Then, on New Year’s Eve, 2013, while students and professors alike were out for winter break, the FAA abruptly sent an announcement to the presidents of the CTI [collegiate training initiative] schools. The announcement came, without warning, as an email from one Mr. Joseph Teixeira, the organization’s vice president for safety and technical training. “The FAA completed a barrier analysis of the ATC occupation pursuant to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) Management Directive 715,” the email read, then went on to spell out some changes:
First, every past aptitude test applicants had taken was voided. Andrew Brigida’s perfect score was meaningless.
Second, every applicant would be required to take and pass an unspecified “biographical questionnaire” to have a shot at entering the profession.
Third, existing CTI students were left with no advantage in the hiring process, which would be equally open to all off-the-street applicants—their degrees rendered useless for the one specialized job they had trained for.
[…]
As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly’s friends in the program encouraged her to join the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE), telling her it would help improve her chances of being hired. She signed up as the February wave started. Soon, though, she became uneasy with what the organization was doing, particularly after she and the rest of the group got a voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:
“I know each of you are eager very eager to apply for this job vacancy announcement and trust after tonight you will be able to do so….there is some valuable pieces of information that I have taken a screen shot of and I am going to send that to you via email. Trust and believe it will be something you will appreciate to the utmost. Keep in mind we are trying to maximize your opportunities…I am going to send it out to each of you and as you progress through the stages refer to those images so you will know which icons you should select…I am about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question in order to get through the first phase.”2
The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).
Reilly, Brigida, and thousands of others found themselves faced with the questionnaire, clicking through a bizarre sequence of questions that would determine whether they could enter the profession they’d been working towards. Faced with the opportunity to cheat, Reilly did not. It cost her a shot at becoming an air traffic controller. Like 85% of their fellow CTI students, Brigida and Reilly found themselves faced with a red exclamation point and a dismissal notice: “Based upon your responses to the Biographical Assessment, we have determined that you are NOT eligible for this position.”
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Throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s, the FAA faced pressure to diversify its field of air traffic controllers, historically a profession that has been primarily white men, notably from the NBCFAE. In the early 2000s, this pressure focused on the newly developed air traffic control qualification test, the AT-SAT, which the NBCFAE hired Dr. Outtz to critique from an adverse impact standpoint. As originally scored, the test was intended to pass 60% of applicants, but predictions suggested only 3% of black applicants would pass. In response, the FAA reweighted the scoring to make the test easier to pass, reducing its correlation with job performance as they did so. In its final form, some 95% of applicants passed the test.
This was a bit of a shell game. In practice, they divided it into a “well qualified” band (with scores between 85 and 100 on the test, met by around 60% of applicants) and a “qualified” band (with scores between 70 and 84), and drew some 87% of selections from that “well qualified” band. Large racial disparities remained in the “well qualified” band. As a result, facing continued pressure, the FAA began to investigate ways to deprioritize the test.
Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” outperforming “most other strategies in predicting mean performance,” and it was low cost and low time commitment. On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute.
[…]
The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss. They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”
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An active air traffic controller reached out to me at the end of January last year, talking about his frustration that so many qualified individuals were eliminated from entering training, contributing to a dire staffing shortage. His facility was operating at less than 75%, with controllers fatigued from working 6-day weeks. As he explained it, training can take 1.5 to 2.5 years at larger facilities, with washout rates from 30-60%, and when we spoke upper level facilities were only accepting transfers from lower level facilities, adding years to preparation time. Every issue compounds and adds to the problem over time, and the FAA’s 2013 changes set staffing back years. The FAA, he said, simply is not bringing in enough people to match the number leaving, with some air traffic controllers believing the agency is failing on purpose to find an excuse to privatize them.
A controller who worked for 25 years and retired in 2015 spoke with me last January as well. He had been offered a position at Oklahoma City to instruct new students. Per him, the ideal candidate can go from street to fully certified in about 4 years, while some trainees during his last few years had been training for 6-8 years. He alleged a pattern where some students were trained for years longer than others, rarely washed out, and were quietly checked out and promoted away from direct air traffic control positions into management.
Another retired controller and supervisor who formerly worked at the Chicago ARTCC echoed his story, claiming the FAA would regularly change the “best qualified list,” with those responsible for promotions changing requirements depending on who they wanted to promote. He was never told to certify an inadequate trainee, he said, but “the pressure was mounting.”
