The Federal Aviation Administration, under a national outreach program for diversity and inclusion, is pushing to recruit workers with total deafness in both ears, blindness, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism. John Hinderaker wonders, “How crazy are these people?” and as Paul Simon might say, the FAA is still crazy after all these years.
Joe Biden’s pick to head the FAA was Phillip Washington, who proclaimed that safety would be his top priority. Washington was unable to answer a series of basic aviation questions including “what causes an aircraft to spin or to stall?” Washington did not know the minimum separation distance for landing and departing airliners during the daytime, and the three types of certification the FAA requires as part of the manufacturing process.
During the Obama administration, a group within the FAA determined that the workforce was “too white.” The FAA replaced hiring standards with rules designed to increase “diversity.” An attorney suing the FAA called it “social engineering at its finest.”
Back in 2009, pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed his stricken airliner on the Hudson River saving everybody on board, a full 155 lives. After that miraculous event, some in the National Transportation Safety Board thought the pilot should have returned to LaGuardia. In that scenario, as Clint Eastwood showed in Sully, all 155 would have perished in a crash.
In 2019, Sullenberger criticized Boeing and the FAA for their roles in two crashes involving the Boeing 737 Max 8. At this writing, Sully is not on record about the FAA’s plan to hire the intellectually and psychiatrically disabled, but it is possible to guess. What starts as farce can easily repeat as tragedy.
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