Divers were still searching the chilly Potomac River for the black boxes and nobody had definitive answers.
But that did not stop President Donald Trump from casting blame on DEI for Wednesday night’s midair collision between an American Airlines passenger jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter, killing 67.
Vice President JD Vance dutifully stepped up to affirm the baseless claim, saying, “We want to hire the best people… actually competent enough to do the job.” He added that the government was being sued by hundreds of people who “would like to be air traffic controllers, but they were turned away because of the color of their skin.”
Vance was apparently referring to a federal class action lawsuit brought by some 900 applicants who had qualified to become air traffic controllers, only for the hiring list to be nullified in 2015 by an Obama-era diversity decree. The ensuing class action was brought by the Mountain States Legal Foundation and former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, an election denier who had sought to blame DEI for endangering the nearly 3 million Americans who fly every day.
“We’re seeing all sorts of air traffic control problems where you have near miss(es) on runways,” Laxalt told Fox News in June. “Anyone that’s flown in the last few years knows that almost every flight is delayed, almost every layover is delayed. And most (of) this because of the air traffic control system that is broken.”
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There had been two near-misses involving air traffic controllers at Reagan National Airport in as many months, on April 18 and May 29. But the frayed state of affairs there and elsewhere in the country is the result of several factors unrelated to DEI.
As has been widely noted, and as an official with extensive experience in airport operations affirmed to the Daily Beast on Thursday, the whole system is still suffering from the firing of 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981 by the president for whom Reagan National Airport is named. The new controllers who took their place had a mandatory retirement age of 56, and many of them have been departing in recent years. An early FAA report after Wednesday’s crash noted that a single air traffic controller was doing work that customarily would have been done by two.
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“The position configuration was not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” the report says.
The critical issue seems to be scarcity, not diversity. And it is not limited to air traffic controllers.
“According to a February, 2024, response from FAA technicians, the top issue facing the agency is system obsolescence and difficulty in finding replacement parts,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in December. “The response also indicated that inadequate staffing of FAA facilities posed a challenge to maintaining systems because some technicians were responsible for areas spanning hundreds of miles.”
The shortage in personnel is accompanied by a dangerous deficiency in technology and equipment. The GAO noted that a nationwide air traffic control shutdown in 2023 prompted the FAA to conduct a risk evaluation that determined that 51 of its 138 air traffic control systems were so aged and underfunded as to be ”unsustainable.”
“Until FAA takes urgent action to reduce the time frames to replace critical and at risk ATC systems, it will continue to rely on a large percentage of unsustainable systems to perform critical functions for safe air travel,” the GAO found. “This reliance occurs at a time when air traffic is expected to increase each year.”
Among those who have sounded the alarm in recent months was U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL). She was in her final days as chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Aviation Safety, Operations and Innovation in December, when she held a hearing.
“The safety of the flying public depends upon well-equipped air traffic control systems–and right now, it is deeply troubling that more than one-third of them are unsustainable,” she said in her opening statement.
Since then, the Trump-led Republicans have taken control of the Senate, along with the House and the White House. Duckworth lost her chairmanship, but her Thursday night post on X had the authority of someone who had flown an Army Black Hawk helicopter in combat in Iraq.
“Victims are still in the water.
The Blackhawk crew is still strapped into the cockpit.
Families are mourning.
And Trump is blaming DEI, suggesting our pilots and air traffic controllers don’t deserve their jobs.
”We need compassion and leadership—our President showed none.”