I don’t fly if I can possibly avoid it. When folks ask me why, the short answer is that I know too much.
It’s been recently reported that the FAA is now actively recruiting new trainees to work in the towers and control rooms directing airplanes and that the criteria they now utilize to screen applicants is a curiously absurd “biographical questionnaire.”
The Wall Street Journal recently reported:
“A recently completed six-month investigation by Fox Business Network found that the Federal Aviation Administration has quietly moved away from merit-based hiring criteria in order to increase the number of women and minorities who staff airport control towers. The changes come despite the fact that the FAA’s own internal reports describe the evidence for changing the hiring process as “weak.”
Until 2013, the FAA gave hiring preference to controller applicants who earned a degree from one of its Collegiate Training Initiative schools and scored high enough on an eight-hour screening test called the Air Traffic Selection and Training exam, or AT-SAT, which measures cognitive skills. The Obama administration, however, determined that the process excluded too many from minority groups. In May 2013, the FAA’s civil rights administrator issued “barrier analyses” of the agency’s employment procedures, which recommended “revising how the AT-SAT is used in establishing best-qualified lists.”
By the start of last year, the FAA was using a biographical questionnaire (BQ) to initially vet potential hires. The questions – “How many sports did you play in high school?”, “What has been the major cause of your failures?” – seem designed to elicit stories of personal disadvantage or family hardship rather than determine success on the job.”
There are a lot of reasons to limit your flying to only the most necessary flights. The affirmative action angle is only a part of the problem.
Boarding an aircraft is like playing the world’s largest game of Russian roulette.
If I can’t drive, most likely, I won’t go.
We need go start teaching, speaking and making decisions based on THE WHOLE TRUTH.
The founding fathers DID NOT write in to the Constitution that ALL MEN (and women) ARE EQUAL.
That is a lie. All men (and women) ARE NOT EQUAL. They may be CREATED, at birth, (in most cases) roughly equal, and equally loved by God, but everything after birth, that a person says, does, experiences, decides, achieves, chooses, loves, hates, learned or failed to learn, values, honors , seeks, cares about, works for, commits to, and every other aspect of character and “track record” EITHER MOVES THEM UP OR DOWN the scale in actual, individual “competence, and value for certain pursuits among “the herd of humanity”.
Advantage, or disadvantage, “environmental factors” aside, because How we RESPOND, REACT to less than ideal formative circumstances is far more weighty in forming our future than the actual challenges we “suffered under”. Did we have abusive parents and decide “we would never be like that” or instead fill with rage and feel entitled to abuse others? Every other experience, (good or bad) can work to either lift us or defeat us depending upon how we react and respond to it.
Stop saying everyone is “equal”, they are not, outside of certain nor should they be regarded as such if truth matters (and it DOES) because denying TRUTH has unpleasant consequences, when denied.
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