Air traffic controlling in the US fixed by ashcanning DEI and hiring gamers. By Jeff Childers.

For years, parents across America have been engaged in a futile, daily struggle with their teenage sons, delivering variations of the exact same speech: “Justin, put down the Xbox controller and go do your homework! You can’t make a living playing video games! You need to go to college so you can get a degree in Marketing and work as an assistant manager at a 7-Brew drive-through coffee stand!”

It turns out the parents were wrong. The teenagers were right …

Behold, yesterday’s tweet from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, titled “Game Changer”:

 

 

Shortly after his appointment, Secretary Duffy announced that the Federal Aviation Administration had a massive, crippling shortage of air traffic controllers. The FAA was short about 3,800 people. This is a problem, because air traffic control is one of those jobs where you really, really want a full staff. It is not like the Department of Motor Vehicles, where if they are short-staffed, the only consequence is that you spend an extra four hours sitting in a plastic chair reading a 2018 issue of Highlights magazine. If the FAA is short-staffed, airplanes can bump into each other.

So Secretary Duffy launched a new recruitment campaign. And he did not target people with master’s degrees in Public Policy. He targeted video game freaks. …

A couple of weeks later, Secretary Duffy explained to Fox how they came up with the idea:

The FAA’s ad campaign literally started with an Xbox logo and gaming footage from Twitch streams. The pitch went something like: “Hey, you! The guy who just spent 14 consecutive hours successfully managing a 40-player raid in World of Warcraft while simultaneously eating a family-sized bag of Doritos and ignoring your bladder! How would you like to do the exact same thing, but with real airplanes, and we will pay you $160,000 a year?”

That is the actual starting salary. The average certified professional controller earns over $160,000 within three years of leaving the academy. At the nation’s busiest airports, the base pay reaches a tidy $225,700. And — this is the best part — applicants no longer need a college degree.

Well duh:

The response was exactly what you would expect if you told a million nerds that their parents were wrong. In a single 24-hour window, the FAA received 12,350 applications— more than double the previous record. They hit 94% of their hiring goal immediately.

This is basically the plot of the movie Ender’s Game, or The Last Starfighter, where the military realizes that the only people with the hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness required to save the galaxy are teenagers who have never seen the sun.

The FAA realized that the skills required to guide a Boeing 737 safely through a thunderstorm into O’Hare are the exact same skills required to survive a Call of Duty deathmatch …

DEI-addled lefties were that stupid!?

But the absolute comedy is the reason why the FAA was short 3,800 controllers in the first place.

To understand how we got here, we must time-travel back to 2013, during the glorious Obama administration. Since its inception, the FAA had relied on a proven, rigorous aptitude test to hire new controllers. But woke progressives decided that this test was not producing a sufficiently diverse workforce.

So Obama’s FAA ashcanned the aptitude test. They replaced it with a “Biographical Questionnaire.” The stated goal was to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion. (Don’t ask why one of the most critical, stressful, and demanding jobs in the country needed more ‘diversity.’ It will just give you a migraine.)

How did this marvelously diverse questionnaire work? It asked questions about the applicant’s background and assigned points based on the answers. And because this was the federal government, the points were assigned in a way that defies all human logic.

For example, one of the questions was: “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was…” Now, set aside the fact that they could have asked for transcripts instead of self-attestment. Set aside the fact that this has nothing to do with air traffic control skills. Set aside the fact that there is no correct answer to an unscorable question like that.

The part that will make you want to chew the carpet is that, if the applicant said their worst subject was Science, they were scored +15 points.

I am not making that up. To get a job where your entire responsibility is applying the laws of physics, mathematics, and meteorology to keep hundreds of tons of metal from falling out of the sky, the Federal Aviation Administration gave you bonus points if you were bad at science. …

You can see what they were doing, right? It was obvious. They replaced merit with bonus points for weak subjects that suggested you might be in certain diverse groups.

Especially if you knew in advance what non-intuitive answers to put down in the questionnaire.

This is where things got stupendously worse. An FAA whistleblower recorded a voicemail for a specific minority advocacy group, coaching applicants on exactly how to answer the questionnaire to pass. …

The result of this brilliantly diverse bureaucratic strategem was that hundreds of highly qualified candidates — people who had spent years studying aviation, say — were rejected, because they failed a personality quiz that actually rewarded people for flunking physics. After a series of near-disasters, the FAA froze its hiring for years while the lawsuits piled up. Then the Biden administration accelerated the DEI focus, the shortage worsened, and the whole rotten system nearly collapsed.

But then President Trump appointed Sean Duffy. He arrived, looked at the previous 8-step hiring process that took three months for the initial review, and asked, “What if we just hire people who are good at this?”

He cut the hiring process to five steps. He removed the degree requirement. He dropped the DEI nonsense. He went straight to the people who have spent their entire lives training their brains to track multiple fast-moving objects on a glowing screen while remaining perfectly calm.

The gamers answered the call. The nerds are saving aviation.

Every institution in the the western world needs the same treatment. Talent has been systematically excluded for decades now, and is sitting on the sidelines while fools get the salaries and status.

UPDATE:

They may end up having a lower rate of Alzheimer’s, like taxi drivers and ambulance drivers:

A 2024 population-based cross-sectional study published in The BMJ analyzed nearly 9 million U.S. death certificates from 2020–2022 that included occupational information across 443 professions.

Key findings:

Overall, Alzheimer’s was listed as a cause of death for about 3.88% of people (or ~1.69% after adjustments for age and other factors).
Among taxi drivers, the rate was 1.03% (171 of 16,658); among ambulance drivers, it was 0.74% (10 of 1,348). After adjustment, these were the two lowest proportions of any occupation (taxi drivers ~1.03%, ambulance drivers ~0.91%).

This pattern did not hold for other transportation jobs that rely more on predetermined routes (e.g., bus drivers or aircraft pilots), nor for other forms of dementia (such as vascular dementia).

The researchers hypothesized that the difference relates to the intensive real-time spatial navigation and cognitive mapping required in these jobs. This builds on earlier neuroimaging work (notably Eleanor Maguire’s studies of London taxi drivers) showing that the demands of acquiring detailed spatial knowledge (“The Knowledge”) are associated with structural changes in the hippocampus — larger posterior hippocampal volume that correlates with years of experience. The hippocampus is heavily involved in spatial memory/navigation and is also one of the regions that undergoes early atrophy in Alzheimer’s disease.

hat-tip David Archibald