AIM Editor on FAA’s Air Traffic Control Hiring Scandal [Video]

Accuracy in Media Editor Roger Aronoff recently appeared on The Daily Ledger on the One America News Network to discuss an ongoing scandal at the Federal Aviation Administration which has prompted an investigation by the department’s inspector general.

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Prior to 2014, as Aronoff reported in May, the FAA recruited its air traffic controllers from either the military or from the pool of people who had graduated after spending years studying and training at FAA programs called Collegiate Training Initiative, or CTI schools. However, it now uses a walk-in process combined with a biographical questionnaire asking questions such as, “How many sports did you play in high school?” “And what this is really about is ethnic diversity,” said Aronoff on The Daily Ledger. Peter Kirsanow, of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, also came to the same conclusion. “A news report quotes [Transportation] Secretary [Anthony] Foxx as telling Congress, "The FAA took an opportunity to take a broad opening of the aperture if you will to try to get a larger universe of applicants into the [air traffic control] program,’” wrote Kirsanow, according to Newsmax. “I don't speak jive, but I am fluent in bureaucratese, and this is easy to translate: the FAA didn't like the racial and gender composition of the people in its pool of potential air traffic controllers.” “This is the safety of our planes flying in the air,” Aronoff emphasized. “And I can tell you from what I’ve learned is that there have been a number of very close calls…There have been many who have been thrown out of the system because they were so bad.” The Fox Business Network (FBN) exposed back in May how a leader of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE) had distributed a recorded message detailing how its members could cheat on the biographical questionnaire. “But they have a recording that they tell you, they walk you through what to fill out so you will be able to pass this and get hired,” said Aronoff.

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“This is a scandal that should be looked at constantly by the news media, but they are ignoring this,” Aronoff said. “It’s like Benghazi or the IRS scandal. [The media] consider it not even worthy of being discussed.” After Aronoff published his initial article noting how The Wall Street Journal had reported on the change in FAA hiring standards, but not the Obama administration scandal itself, the Journal published an opinion article entitled, “Affirmative Action Lands in the Air Traffic Control Tower:”

After the FAA changed its screening process in 2014, thousands of applicants who were already in the pipeline—people who had obtained an FAA-accredited degree, taken the AT-SAT exam and had been designated ‘well-qualified’ to become air-traffic controllers—were told by the government that they would have to start the process again. ‘But this time, when they applied for a job, their college degrees and previous military experience would mean nothing,’ reported Fox Business. ‘They would now compete with thousands of people the agency calls ‘off the street hires’; anyone who wants to, can walk in off the street without any previous training and apply for an air traffic control job.’ In other words, the current policy is to deliberately favor less-qualified applicants over more qualified applicants in the name of obtaining the ‘right’ racial and gender mix among air-traffic controllers. Advocates of ‘diversity’ insist that discounting objective measures of ability and competence is harmless, but history shows that it can be deadly.

The Obama administration isn’t stopping there in its effort to create a progressive utopia of ethnic diversity, whether or not racial discrimination is, in fact, currently happening. Stanley Kurtz, writing for National Review earlier this month, called it a “scandal that the mainstream press has largely refused to report on the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule:”

AFFH is easily one of President Obama’s most radical initiatives, on a par with Obamacare in its transformative potential. In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood—imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education. Not only the policy but the political implications are immense—at the presidential, congressional, state, and local levels.

Here is Aronoff on One America News’ “The Daily Ledger,” with Graham Ledger:

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