David has written about this general topic at least once earlier this month. Today I happened to come across some new information published by an anonymous blogger who goes by the handle “Tracing Woodgrains.” In real life he (or maybe she) is a law student who has a part time gig working for the Blocked and Reported podcast, which is co-hosted by Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog.
Through a series of accidents really, Woodgrains became interested in this particular story and spent an evening digging through the voluminous court filings. Today, he (or she) published the results on their own Substack site. This is truly a scandal.
A scandal at the FAA has been moving on a slow-burn through the courts for a decade, culminating in the class-action lawsuit currently known as Brigida v. Buttigieg, brought by a class who spent years and thousands of dollars in coursework to become air traffic controllers, only to be dismissed by a pass-fail biographical questionnaire with a >90% fail rate, implemented without warning after many of them had already taken, and passed, a skill assessment. The questionnaire awarded points for factors like “lowest grade in high school is science,” something explicitly admitted by the FAA in a motion to deny class certification.
How did such an idiotic measure wind up in place? Well, it took years of pressure.
Historically, the pipeline into air traffic control has followed a few paths: military veterans, graduates of the “Air Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative” (AT-CTI) program, and the general public. Whichever route they came from, each candidate would be required to take and pass the eight-hour AT-SAT cognitive test to begin serious training. This test was validated as being effective as recently as 2013.
The FAA has faced pressure to diversify the air traffic control for generations, something that seems to have influenced even the scoring structure of the AT-SAT cognitive test used for pre-employment screening of air traffic control candidates. Leading up to 2014, that pressure intensified, with the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE) leading the push.
The NBCFAE formed a group called Team 7 which met with the FAA and the Sec. of Transportation in 2012 to demand more hiring diversity. The FAA created a Barrier Analysis which concluded “the cognitive test posed a barrier for black candidates, so they recommended using a biographical test first to ‘maximiz[e] diversity,’ eliminating the vast majority of candidates prior to any cognitive test.”
In other words, instead of using the cognitive test to weed people out, the FAA would instead use a generic “biographical questionnaire,” introduced in 2014. This was a nonsense test which nearly everyone would fail. And the results were, predictably, a disaster with “70% of CTI administrators agreed that the changes in the process had led to a negative effect on the air traffic control infrastructure.”
But there was one group that benefited from the new process, the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE). One of its members who was also an FAA employee sent out information to other NBCFAE members on how to pass the biographical questionnaire. This made news at the time but the FAA carried out an internal investigation which went exactly as you might imagine it would.
The FAA recently concluded an internal investigation which cleared the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong. In a statement sent to members of Congress last month the FAA claimed its Office of Security and Hazardous Materials Safety (ASH) had conducted an investigation into the allegations of cheating and favoritism. The FAA claims it was a thorough investigation which reviewed relevant audio recordings and documents. The statement says, “ASH found no specific information or evidence supporting claims that Human Resources employees improperly provided an advantage to ATCS applicants affiliated with the NBCFAE…” But it appears FAA investigators may have lacked key evidence. According to the FAA legal motion, its investigators refuse to release 29 emails and attachments, “…either sent or received by Mr. Snow in his capacity as a member of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees” because it is considered non agency email.
Eventually the use of the questionnaire as a first test to weed out applicants was ruled out but people who’d been screwed over by the new process filed lawsuits and that eventually became a class-action suit known as Brigida v. Buttigieg which is still making its way through the courts.
The whole thing sounds like a right-wing fever dream but as the saying goes, it’s real and it’s spectacular. And that’s precisely why you haven’t heard much about it from the mainstream media. It’s a pretty clear case where a DEI pressure group— the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees—convinced the FAA to drop standards and then further gamed the new system from the inside for the benefit of the group’s members. All of this including the FAA “investigation” which cleared those involved stinks to high heaven but we’re not supposed to talk about that because we can’t let the right have a win on DEI at this moment in time or, you know, ever.
Finally, here’s one of the Shelton Snow emails which Woodgrains pulled out as a teaser for all of this.
a taste of things to come pic.twitter.com/8BhtGowRJD
— TracingWoodgrains (@tracewoodgrains) January 29, 2024