Comment by TraceWoodgrains
2 months ago
When the methods of selection aren’t selective at all (the “qualified” bar on the AT-SAT only eliminated some 5% of candidates), “qualifying citizens” is a bit misleading.
Yes, academy attrition.
I don’t disagree that the 2013 sequester played some role, but to radically change hiring practices in the wake of the sequester and then blame radically higher washout rates primarily on the sequester doesn’t pass the sniff test.
My basic case is simple: when articles and reports considering the reasons haven’t even mentioned this massive change in hiring practices as one contributing factor, shifting to including this as a contributing factor is a genuinely major change, and while it would be convenient for people if it didn’t impact anything I don’t think you can disrupt the pipeline that much and then shrug and attribute all issues to other things. That just doesn’t make sense.
So are we just going to ignore COVID as an impact on the most recent staffing issues?
Of course not. Multiple things can be (and are) factors at the same time. I'm not asking people to ignore COVID, I'm asking them to not ignore this.
Ok-but you make a sweeping statement about the impact to safety and ATC numbers in the wake of an air tragedy - do you expect me to weigh this as heavily as COVID?
While I agree with the surface evaluation(you have likely lower quality initial candidates(not necessarily race induced) = more academy failures = more pressure on upstream DEV/CFC training) - you'd need to identify a few things such as why the spike didn't occur in 2014-2016 in such large #s compared to 2017, what safety data tells us about this time and how number of flight actions per controller has changed over time after this hiring change.
I find it somewhat disingenuous to consider safety and tie it back to this as you present it as the only cause while failing to mention other inputs.
This is NOT TO SAY you do not have a very valid discussion here - I just am frustrated to see it tied into modern day without hashing through other modern causes - folks who want to point a finger at "disadvantaged candidate hiring." get all the hay they need when nothing else is mentioned.