Despite rising dangers, FAA says it will target hiring people with severe 'intellectual' and 'psychiatric' disabilities

WASHINGTON, DC- A “plug door” falls off an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 shortly after takeoff, putting the entire aircraft at risk. Close calls on runways and in the skies at our nation’s major airports are now a routine occurrence. Airlines are now using the flight deck to fulfill diversity quotas. In short, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is going to get people killed. It is almost like they're intentionally trying to kill people.  

Air traffic control towers across the country have been dealing with a number of terminations after many refused to submit to the jab during COVID-19. Many chose to take retirement instead of submitting to an experimental vaccine. 

To make matters worse, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has lowered standards for hiring to meet diversity quotas. At one time, the entry-level exam to qualify to attend air traffic control training in Oklahoma City was extremely difficult, so the exam was “dumbed down” to expand the pool of candidates. Our nation’s airports and skies are now seeing the results. 

According to the Mountain States Legal Foundation, the FAA abandoned merit-based training in favor of DEI. “Candidates who had trained for years and who had scored high on aptitude tests were dropped from consideration in favor of lesser-trained people who fit the right biographical profile,” they wrote in a release. 

They also wrote of a case, Brigida v. Chao, which was initiated by the FAA’s 2013 decision to abandon a university-sponsored Collegiate Training Initiative (CTI) program that had been in place since 1991 to train and test future controllers. 

The suit claimed the FAA’s new hiring protocol eliminated the CTI program in favor of a “biographical questionnaire” to screen out candidates who didn’t check a particular box on a questionnaire. 

That led to “thousands of qualified and highly-trained applicants” who had received the education and training while accumulating significant debt to be passed over. In their place, the FAA hired off-the-street candidates who passed the biographical questionnaire. 

The Biden administration has done nothing to solve the issues plaguing America’s skies. Several recent incidents at airports in Boston, New York, Austin, and New Orleans have highlighted the problem. In all four of those incidents (and many more), only the skill of pilots prevented what could have been unimaginable disasters and loss of life. 

Given the high-profile incidents, especially over the past year, one would think that they would seek to hire the most qualified and shelve the woke DEI nonsense. Instead, the Pete Buttigieg-led FAA is doubling down. A piece in the New York Post this weekend said the FAA is “actively recruiting workers who suffer ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions” under the agency’s DEI initiative, which is spelled out on the FAA’s website. 

“Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” the FAA website says. “They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.” 

That sounds like the exact demographic of people you want controlling the destiny of your aircraft as you hurdle through the skies at 500 mph. Or, as you descend into Atlanta-Hartsfield International Airport, the busiest in the world. 

In an unbelievable case of a “crock of you-know-what,” the FAA said the initiative is part of the FAA’s “Diversity and Inclusion” hiring plan, which claims “diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond.” 

That begs the obvious question: where precisely will these individuals be placed within the FAA? Except for perhaps someone missing an extremity or suffering partial paralysis, anyone with other disabilities doesn’t belong anywhere near an air traffic control tower or en route center. The agency’s guidelines were last updated during the term of Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, the failed former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who somehow found himself appointed to an important position by Dementor in Chief Joe Biden. 

The FAA and Buttigieg have been under increasing scrutiny over the past few years due to a number of high-profile incidents and system meltdowns. More recently, the FAA is under fire for its approval of the Boeing 737 Max 9, which last week in Oregon suffered what could have been a catastrophic equipment failure on the Alaska Airlines jetliner. Had the aircraft been much higher, it would have suffered a catastrophic depressurization, which at the least would have caused a number of deaths and injuries on board; at worst, it could have brought the plane down. 

In that case, the manufacturer of the “plug door” that blew out on the aircraft, Spirit AeroSystems, recently saw a TikTok video posted that showed an entire crew of females dancing around to Shania Twain’s “I Feel Like a Woman” while touting its program of diversity. It is pretty much guaranteed that people who fly on airliners don’t give a crap about the diversity of the people who built the aircraft; they just want to make sure the plane isn’t going to fall out of the sky. 

The Alaska Airlines incident caught the attention of a number of people, including Space-X founder Elon Musk, who posted to his X account:

“Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety?” 

Conservative commentator Matt Walsh wrote recently in an op-ed, “The DEI Rot in the Airline Industry is Way Worse Than You Think.” 

United Airlines last March announced a new hiring initiative called the Aviate Academy, which is designed to address a shortage of pilots and “diversify a workforce that is overwhelmingly white and male,” CBS News reported at the time. The company bragged that its first class was 80% women or minorities. 

One of the graduates bragged, “It looks nothing like the industry. But guess what it does look like. It does look like the demographic we serve. It looks like our passengers.”  So evidently, only 20% of the “demographic” United “serve[s]” is only 20% white males. 

None of this apparently matters to the Biden administration’s FAA, which has taken its eye off the ball much as his military has and focused on being as woke as they can. In the statement announcing the new initiative, the FAA added:

“Because diversity is so critical [apparently more than competence], FAA actively supports and engages in a variety of associations, programs, coalitions, and initiatives to support and accommodate employees from diverse communities and backgrounds. Our people are our strength, and we take great care in investing in and valuing them as such.” 

Fox News Digital reached out to the FAA to seek comment on what exactly disabled individuals would fill. 

“The FAA employs tens of thousands of people for a wide range of positions, from administrative roles to oversight and execution of critical safety functions. Like many large employers, the agency proactively seeks qualified candidates from as many sources as possible, all of whom must meet rigorous qualifications that, of course, will vary by position,” the FAA replied. [emphasis added]

However, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chair of Do No Harm, comprised of healthcare professionals, medical students, and policymakers working to protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology, told Fox that just as with the medical field, the aviation industry must work to protect its travelers. 

“The aviation industry has a responsibility for traveler safety just as the healthcare industry has a responsibility for patient safety. These responsibilities outweigh other factors when considering applicants to work in those fields. People with disabilities who can successfully complete the task should never face discrimination,” Goldfarb said. 

“Unfortunately,” Goldbarb said, “identity politics is creating opportunities for so-called oppressed groups by lowering standards for entry into those fields and thereby endangering the safety of those which it’s designed to serve. Some endeavors simply do not lend themselves to identity politics,’ he added. 

The FAA said that disabled individuals would be given “reasonable accommodations” on the job. 

Just wondering if the FAA and its feckless leader Buttigieg will provide “reasonable accommodations” to the families left behind after one of the administration’s DEI initiatives literally crashes and burns.