Air traffic controllers say FAA hiring practices, ‘immunity program,’ led to DC plane crash . . . what you will read below is totally UNBELIEVABLE!!
Air traffic controllers say an FAA “immunity program” fails to hold people accountable for their mistakes, even with deadly consequences.
by Natalia Mittelstadt, Just the News.com, February 8, 2025
Current and former air traffic controllers warn that the Federal Aviation Administration’s hiring practices and “immunity program” have led to problems, such as those that may have resulted in the recent midair collison near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
The FAA’s focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) hiring practices has resulted in the employment of less qualified air traffic controllers (ATCs) and a staffing shortage, former ATC's say. This, in addition to an “immunity program” that fails to hold ATCs accountable for their mistakes, are likely contributing factors American Airlines plane collided with a military helicopter on Jan. 29 that resulted in both aircraft plunging into the Potomac River near the Washington, D.C.-area airport. All 67 people aboard died
The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are investigating the incident.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said Thursday that the helicopter’s advanced tracking system was turned off at the time of the crash. As for the FAA, an ATC tried unsuccessfully to contact the helicopter less than 30 seconds before the collision, according to audio from air traffic control.
Warned about dangers
The FAA was warned in a 2023 report that air traffic controllers were increasingly making last minute flight adjustments to deal with traffic and shortages of controllers in a trend that raised safety concerns. The safety expert report that warned America’s air traffic control system is suffering from quality-control issues and staffing shortages that put safety at risk.
The November 2023 report also warned that personnel shortages among air traffic controllers were forcing people to work longer hours and make sudden, last-minute changes to flight plans that increased risks.
Regulators acknowledged that in 2023 there were 19 serious near-misses at U.S. airports that could’ve been catastrophic, one of the largest totals in many years.
Some former ATCs have pointed to the FAA’s change in hiring practicesunder the Obama administration as partly to blame for the current state of air traffic control, which led to a class action lawsuit that is ongoing.
"Biographical survey" vs "Cognitive and skills-based testing"
In December 2013, thousands of students who had participated in the FAA’s Collegiate Training Initiative (CTI) – a program specifically designed to prepare individuals to become Air Traffic Control Specialists – were informed that their previous scores on a cognitive and skills-based test, the AT-SAT, would be discounted. Instead, the students would have to pass a biographical survey before retaking the cognitive portion of the test.
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What the program graduates did not know is that only 14% of them would pass this new biographical questionnaire, despite half of them having previously passed the skills-based test and met all of the FAA pre-qualifications to be referred on the next step to becoming Air Traffic Control Specialists.
Eventually, one of the CTI graduates, whose career was derailed by the biographical questionnaire, sued the FAA for discrimination in a class action lawsuit.
Michael Pearson, who was a FAA air traffic control specialist for over 26 years, is a lawyer in the lawsuit against the FAA regarding alleged racial discrimination in the agency’s hiring practices. Pearson told Just the News on Tuesday that ATC didn’t follow proper procedure, which led to the crash. He said there was a conflict alert on the radar, giving the ATC “27 seconds to do something.”
“When a [conflict alert] goes off, you take immediate action,” he said.
While the media largely appears to holding the crew of the Army helicopter to blame for the crash, Pearson believes that the ATC is primarily at fault. Pearson says that the controller "didn't tell the jet that the helicopter was in sight,” despite being “required to, and didn’t give safety advisories” when the conflict alert went off. Also, the “helicopter route was horrible,” and “the controller didn't apply the rules properly.”
Regarding the FAA’s hiring practices, Pearson said that the FAA “stopped hiring” in order “to figure out how to eliminate the CTI program” because the agency leadership believed there were “too many white people.” While the CTI program wasn’t eliminated, the FAA stopped using it to hire people, he also said.
There were 36 schools with the CTI program, before the FAA stopped hiring CTI graduates. From about 2010 through 2014, there was “no hiring done,” resulting in the FAA being “down thousands of people” as controllers retired, Pearson said.
He thinks the hiring freeze may have contributed to controllers’ fatigue, attrition and low staffing – resulting in the crash in at the Reagan airport.
Another issue is the Air Traffic Safety Action Program (ATSAP), which the National Air Traffic Controllers Association says “helps resolve safety issues that otherwise might not have been identified or resolved.”
No consequences
With ATSAP, “employees are promised that no punitive or disciplinary actions will be taken as a result of reporting errors that could impact safety, provided those errors are not the result of gross negligence or illegal activity,” according to the association.
Pearson calls ATSAP an “immunity program" that results in the FAA having “no way to decertify controllers who can’t be retrained.” Like the change in ATC hiring practices, ATSAP also began around 2010.
John Gilding, who is a former controller, supervisor, and professor for Arizona State University’s CTI program, told Just the News on Thursday that the FAA is “resurrecting” its use of the CTI program to hire controllers.
Before ditching the program, the FAA would hire CTI graduates, military controllers then people “off-the-street” – who had no experience in ATC and only graduated high school – in that order of prioritization, Gilding said.
After hiring them, they go to the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City. And if they graduate, they are then dispersed “throughout the country to various facilities, then they go on to on-the-job training,” he said.
The controller hiring pipeline can’t just be “reloaded,” Gilding said, as “a lot of schools shut down” their CTI programs because they couldn't afford to keep them. “When students found out the program was dead, they stopped enrolling,” he said.
It might take five to eight years “to get the CTI program back up to full strength,” but “will the FAA do another rug pull in seven to eight years?” he asked.
Gilding added that controllers are working six days a week, 10 hours a day, leading to burnout, "mistakes and serious errors.”
“In our career field, if you run people into peak exhaustion, someone's gonna die,” he said.
Regarding the D.C. crash, Gilding said that he and Pearson reviewed the publicly available information and found that “there was a stunning amount of air traffic error there,” and that he “stopped counting at six or seven mistakes the controller made.”
“ATSAP might be the problem,” Gilding said regarding the reason for the mistakes that led to the crash.
In response to a request for comment on Friday, the FAA sent Just the News its FAQ page on the crash and a link to its hiring practices.
The FAA told Just the News in a statement: "Growing the nation’s air traffic controller workforce is a top priority for the FAA. We continue to hire and onboard new controllers. Their work is critical to meeting our safety mission. The FAA hired 1,811 air traffic controllers in Fiscal Year 2024."
A controller who asked to not be identified by name told Just the Newson Friday that during a controller’s on-the-job training, supervisors can have different standards for when someone is “ready to be certified.”
While the overall standard for certification is that a controller “moves planes without breaking any rules,” they could still take actions that supervisors with higher standards believe are not acceptable, meaning a controller needs more practice, the controller said.
"Get out of Jail" card
The controller also addressed ATSAP, saying that controllers use “self-reporting … as immunity from punitive action from the FAA,” even if it’s “just retraining.”
“The problem is that a lot of controllers, after ATSAP rolled out, saw it as a get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said.
Before ATSAP, there was a three-strike rule, the controller said, where if a controller had “three errors in two years, then they could be terminated by the FAA.” This forced “accountability on the controller’s part,” the controller said.
While ATSAP “allowed us to speak out on safety issues in the system” when there wasn’t really “a good avenue for that before,” the FAA “went too far,” the controller said.
A controller could make a mistake “three to four times before the FAA could give you retraining,” which is called “skill enhancement training,” the controller said. However, “to me, if someone” makes a mistake “three to four times, they have a much bigger problem,” and “waiting to that point” is too long,” the controller also said.
Some controllers are “taking the job not as seriously as they should because there's no threat to them,” the controller said.
The “real threat is collision,” which isn’t typical, “so people have complacency” because there are “so many systems put in place,” the controller said, adding, "Hopefully, the crash is “a wakeup call for people."
Group, not individual performance
The controller also said another “big issue” is that there has been a shift “away from individual performance to group performance management.” Thus, management does “not go after one controller,” but rather, the whole facility, even if it’s an individual’s issue.
"I think most controllers are dedicated and do a great job, but as in any profession, there are some lower performers that are not being addressed, and their mistakes are grouped into the facility as a whole," the controller explained.
Following the D.C. crash, President Donald Trump called out the efforts during the Obama and Biden administrations to prioritize DEI in the FAA hiring practices, including for important air traffic control specialist roles, and issued an executive order requiring a review of government hiring in the industry.
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