The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is, remember, the federal agency that oversees commercial air travel, including the airlines, their primary purpose being to keep air travel, above all things, safe. So why, then, has that agency bought into the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion nonsense to the point where their hiring choices have the chance of actually getting American air travelers killed?
The Federal Aviation Administration is actively recruiting workers who suffer "severe intellectual" disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.
"Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring," the FAA’s website states. "They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism."
The initiative is part of the FAA’s "Diversity and Inclusion" hiring plan, which claims "diversity is integral to achieving FAA's mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond." The FAA’s website shows the agency’s guidelines on diversity hiring were last updated on March 23, 2022.
This is what, back in my days in Uncle Sam's colors, we used to refer to as a "Charlie Foxtrot."
The FAA wants to bring in people who are "under-represented," including, of all things, people with "severe intellectual disability" and "psychiatric disability." Of all the things they list, those two are the most concerning. At what, precisely, does the FAA plan to put these people to work doing? It's safe to assume that by "severe intellectual disability," one means at best a substandard IQ, if not an outright inability to function in any organized workplace; there's a reason these people are "under-represented" in the workplace, and it's because there is just so little we can safely have them do - especially in this industry, which involves, I remind you, loading a couple of hundred people in a jet-propelled aluminum can and propelling them through the air at 36,000 feet for a few hours.
Even more disconcerting, though, is the perceived need to bring in those with a "psychiatric disability." Given the line of work I'm in, I get to read all manner of government-agency lunacy every day, so it takes a real whopper to faze me these days, but when I first read that, I honestly did a double-take - "Wait, what?" On second reading, though, yes, I had it right. The FAA - who I remind you, is responsible for ensuring safe air travel - is planning to ramp up hiring of those with "psychiatric disabilities." What kind of psychiatric disabilities? Sociopathy, I would posit, is a psychiatric disability, as is schizophrenia or "other psychotic disorders," bipolar disorder, or manic-depressive disorder. Surely the FAA isn't going to be hiring people with these kinds of disorders to do, well, anything the FAA needs done?
Has our federal government gone absolutely bonkers? What in the world could the U.S. taxpayers, who after all are paying for all this, have to gain by the FAA taking this bats*** crazy action?
This latest effort by the FAA is downright unsettling, and whoever takes the seat at the Resolute Desk next January should look into dismantling this initiative, tout de suite.