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The FAA, in its effort to comply with the government’s DEI push, believes the agency will be well-served if they hire people who are completely paralyzed or have major mental health issues.
The Federal Aviation Administration is actively recruiting workers who suffer “severe intellectual” disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.
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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.”
Read that again. “Diversity,” not actual qualifications are integral, according to the FAA, to ensuring planes don’t drop out of the sky. And yes, it is right there in black and white on the FAA website:
People with Disabilities
Individuals with targeted or “severe” disabilities are the most under-represented segment of the Federal workforce. The People with Disabilities Program (PWD) ensures that people with disabilities have equal Federal employment opportunities. The FAA actively recruits, hires, promotes, retains, develops and advances people with disabilities.
The FAA meets the goals of the PWD Program through a variety of practices:
Targeted Disabilities
Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring. They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.
Many organizations and agencies do hire folks who have disabilities. And, in several cases they thrive at their job. That said, I have major concerns about the FAA’s hiring practices when it comes to those with psychiatric disabilities ie; severe mental health problems. Especially in light of the fact that many of the FAA positions are in high-stress environments.
How about the person who is completely paralyzed? I’m looking through all the open job positions at the FAA and I honestly can’t think of one that would suit. As you scroll through the list of those positions the FAA would like to fill, let’s step back and be honest and realistic here. How many of these are a good fit for someone living with full paralysis or for one who has a psychiatric disability?
We need people in those roles who have the ACTUAL qualifications to do that job. Ticking the box to meet DEI disability quotas ahead of genuine skill sets puts us all at risk.
This is a terrific point from James Woods followed by a most excellent question.
Wait
— Enough Already (@loochc1) January 15, 2024
So the same Biden regime wants to limit the rights of people with psychiatric problems from owning guns wants to promote them to be in charge of air traffic control?
What could go wrong?
Exactly! The Biden Administration continually pushes for Red Flag laws whenever someone uses a gun. Yet the true issues of mental health and psychiatric disability are ignored, unless the government decides to pander to the DEI crowd.
Again, when one looks through the job listings, many are definitely NOT low stress positions. Furthermore, quite a number of them require someone who is physically capable of doing their job! The FAA should be working diligently to hire people who have the actual skill sets and qualifications for the job! By putting DEI criteria at the forefront, as I noted above, that puts us all at risk.
The Department of Transportation has been quite busy these last two years because of train derailments, such as the one in East Palestine, OH. And now we have the FAA dealing with Boeing yet thinking DEI should be a high priority!
About that Boeing debacle …
The investigation is a result of an incident on January 5 when an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 (737-9) lost a door plug in mid-flight, resulting in a rapid decompression of the aircraft and an emergency landing.
The airline immediately grounded its fleet of 737 Max 9s. Within hours the FAA grounded the model countrywide. This has resulted in hundreds of flight cancellations and delays for United Airlines and Alaska Airlines, which utilize the design.
The FAA stated that the aircraft will not return to the skies until they have been inspected and found to be safe, noting “the safety of the flying public, not speed, will determine the timeline for returning the Boeing 737-9 Max to service.”
Yet, in the midst of all of this, the FAA is pushing for DEI hires among the disabled. That’s ok though. The FAA will use our taxpayer dollars to ensure “reasonable accommodations” are made.
Reasonable accommodation at the FAA “ensures that employees with disabilities have access to accommodations that suit their needs. This can include modifications made to existing facilities or special equipment,” according to the website.
I’m not saying that some diagnosed with a psychiatric disability can’t or are unable to work. The concern is hiring someone who won’t be able to manage the stressors of that position.
Whatever line you think they won’t cross- they will. The same Leftist mental pathology that brought you “mask up between bites” will hire people incapable of doing a job, even if it puts lives at risk. The DEI true believers think it’s worth it, even if people die for the cause. https://t.co/0U5lHCYLxj
— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) January 15, 2024
Quite frankly, people with severe mental health issues or who are physically incapable of doing the job shouldn’t be hired at the FAA. Period.
Feature Photo Credit: Aviation control tower via iStock, cropped and modified
Cameron says: We need to go back to the days we discriminated. “Sorry, you’re not mentally healthy enough for this job.”
draigh says: Imagine if that dead-heading pilot a few weeks back had been the actual pilot of the Alaska flight. We would have been mourning the ended lives of over 200 people. That is where the DEI airlines are headed. If just one flight can be proved to be pilot error, that airline won’t recover after giving the next of kin millions of dollars! The bad publicity will kill them. Then too, you’ll have incompetent mechanics to contend with.
Liz says: You’re right about the last bit. Pilot error, plus a crash that kills people will lead to the death of the company. Which means there is a lot of incentive to get it right. That person was high on mushrooms (against the law for a pilot to take at any time). Through the years there are always problems and the screening process is very important.
The problem now is a dearth of seasoned, trained pilots. That’s about 10 percent DEI, and certain percent covid (pilots and crew in at least a couple of the major airlines I know of were given exemptions, unlike the military who were not permitted any exemptions), but mostly a tapering of the usual pipeline (pilots transitioning in from previous military service).
When there are fewer pilots (instructors are the limiting factor, not people who want to be pilots….can’t get them without the instructors to train them).
When my father in law went to fly at Eastern airlines, he needed thousands of hours to even hope to apply because there were so many veterans. When he started, he was almost the only civilian pilot. When my spouse started working for the majors it was about 50/50. Now it is almost entirely civilian (the airlines have started their own academies to address the shortage). When my spouse applied, the minimum was 2000 hours to hope to get a job as an FO with the majors (he had over 4000, in a fighter that is a LOT). Now most applicants only need 500. Took his dad 18 years to be a captain (it’s a seniority based business), now it is only 6.
Liz says: If anything is wrong about DEI in the business, it would be the legal factors. And those are driven by politics. An example that comes to mind (same airline, Alaska) years ago there was a female pilot (last name Pina, IIRC). She (FO) made an accusation of assault against her captain after a night of very heavy drinking on the job. She went to the press and they excoriated the captain and demanded Alaskan air fire him. He was dismissed immediately. Very shortly after, she again accused a different Captain after another night of very heavy drinking. This time she was quietly removed with a generous severance package, and she went on to work for a Hawaiian airline. The original Captain was unemployable by any company as a pilot after that…she’d been so successful with her media campaign his life was over. Years later, he sued the airline. That’s one missing pilot with decades of experience. FWIW. One story, but that is the climate. See the General Franklin case in Congress for more. He wasn’t employable after that either. There are a lot of examples.
Lloyd says: Sheer idiocy….file this under “You can’t make this shit up!”
Liz says: I’m going to go out on a limb and say I think there is a reasonable explanation here.
The FAA is a huge organization….they employ a lot of people for a lot of different tasks.
Someone cleans the buildings, does payroll, ect.
Those are examples of the jobs they are probably talking about.
I’d bet this has also been going on for a long while.
It’s not all bad either. For example, back when my father in law flew for Eastern, he was medically retired for high blood pressure. A condition that is easily treatable and now protected under the Americans with Disabilities act.
That would be a “reasonable accommodation” (taking bp medication).
There is a laundry list of other “reasonable accommodations”. For example, sleep apnea is a big concern and usually disqualifying. But if a pilot is continuously monitored (via satellite) and uses the c-pap, they afford them a “reasonable accomodation” to continue to fly.
Liz says: Let me give one more example (hoping this will calm folks down a little)….
The FAA is very strict about grounding pilots for conditions that matter, and there are no reasonable accommodations for. My spouse is currently on disability for tachycardia. After he gets his ablation, it will take a MINIMUM of 5 months evaluation before he can step onto a plane…and that evaluation is intense.
If he sustained a head injury, even when fully recovered and after passing ALL cognitive tests…the minimum wait period is 5 years to go back to flying, IF there are absolutely no problems.
My spouse also had some neck fusions and he cannot move his neck well enough to fly….that too will have to be remedied if he ever hopes to go back.
Cameron says: I appreciate your thoughts on the matter and your arguments are sound. But it is believable to think that they will open pilot slots and other jobs to these kind of people because diversity is more important to this administration.
NTSOG says: I believe that Jordan Peterson once reported that the US military will not recruit any person with a Full Scale IQ 85 or less. That is, an FSIQ one standard deviation below the norm of 100. The reason is that the military found that people with low normal IQs of 85 or less are unable to master the sorts of tasks required and provide useful service in the military. [Internationally the cut-off for mental retardation or intellectual disability [ID] is an FSIQ of 70 accompanied by significant deficits in adaptive behaviour, i.e. behaviour that “enables a person to cope in their environment with greatest success and least conflict with others.”]
There are people who present with significant ID who can master quite sophisticated specific skills in specific structured settings with great success, but there has to be a consistent supporting structure and support. Expecting such people to change their role and duties at a moment’s notice is not feasible. Over many years working in the disability field I repeatedly encountered enthusiastic young professionals of the ‘Save the world’ type who would advocate that certain clients with ID be pushed into more open settings on the naive basis that if the person could do X task, then they must be able to do Y task. What these young advocates failed to understand was that the ability to perform X task was the very best the person could do and not representative of their general [low] level of competence. We called such skills ‘splinter skills’, i.e. highly developed skills that do not transfer or generalise to other tasks”. To move such clients into more demanding and open [less structured] settings on the basis of a splinter skill was to set them up for failure.
This current DEI proposal reeks of the same sort of blind social welfare idealism that demonstrates a lack of understanding of human development, learning and behaviour. As for those with mental illness [which is not my specialist field] I assume that such people would require a ‘sign-off’ by a consulting psychiatrist stating that they were stable if they were to be offered jobs potentially involving risk to others. That assumes medical professionals would be prepared to take the risk of declaring certain people to be stable.
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