The FAA's Real Air Traffic Control Crisis Runs Much Deeper

https://viewfromthewing.com/collision-on-final-approach-sparks-dei-blame-game-the-faas-real-air-traffic-control-crisis-runs-much-deeper/

by js2 • 1 year ago

75 99 1 year ago

viewfromthewing.com

skellington3• 1 year ago

Uh oh, you posted something factual that invites questions. HN not going to like this...

>>Facing pressure to diversify an overwhelmingly white workforce, the FAA began using a biographical test as a first screen of candidates. Minority candidates were fed “buzz words” to bump their resumes up to top priority. Apparently saying your worst subject in school was science served as a golden ticket. Correct answers to the take-home biographical questionnaire were given in their entirety. These questionnaires were later banned. This was dumb, but it’s not the problem.<<<

Ok, besides the fact that this, along with the evidence that the magic keywords were given in secret to special groups, is blatantly illegal, after they banned it, what did the criteria become? What is the criteria today?

Did they switch to a primarily merit/skills based assessment of candidates? Did they lower standards and if so, by how much? Have they tracked their assessment performance against real-world performance across the ATC pool?

zug_zug4• 1 year ago

So how it works is there's a selection process to go to ATC school/training.

Just getting into training doesn't mean you get to be a controller, you get tested a lot and hard with very representative work (a close relative failed this actually), and only get to be an ATC if you pass well enough.

I think maybe you misread the article, because it explicitly says "Note that leaving behind qualified applicants from Collegiate Training isn’t why we don’t have more controllers"

skellington3• 1 year ago

I saw that. But it's laced with political overtones. The question is not just # of controllers, it's the quality of controllers.

Have they lowered the standards to get through ATC school? What is the truth?

Just asking so I have ammunition against right-wing arguments.

lttlrck• 1 year ago

But if the standard to get into school was lowered (not saying it was as I have no evidence), that it would alter the output. If not in quality then in volume.

rayiner5• 1 year ago

Not only was it blatantly illegal. How do you trust the overall judgment of the people who signed off on it? Who thinks it’s okay the make a mandatory screening test for air traffic controllers where the scoring rubric is basically random and has a 90% failure rate unless you have secret information from affiliated groups.

What else did they think was a good idea?

viraptor2• 1 year ago

Good context for the "magic keywords" from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42901362 which is now folded:

The list is on the last page of this document: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17Vi9dDtZvbwHDafrygRG... It looks like it's a page that was photocopied from a book about how to write a resume. It's a list of dozens of incredibly generic verbs like "manage", "analyze", "administer", "make", "improve", "design", etc. pretty much any resume will have at least some of these verbs.

So it's not a secret code, but rather "tailor your CV for the job, ok?"

tac19• 1 year ago

I know I shouldn't get my news from Reddit, but the consensus there is that the entire FAA crisis (and both recent crashes in the US), is Trump's fault. I don't know the details, but apparently he "gutted" the FAA last week, on the first day he took office, leaving the FAA unable to protect the flying public.

readthenotes1• 1 year ago

"I know I shouldn't" --> then don't

CrazyStat• 1 year ago

The air traffic controller shortage long predates Trump; here [1] for example is a statement about it from 2015.

[1] https://www.natca.org/2015/12/09/natca-discusses-air-traffic...

CamperBob2• 1 year ago

The so-called "DEI" hiring policies currently in effect, however, were instituted under Trump: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/30/faa-dei-t...

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears...

lumost2• 1 year ago

I'd argue that in our quest to maximize income inequality, we've made many necessary careers non-viable from a living standards perspective.

These non viable careers include pilots, atc, teaching, and a large portion of the skilled trades and more. While a non viable career path will still have some individuals in the field due to sunk cost, passion, or inertia - a shortage is inevitable.

Supply and demand should rationalize this - but if training is long, wage visibility is low, and sunk cost is high, and negotiation power is low - its entirely possible for a employers to collectively push the prevailing wage below the level which makes the job worth it to enough individuals.

9283409232• 1 year ago

This sounds like mixed messaging. The head of the FAA was forced to resign because he fined SpaceX for safety violations and President Musk did not like that. However, I've been hearing about ATC problems my entire life so around 40 years.

jml7c5• 1 year ago

No, that was only ten days beforehand and focused on people at a high level. There's no good reason to believe it had an effect on this crash.

boothby• 1 year ago

This "quit or risk getting fired" email was sent to federal employees on January 28, the day before the crash: https://www.opm.gov/fork and that includes air traffic controllers and their supervisors [1]

If you don't think that could have had an impact on morale, and therefore attentiveness, I can only wonder if you've never witnessed large-scale layoffs first-hand. They're pretty common in tech. From what I've seen in our industry, first and second hand, almost nobody gets any real work done for several days after getting such an email. The ATCs don't have such luxury, but instead, they continue their life-and-death job with an elevated level of stress.

And we know that one of the ATCs was dismissed early that day. Was it because undue stress, caused by that email, was impacting their performance? If so, will their supervisor be brave enough to say so in public? We don't know. But this is a substantial reason to suspect that the administration's actions could have had a direct impact on the people in that control tower.

[1] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/tom-temin-commentary/2025/01/...

fabian2k• 1 year ago

There wasn't enough time for Trump to affect his specific incident. But longer term it's certainly not a good idea to send traffic controllers a letter asking them to resign (the letter went to all federal employees) and to interfere with staff for purely political reasons this way.

namaria• 1 year ago

I don't know about you, but weird emails about a mass voluntary resignation program would take my focus out of any work.

If suddenly I have to worry about my job security and the possibility of losing a bunch of colleagues and becoming overworked there's no way I'd be able to be all there.

Handprint4469• 1 year ago

Reddit comments seem reasonable until they talk about something you're an expert on. Then you realize the "Reddit consensus" is worthless: uninformed at best, actively misleading at worst.

A corollary to this: people who don't have expertise in any field might never realize this, and will believe whatever Reddit (or HN, Twitter, etc) tells them that matches their previous-held beliefs.

I recommend people become technically proficient at at least one thing in their lives. It gives you an anchor to reality (you can easily recognize bullshit), and it will cure you of the illusion that most people know what they're talking about.

AceyMan• 1 year ago

relevant citation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect?wprov...

duxup• 1 year ago

Even worse when you run into those folks who a surface level knowledge and sound knowledgeable but somehow come up with the worst possible conclusions.

Then the rest go around repeating it ad nauseam.

zerocrates2• 1 year ago

There's definitely a purposeful political effort to string together true facts -- Musk pushed out the incumbent FAA administrator, they didn't name an acting administrator until after the crash, there's a government-wide hiring freeze, Trump disbanded an aviation safety committee, the controllers like everyone else got the resignation "fork in the road" emails, the new transportation secretary is a guy who got semi-famous being on "The Real World" -- into a narrative that Trump caused the DCA crash.

The reality is that most of this either had no effect or not enough time to have an effect, but whether it has bite politically remains to be seen. My view on it is that it's an explicit attempt to use Trump's own tactics against him.

From what information is currently available, the actual investigation will likely blame pilot error on the part of the helicopter pilot, but also decades-old systemic problems with ATC understaffing, crowded and awkward airspace at DCA squeezed too much by increased traffic and no-fly zones, and years of "accepted practice" that normalized an unnecessarily dangerous situation, all of which are solidly bipartisan problems. (The Philadelphia crash I haven't read much about; I would guess it probably won't have as much in the way of broadly applicable takeaways for the aviation system, but it coming in such quick succession certainly helps build narratives.)

roland35• 1 year ago

I think it may be unfair to pin each of those factors individually on the crash, but I do believe that collectively when you have an administration reaking havoc and chaos across all federal agencies, things are gonna happen.

_DeadFred_• 1 year ago

How well do you function days after the head of your company is unexpectedly pushed out in a hostile take-over, you have zero direction given from above, and you are sent an email from the person behind the hostile takeover, that doesn't work at your company and doesn't fit in the management structure in any way saying you should quit? Would you say you would function better or worse than prior to that occurring?

Spooky23• 1 year ago

Any accident like this is an accident - none of the pilots or ATCs woke up and decided to kill dozens of people. (Including themselves in the pilots case)

That said, conditions in the ATC facility were likely a contributor, and the overall management and control environment of the FAA created those conditions. Frankly, the Elon stuff is insane, and who knows if the people who approve the overtime, etc exist anymore.

Trump deserves blame for the circus and harm created by his administration’s irresponsibility and recklessness. But he didn’t crash a plane.

nineplay• 1 year ago

reddit is all rage bait at this point and if the big subreddits aren't over 50% propaganda I'll eat my hat. The recent election shows how out of touch the front page is and you can conclude that the average poster is hopelessly out of touch or that the 'average poster' doesn't really exist or that the 'average poster' is there to make people feel complacent or make people feel indignant or make people feel superior.

You are supposed to be outraged. You are supposed to think that the 'dumb libs' have no legitimate points, that they only believe 'orange man bad' and therefore everything they say can be completely disregarded.

Stop reading, sit back, and figure out what you think without feeling like you have score points over some imaginary opponent.

zug_zug4• 1 year ago

tl; dr -- "Pinning Last Night’s Disaster On Diversity Hiring Is Unsupportable"

suby• 1 year ago

I think it's unfortunate if this is your only take away.

Two things can be true at once:

A) Diversity hiring is unrelated to the crash

B) There is a real scandal with hiring and the FAA

What I have read so far about this situation is outrageous. My understanding is that in 2014, Obama appointed a head of the FAA who wanted to diversify the workforce.

They introduced a biographical questionnaire which had rather arbitrary criteria for passing. It appears to have been explicitly designed to fail people that do not know the magical answers. The failure rate was 90%.

This is not the only example, but perhaps the most egregious questions: you are asked what your best subject was in highschool. If you answered science, you get 15 points (a substantial amount). No points for any other subject. Next, you're asked your best subject in college. If you answer history, you get 15 points. No points for any other subject.

Here is an alleged recreation of the test: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

There are supposedly voicemails in which they helped select candidates pass this biographical questionnaire by providing their preferred race/gendered candidates with the answers. I haven't been able to find a voice mail online, but Fox Business reported that these voicemails exist.

Per a 2016 Yahoo Finance article, an internal FAA report falsely cleared the employee of wrongdoing.

It's my understanding that there is currently a lawsuit making its way through the courts regarding this. It's also my understanding that some allege that the problems are not all resolved yet with hiring, despite the questionnaire being withdrawn in 2018. I'm not sure of the specifics of how there may still be problems with hiring and the FAA.

https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752091831095939471

rayiner5• 1 year ago

What allegedly happened at the FAA wasn’t just “let’s try to have a more diverse workforce.” It was “let’s collide with racial advocacy groups to make a test that would allow us to deny white applicants because they won’t have the secret pass words.”

Anybody who was involved in this obviously has severely compromised judgment. Who can trust anything else they did?

Eisenstein• 1 year ago

Both of those links come from that same person, tracewoodgrains, who links the documents on their google drive. Looking through the documents, it appears there was a case that happened in 2014, which was investigated in 2016. They found an FAA employee in a New York state office held a teleconference about how to apply to the open positions. People asked him questions and he answered them. The investigate was closed noting the following:

"OIG reviewed official government emails for the period January 2013 to July 2015 and did not identify any additional matters or information of specific interest to this investigation.

AEO-500’s ROI Case Number AHQ20150170 did not develop information that demonstrated HR employees gave improper advantages in processing the applications of ATCS candidates affiliated with the NBCFAE. A review of the ROI did not identify any issues that warranted additional review in this investigation.

The findings in this investigation did not warrant a referral to a federal prosecutor."

What exactly makes 'diverse' candidates more likely to answer 'science' and then 'history' on those questions? Are you saying there was a conspiracy to create hard to answer questions on the test and then give out the answers to diversity candidates?

Occam's razor says this was a bullshit 'behavioral' test that meant nothing but disqualified a lot of candidates, and someone who knew that gave others a way to bypass it to get their foot in the door in one instance.

lakis• 1 year ago

From the website "The FAA has discontinued use of this Behavioural Assessment since 2018."

That was 7 years ago.

comeonbro3• 1 year ago

I'm sure this is multifactorial and the other factors are probably as or more important, but especially if you are familiar with the very egregious specifics of the FAA diversity hiring scandal (https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...), "is unsupportable" here is a strong claim that is playing the classic and well-worn role that "there's no evidence" often does in bad journalism: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a...

apical_dendrite5• 1 year ago

I dug into one of the claims in the blog, and as far as I can tell, he's completely misinterpreting the evidence. The blog says:

An FAA employee and then-president of the NBCFAE's Washington Suburban chapter, provided NBCFAE members with "buzz words" in January 2014 that would automatically push their resumes to the tops of HR files.

It's true that this person said that in the email, but if you actually look at the list of buzzwords, it's clear that this person was bullshitting and inflating his own importance (or maybe just fundamentally misunderstanding something). The list is on the last page of this document: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17Vi9dDtZvbwHDafrygRG... It looks like it's a page that was photocopied from a book about how to write a resume. It's a list of dozens of incredibly generic verbs like "manage", "analyze", "administer", "make", "improve", "design", etc. pretty much any resume will have at least some of these verbs. There's just no way you could build a system that would use these verbs to secretly screen in resumes of people who are in the know because everyone uses these verbs. A far more plausible explanation is that this guy was trying to make himself sound more powerful than eh really was.

The email this person sent is awful, but it seems to be one person's very misguided attempt to push an agenda, not some sort of secret plot by FAA.

Xiol32• 1 year ago

Amazes me how much the AI generated slop artwork puts me off the actual content of the article, which I'm assuming is of greater quality.

dkasper• 1 year ago

Makes you assume the article is also at least partially generated by AI

elif• 1 year ago

Makes you wonder if an LLM wouldn't be the perfect air traffic controller.

Only one on duty? How about 100 agents continually monitoring

throwawaysleep• 1 year ago

I assume the issue is that stock photography costs money.

thwarted• 1 year ago

And writing has costs too, so if someone is going to look for a way to avoid paying for photography, they are probably also looking for a way to avoid the costs of writing.

gedy• 1 year ago

This is just the modern equivalent of clip art laden docs from the "desktop publishing" days, it'll pass.

ck22• 1 year ago

So is someone making jokes of our reality? No really, think about it:

RONALD REAGAN AIRPORT has a disaster because of decades-long crisis of too few air-traffic controllers available?

Reagan fired thousands upon thousands of ATC because they dared to ask for proper wages.

That seems like an odd place to put his name.

(oh and this had nothing to do with DEI, just like all attacks on DEI are ridiculous and just people being trolls for entertainment)

WillyWonkaJr3• 1 year ago

The air traffic controller union was asking for a 32-hour work week and a $10,000 a year raise. The counter offer would give them salaries higher than the private sector, but keep the work week at 5 days instead of 4. So they went on strike.

After the workers disobeyed a Federal judge's orders to return to work, they were fired.

EDIT: It's so funny that if you make any comment that doesn't tow the left wing narrative here on HN you're down voted. I'm not right or left, but find it kinda sad.

dml2135• 1 year ago

There are privately-employed air traffic controllers?

ck22• 1 year ago

Do the reasons for firing them (looked it up, over 11,000 !) even matter?

Because the remainder and future employment prospects for ATC simply looked at how they were treated and how they had absolutely no options and decided to NOPE NOPE out of that profession.

And so here we are:

naming airports after people whose actions eventually led to the specific reasons for the disaster

whycome2• 1 year ago

What about the meta-metaphors of a literal "american airline" full of civilians minding its own business and following the rules and then literally t-boned by an american war machine. Also, they were leaving Dwight D. Eisenhower airport in Kansas. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of allied forces in WW2 who warned against the "military industrial complex". Wichita has so many air-related industries there that it was once known as the "Air capital of the world" and it's still its primary industry.

There's probably also something there about the fact that the plane was a Canadian one (Bombardier) whose name means "the guy releasing the bombs in a bomber". And also, the Bombardier company was started by a guy just trying to get people around (mass transit) in the winter time (via the first good snowmobiles B7, B12 - powered by american-made engines from Ford/Chrysler). And the helicopter was from a US company started by a Russian immigrant (Sikorsky) who immigrated to the US to escape the Russian Revolution after making bombers (that hold bombardiers) in WW1. And the helicopter crashed into a river, Potomac, named after the Algonquian word for a native american city and was itself named after a native american war chief (Black Hawk) that fought alongside the Canadians/British in the war of 1812 (where the white house and capitol were set on fire) to "push away white settlers". The helicopter left a fort (Fort Belvoir) named after a former slave plantation. The airfield it departed was named after a WW2 aviation engineer (Davison) and where Army One, the helicopter that carried Eisenhower, used to be based. In addition to the Black Hawks, the airfield is also home to 4 cessnas used in civilian air patrol - made in Wichita.

mrcwinn• 1 year ago

The facts seem to be that a helicopter diverted from its published course (300 feet rather than 100 feet) and made a reckless, fatal mistake. TCAS was too late or not usable at that low altitude. The controller - who had previously warned of inbound traffic and passed responsible to the pilot by putting them in visual separation, which was in turn confirmed - was also too late.

Hire more controllers? Sure, maybe, but I can't help but think this was very avoidable using technology and training.

formerly_proven• 1 year ago

Visual separation at night in dense airspace has no checks and no margin for error. There is no way for anyone to tell whether the crew is tracking the correct aircraft or whether they are correctly guessing its attitude etc.

That practice is plainly asking for an accident to happen.

PaulRobinson• 1 year ago

In the UK I know traffic is indicated with a relative position and altitude: “traffic at your 10 o’clock, 2 miles, altitude 1500 feet”.

The ATC for the Reagan crash did not indicate a relative or absolute position, only referencing “the CRJ”, which might be hard to identify in the dark, and the helicopter pilot may have assumed he “had visual”, but was looking at a different aircraft.

pstuart3• 1 year ago

That article makes a very valid point that they need new technology and training, but can't due to internal failures and the whims of congress.

What happened with this accident is a wake call but nothing will change -- the current administration is interested in destroying institutions, not building them up.

euroderf• 1 year ago

I imagine this one hits pretty close to home for Congresscritters. You might see some action.

EA-3167• 1 year ago

TCAS has limitations as you suspect. Below 1000 feet it doesn't make Resolution Advisories (RA) because of the very real risk that it could steer a pilot into terrain. Below 500 feet it doesn't deliver aural warnings, only the visual ones. These are both limitations of the tech as it exists right now, and in theory pilots should be aware of this and be extremely cautious.

Personally I'm in favor of the "Swiss cheese" model of accidents, in which a lot of errors might routinely happen, but they're blocked from leading to an accident by other measures. When however the holes in the cheese line up... boom. There's evidence that there was a culture of accepting near-misses along this route, there's evidence that the training flight ignored best practices, there was a single ATC person managing rotary and fixed wing in that airspace, it was night time, the jet was making an approach to the shorter runway, etc etc.

On any given night one or two of these factors might have lined up, but not all of that. That night however they all lined up, and people died. This notion of failure in depth is the driving force between the total nature of an NTSB investigation, they don't want to find the LAST failure, they want to find ALL of the failures.

dzhiurgis2• 1 year ago

How much or what parts of atc can be automated?

If have a feeling it’s what musk will try to do.

multjoy• 1 year ago

Then people will die.

cameldrv• 1 year ago

The way this airspace is set up is very unusual where there is only about 150 feet of separation between the approach and the helicopter route. Normally there would be at least 500 feet and more likely 1000 feet of separation. Also the controller did call out the traffic but he wasn’t that specific about where it was, just that it was a CRJ, which you can’t even really tell at night. He also didn’t call out the traffic to the jet. To be fair to the controller though, he was working two positions simultaneously due to a controller shortage. He might have been able to be more helpful if he wasn’t so busy that night.

davkan2• 1 year ago

The controller was specific about the location of the CRJ during initial communication with the Blackhawk.

Traffic just south of the Woodrow Bridge, a CRJ, it's 1,200 feet setting up for Runway 33.

Subsequent communications in the following minute from both parties were not specific.

jrs235• 1 year ago

Flying the helicopter mission with only one crew chief may also have contributed if the chef was distracted or not looking/watching out the left side of the helicopter for the airplane, possibly looking out the right side and/or watching the airport.

hiatus2• 1 year ago

Why isn't air traffic control run by the military in the US like it is in other countries?

wombatpm2• 1 year ago

In the 1980’s Reagan fired all members of PATCO, the air traffic controller union and replaced them with military personnel until a new cohort could be trained.

p_l• 1 year ago

And the military traffic controllers were not ready for civilian traffic

viraptor2• 1 year ago

Is that actually common? I did a spot check of few big ones and couldn't find an example.

hiatus2• 1 year ago

I'm not sure it is common. I was thinking about Brazil when I made this comment but further review makes me believe it is not all that common worldwide.

whycome2• 1 year ago

here are the bits as I've come to understand them:

- there was a similar incident just the day before where a helicopter's path came close to a similar plane. It was high enough, so the plane received the TCAS (traffic alert/collision avoidance) 'resolution advisory' warning and made the proper actions.

- warnings from TCAS are inhibited under 1000ft because they would be full of false/nuisance warnings that close to the ground and potentially suggest unsafe evasive maneuvers.

- the helicopter was following a designated route along the river as the general guide

- the helicopter went a bit higher than the designated ceiling (and that probably happens pretty often).

- the incoming airplane was following the 'glideslope' of the 'instrument landing system'

- the helicopter crew may have been wearing night vision goggles. such goggles can affect ability to see periphery. Also, nighttime lights of a city can appear bright and distracting.

- the helicopter crew of 3 may have been less than other similar flights

- airplane was initially looking to land on the longer runway #1 but was asked by the ATC to use #33 instead (their smaller plane could use it fine). They take awhile considering it and then accept it. They had to slightly change the angle of their approach. This may have been a choice to simplify the workload for the ATC controller.

- There was one controller handling both the plane and helicopter traffic and one left earlier

- the plane and atc use VHF to communicate while the military helicopter uses UHF, thus, the plane had no awareness of any communications with the helicopter

- the ATC mentions the presence of the plane to the helicopter. the helicopter says they see them and request "visual separation" which is basically 'we can see them, so we can move around them accordingly'

So, it's possible the helicopter was looking at a different plane/set of lights when they mentioned that they had them in sight. Another plane had just taken off from runway 1. It's also possible that they saw the CRJ plane and just misjudged its location (maybe due to the turn they were making for the alignment to land?).

As for systems issues, it seems there's no way for ATC to know just which plane a helicopter (or other plane) is referring to when they 'confirm' seeing it.

It's interesting to note that some airlines actually forbid "visual separation" at nighttime due to the safety concerns (misidentifications, conflicting city lights, human perception). (eg, KLM (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rdapQfJDAM)) US ATC might prefer visual separation which means that planes can be closer together in lining up to land whereas an instrument approach means a bigger gap. (More planes landing means more money for airports?)

It seems like the 'glidescope' area when landing should be treated like a 3d extension of the runway -- keep planes and craft out of it during a plane's landing. Anything crossing into it should be treated like a "runway incursion" (which is also clearly a problem that the US needs to fix...In someways, this crash might be seen as an extension of that issue?)

There needs to be a way to verify just which planes a craft is "confirming visual' of - especially at night.

robbbed• 1 year ago

So what as normies can we do about this? Boycott air travel? Write congress? I'm seriously considering postponing any upcoming air travel. If a core component of safe air travel is antiquated and lacking in resources then it seems incredibly foolish to risk our lives any further taking this form of transportation.

The FAA's Real Air Traffic Control Crisis Runs Much Deeper

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