Last week, an Air Canada jet struck a Port Authority fire truck on a runway at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, killing both pilots and injuring more than 40 others. Following an unusually high number of “close calls” and other disasters at airports nationwide in recent years, the tragedy is drawing fresh scrutiny on an Obama-era policy that may be putting travelers’ safety in jeopardy.
While the investigation into the Air Canada crash is ongoing, early reports suggest that air traffic control (ATC) personnel were handling a second emergency at the same time. A United Airlines flight had aborted takeoff twice after the crew reported a strong odor in the cabin. The pilots said flight attendants were feeling ill and needed a gate immediately. With no gate available, controllers sent fire trucks to help passengers deplane on the tarmac.
As the Air Canada jet approached, radio traffic captured the chaos in the moments before impact: “Stop, stop, stop, Truck 1. Stop, stop, stop,” one controller said.
Shortly after the crash, another controller said, “We were dealing with an emergency, and I messed up.”
But that explanation addresses only the final mistake, not the larger problem. The conditions that may have produced it had been building for years. Specifically, the Federal Aviation Administration now faces a nationwide shortage of about 3,000 ATC personnel, placing enormous strain on the system and making accidents more likely.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that LaGuardia’s tower is generally “well-staffed” but currently has 33 assigned controllers against a target of 37, with seven more in training. He declined to say how many controllers were on duty at the time of the collision. Overnight shifts are typically staffed more lightly than daytime operations.
But the ATC shortages did not occur in a vacuum. An Obama DEI hiring policy may be to blame for severely exacerbating the problem.
For decades, ATC was one of the most merit-based professions in the federal government. Most controllers were military veterans or top graduates of the FAA’s Collegiate Training Initiative (CTI) programs. Entry required passing the AT-SAT — a strenuous cognitive test designed to identify candidates who could handle the demands of the job.
But then came the rise of the DEI movement, and suddenly liberals began complaining about a supposed “lack of diversity” in ATC towers. After a 2012 “barrier analysis” concluded that the AT-SAT disadvantaged minorities, the FAA astonishingly scrapped the test in 2014.
In its place, bureaucrats substituted a biographical questionnaire and a watered-down test known as the ATSA, along with opening hiring to applicants with zero aviation experience. The stated goal was to add “depth and diversity.” The result was a dramatic weakening of the screening system and mounting shortages as the Obama administration set nearly impossible diversity targets.
The FAA’s own 2014 internal study found the biographical questionnaire added almost nothing to the AT-SAT’s ability to predict who would succeed in training. The ATSA, meanwhile, replaced actual radar-style simulations with memory, prioritization, and attention tasks that have nothing to do with actually keeping airports safe. Even so, the FAA kept using both. Training a single air traffic controller costs more than $400,000 and can take years — and the FAA was willing to gamble with that investment in the name of a diversity agenda that its own data couldn’t justify.
The new questionnaire was so poorly designed that failure rates reportedly reached as high as 90 percent. That was until Shelton Snow, an official with the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees, was caught on a voicemail recording offering coaching on how to pass the test — exclusively to black people, women, and other minorities. He told recipients he was “99.99 percent sure” his answers were correct and admitted he was selectively helping certain minority groups to “minimize competition.”
Congress restricted the use of the biographical questionnaire in 2016 and offered affected CTI applicants another opportunity to apply. But the effects of the situation were already locked in. Controller training takes years. The disruption to the CTI pipeline had already reduced the flow of prepared applicants. The downstream effects would persist regardless of any correction — and they have.
A veteran airline captain who has been informally surveying the situation offered anecdotal evidence of how dangerous working conditions have become. During a transcontinental flight in February 2025, he asked controllers in 18 different sectors whether they were working mandatory overtime. Eleven said yes, six said no, and one declined to answer.
In April 2023, during the spring-break travel rush, he received responses from 19 sectors. All but one ground controller reported working six-day weeks with no short-term leave available.
The captain noted his survey was informal, so it did not account for differences in route and season. Even so, he warned that some controllers have likely been on six-day schedules for five years or longer.
“That’s just not sustainable,” he wrote, pointing to the toll on alertness, family life, and long-term health.
The Biden administration made the crisis even worse. As The New York Post reported last August, in 2023, FAA officials “scrapped the previous ‘best qualified’ tier for candidates who scored 85 percent or above on the Air Traffic Skills Assessment (ATSA) exam in favor of a ‘well qualified’ threshold for applicants who scored at least 80 percent.”
In other words, the Biden administration lowered standards because DEI policies had decimated the applicant pool. That’s a terrifying combination for travelers who rely on ATC agents to keep runways safe.
The Trump administration is rushing to reverse course, with Duffy mandating only merit-based hiring of both ATC personnel and pilots. Encouragingly, the FAA exceeded its hiring goal in fiscal year 2025, bringing in more than 2,000 new controllers — a 20 percent jump over Biden’s numbers. Plus, new rules now require at least 10 hours of rest between shifts and limit consecutive weeks of mandatory overtime.
But reversing the effects of a decade of diversity-driven hiring policy will take time. Meanwhile, exhausted controllers still face life-and-death decisions with too few hands on deck.
Sarah Katherine Sisk is a proud Hillsdale College alumna and a master’s student in economics at George Mason University. You can follow her on X @SKSisk76.
