Last year's deadly midair collision at Reagan National Airport, which killed all 67 people aboard an American Airlines plane and a U.S. Army helicopter, was a wake-up call that many on the left refused to hear.
President Donald Trump, however, understood the problem and sought to fix it. He pointed directly at the Barack Obama and Joe Biden DEI policies that prioritized checkbox diversity over actual competence in air traffic control.
He was absolutely right.
Air traffic control whistleblowers confirmed that the FAA's obsession with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives has led to a shortage of qualified personnel. These disastrous policies began under Obama, were reversed during Trump’s first term, and then roared back under Biden. The result? A staffing crisis filled with underqualified controllers who couldn't handle the job.
The whistleblowers revealed that meeting diversity quotas became more important than actual ability. I’m sorry, but when you're juggling planes full of passengers through the skies, "good enough for diversity" doesn't cut it. The problems were so severe that near misses occurred multiple times a week. Reagan National wasn't a random tragedy; it was an inevitable disaster created by DEI.
But those days are over. Last week, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the FAA issued a mandatory "Operations Specification" that forces every commercial airline to commit to merit-based hiring for pilots.
No more woke hiring practices and no more prioritizing race and sex over skill. If airlines don't comply, they face federal investigation.
"When families board their aircraft, they should fly with confidence knowing the pilot behind the controls is the best of the best," Duffy said. "The American people don't care what their pilot looks like or their gender—they just care that they are most qualified man or woman for the job."
This shouldn’t be controversial. It’s just common sense. But under the Biden-Buttigieg regime, common sense got tossed out the window. The FAA spent years focused on renaming cockpits to "flight decks" and investigating racist roads and bridges while actual safety standards crumbled.
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The new mandate requires all U.S. carriers to certify they've terminated race and sex-based hiring practices. Airlines must prove they're identifying candidates based on specific experience and technical aptitude that match their operating environment.
Imagine that: hiring people who can actually do the job. Such a novel concept, right?
“At the FAA, the safety of passengers is our number one priority,” said FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford. “It is a bare minimum expectation for airlines to hire the most qualified individual when making someone responsible for hundreds of lives at a time. Someone’s race, sex, or creed, has nothing to do with their ability to fly and land aircraft safely.”
This action follows Trump's Executive Order on Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity and his Presidential Action on Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation. The FAA has already raised performance standards, dismantled DEI offices and contracts, and scrapped the worst of the Biden-era directives. But until now, allegations of airlines hiring based on race and sex persisted.
The safety of our skies should never take a backseat to diversity quotas. Period. Americans deserve to know that the people monitoring their flights and flying their planes earned those positions through competence, not because they checked the right demographic boxes on a form.
It's about time the FAA refocused on hiring the most competent individuals who can ensure the safety of everyone traveling through our airspace. And you can bet this fix wouldn't have happened under a Democrat administration — it would still be prioritizing DEI initiatives and then scratching its head over what caused preventable crashes.
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