Last year’s deadly midair collision at Reagan National Airport, which killed all 67 people aboard an American Airlines plane and a U.S. Army helicopter, was a wake-up call that many on the left refused to hear.
President Donald Trump, however, understood the problem and sought to fix it. He pointed directly at the Barack Obama and Joe Biden DEI policies that prioritized checkbox diversity over actual competence in air traffic control.
He was absolutely right.
Air traffic control whistleblowers confirmed that the FAA’s obsession with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives has led to a shortage of qualified personnel. These disastrous policies began under Obama, were reversed during Trump’s first term, and then roared back under Biden. The result? A staffing crisis filled with underqualified controllers who couldn’t handle the job.
The whistleblowers revealed that meeting diversity quotas became more important than actual ability. I’m sorry, but when you’re juggling planes full of passengers through the skies, “good enough for diversity” doesn’t cut it. The problems were so severe that near misses occurred multiple times a week. Reagan National wasn’t a random tragedy; it was an inevitable disaster created by DEI.
But those days are over. Last week, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the FAA issued a mandatory “Operations Specification” that forces every commercial airline to commit to merit-based hiring for pilots.
No more woke hiring practices and no more prioritizing race and sex over skill. If airlines don’t comply, they face federal investigation.
“When families board their aircraft, they should fly with confidence knowing the pilot behind the controls is the best of the best,” Duffy said. “The American people don’t care what their pilot looks like or their gender—they just care that they are most qualified man or woman for the job.”
This shouldn’t be controversial. It’s just common sense. But under the Biden-Buttigieg regime, common sense got tossed out the window. The FAA spent years focused on renaming cockpits to “flight decks” and investigating racist roads and bridges while actual safety standards crumbled.
Hellbound and Down 