the bizarre hiring test and others were not. It is typical behavior of machine politics - give good jobs to those who support you and block others from having them. Certainly the FAA did have DEI goals, but you can't attribute this patronage to them.
It says the answers were sent from the FAA to members of the "National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees". It went to all of them, not just friends. It was DEI, not cronyism.
Soon, though, she became uneasy with what the organization was doing, particularly after she and the rest of the group got a voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:
You might be confused by this line:
As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly’s friends in the program encouraged her to join the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees
That may or not be cronyism, but once she joined, the whole org got the answers, so clearly it was aimed at getting more Blacks through the process.
I found one thing odd, which was outside of the scope over the zero sum game being fought here.
If you are understaffed, AND you are hiring traditionally, it would make sense that recruiting people would go up. That would mean diverse hires anyway - based on the article, it seems that even increasing diversity was not between undeserving candidates and ideal candidates (the second band section of the article)
Is the third variable at play here a lack of funding from congress for recruitment?
If you are trying to reach race/gender based quotas, you simply cannot hire white men anymore when they are 90% of the applicants. Or at least, you must attempt to minimize it as much as possible. Math.
And the FAA stopped doing that. They revamped the hiring process to screen against the White applicants. The way they did it, is also highly insulting to Black people, btw.
The answer to the question you've quoted is important, since it could be "none", "a little bit", "a lot", "any amount", each of which has very different ramifications. There is no answer on the slide ...
They decided that at least some amount was acceptable - the minimum score on the AT-SAT was changed so that 95% of test takers would pass because the original threshold where 60% passed excluded too many black applicants. This was despite previous studies showing that a higher score on the AT-SAT was correlated with better job performance.
If we step away from the traffic controllers nonsense for a moment, the actual problem sounded like a military pilot to me. It's my understanding that people who have a family line of pilots go into that funnel knowing a specific nepotism related result occurs such that when it comes time to become a commercial pilot you are probably from such a family.
I have no idea if helicopter pilots work the same way or are starting to work the same way, but whenever I see a BS move like this I think that there's probably an opposite interpretation that doesn't fit what their demographic wants to hear.
Robust systems are designed to avoid single points of failure. Humans are fallible. So, for example, both the pilot and the air traffic controller are intended to be paying attention so that if one of them makes a mistake the other can pick it up. If the pilot is making an error, the air traffic controller gets on the radio to tell them they're getting too close to another aircraft, in time for them to course correct.
If air traffic control is under-staffed, now the warning the pilot gets might come a minute later than it would have otherwise, and already be too late. Then you no longer have a robust system and it's only a matter of time before one of the pilot errors the system was designed to be able to catch in time instead results in a collision.
There's obviously some number of mistakes one party can make in a single incident such that the other has a limited probability of preventing an accident. If flight control is the robustness, it would take flight control with a lot of free time to be reducing those mistakes in pilots by following up on all sorts of errors unrelated to an incident until a pilot rarely makes multiple overlapping mistakes.
> If the pilot is making an error, the air traffic controller gets on the radio to tell them they're getting too close to another aircraft, in time for them to course correct.
They did.
Pretty sure military aircraft just don’t have to listen to them.
The source article includes primary material that strongly contradicts your anecdote. The policy change arrived in 2013, and there are materials from that same year indicating DEI.
For example, here's an FAA slide from 2013 which explicitly publishes the ambition to place DEI as the core issue ("- How much of a change in jo performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?"):
https://archive.ph/Qgjy5
The evidence in this source does not discuss cronyism, although I believe you that it could have been relevant to your personal experience; it's just false to claim the issue as a whole was unrelated to DEI.
Actually the source article is quite clear about the implementation of cronyism - friends were emailed the answers to the bizarre hiring test and others were not. It is typical behavior of machine politics - give good jobs to those who support you and block others from having them. Certainly the FAA did have DEI goals, but you can't attribute this patronage to them.
I think might be misreading the article.
It says the answers were sent from the FAA to members of the "National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees". It went to all of them, not just friends. It was DEI, not cronyism.
Soon, though, she became uneasy with what the organization was doing, particularly after she and the rest of the group got a voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:
You might be confused by this line:
As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly’s friends in the program encouraged her to join the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees
That may or not be cronyism, but once she joined, the whole org got the answers, so clearly it was aimed at getting more Blacks through the process.
3 replies →
"Friends" here means members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.
11 replies →
I found one thing odd, which was outside of the scope over the zero sum game being fought here.
If you are understaffed, AND you are hiring traditionally, it would make sense that recruiting people would go up. That would mean diverse hires anyway - based on the article, it seems that even increasing diversity was not between undeserving candidates and ideal candidates (the second band section of the article)
Is the third variable at play here a lack of funding from congress for recruitment?
If you are trying to reach race/gender based quotas, you simply cannot hire white men anymore when they are 90% of the applicants. Or at least, you must attempt to minimize it as much as possible. Math.
37 replies →
> AND you are hiring traditionally
And the FAA stopped doing that. They revamped the hiring process to screen against the White applicants. The way they did it, is also highly insulting to Black people, btw.
2 replies →
The answer to the question you've quoted is important, since it could be "none", "a little bit", "a lot", "any amount", each of which has very different ramifications. There is no answer on the slide ...
They decided that at least some amount was acceptable - the minimum score on the AT-SAT was changed so that 95% of test takers would pass because the original threshold where 60% passed excluded too many black applicants. This was despite previous studies showing that a higher score on the AT-SAT was correlated with better job performance.
5 replies →
If we step away from the traffic controllers nonsense for a moment, the actual problem sounded like a military pilot to me. It's my understanding that people who have a family line of pilots go into that funnel knowing a specific nepotism related result occurs such that when it comes time to become a commercial pilot you are probably from such a family.
I have no idea if helicopter pilots work the same way or are starting to work the same way, but whenever I see a BS move like this I think that there's probably an opposite interpretation that doesn't fit what their demographic wants to hear.
Robust systems are designed to avoid single points of failure. Humans are fallible. So, for example, both the pilot and the air traffic controller are intended to be paying attention so that if one of them makes a mistake the other can pick it up. If the pilot is making an error, the air traffic controller gets on the radio to tell them they're getting too close to another aircraft, in time for them to course correct.
If air traffic control is under-staffed, now the warning the pilot gets might come a minute later than it would have otherwise, and already be too late. Then you no longer have a robust system and it's only a matter of time before one of the pilot errors the system was designed to be able to catch in time instead results in a collision.
There's obviously some number of mistakes one party can make in a single incident such that the other has a limited probability of preventing an accident. If flight control is the robustness, it would take flight control with a lot of free time to be reducing those mistakes in pilots by following up on all sorts of errors unrelated to an incident until a pilot rarely makes multiple overlapping mistakes.
5 replies →
> If the pilot is making an error, the air traffic controller gets on the radio to tell them they're getting too close to another aircraft, in time for them to course correct.
They did.
Pretty sure military aircraft just don’t have to listen to them.
1 reply →