How COVID And Affirmative Action Gutted Aviation Safety
Another Former Trump Staffer Is On The Case
In a post earlier this week (Fighting Back Against Affirmative Action In Aviation), we mentioned the work former Trump staffer Stephen Miller was doing suing airlines for discriminating against competent white male pilots.
Fighting Back Against Affirmative Action In Aviation@America1stLegal filed civil rights complaints against three major airlines for hiring pilots based on race and sex, instead of skill.https://t.co/pnx4r4N8vR
— Portfolio Armor (@PortfolioArmor) November 6, 2023
Another former Trump staffer, Dr. Darren Beattie, has turned his attention to this problem as well. Dr. Beattie's news site Revolver, which aspires to be what Drudge was when it was still skeptical about mainstream media narratives, had an important story about an aviation near-disaster, and what the mainstream media has hid about it. Dr. Beattie has graciously allowed us to excerpt it below. Following that, we'll close with a brief hedged portfolio performance update.
Crash Landing: The Inside Scoop About How Covid and Affirmative Action Policy Gutted Aviation Safety
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Two private planes collided on the runway of a Houston airport early last week. Luckily, no one was seriously injured, and the ultimate nightmare scenario of a midair collision did not transpire. Investigators are still looking into the incident, though early reports suggest the air traffic controllers were responsible.
“We just had a midair,” the pilot of the Hawker is heard saying in an audio recording posted on LiveATC.net, which shares live and archived recordings of air traffic control radio transmissions.
Someone in the control tower responds by saying, “Say what?”
“You guys cleared somebody to take off or land, and we hit them on a departure,” the Hawker pilot says.
The recent accident in Houston is just the latest noteworthy instance in what a major New York Times investigation this summer determined to be “an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways in the USA.” According to internal records of the Federal Aviation Agency, the Times reported that these safety lapses and near misses occurred as a “result of human error.” The Times report further revealed that “runway incursions” of the sort described above have nearly doubled, from 987 to 1732, despite the widespread proliferation of advanced technologies.
A follow-up report by the Times revealed that Austin’s airport alone has experienced so many close calls as a result of air traffic controller error that a pilot proclaimed, “They’re trying to kill us in Austin.” One such incident involved an air traffic controller clearing a FedEx cargo plane to land on a runway just as a Southwest Airlines jet was set to take off on the same runway. The air traffic controller in question said the Southwest jet would take off before the FedEx plane got too close, though the two planes ended up just seconds from colliding, with the FedEx plane skimming less than 100 feet over the Southwest jet, whose 128 passengers had no clue how narrowly they just escaped death.
Below is an audio recording of the exchange between the pilots and air traffic controllers.
Despite the remarkable lack of transparency with respect to such near misses and the air traffic controllers behind them, the Times was able to identify the controller behind this incident as one Damian Campbell, a “Navy veteran and self-published poet.” According to the report, even fellow air traffic controllers were “baffled” by Campbell’s actions. Still more baffling is the fact that Campbell is apparently back on the job. FAA’s policy is not to take disciplinary action against a controller unless he or she is guilty of “gross negligence” or illegal activity.
The Times report does not provide a picture of Mr. Campbell. Such is the extreme reluctance to show an image of Mr. Campbell that the only reference we could find is from a Twitter user who posted a screenshot of the LinkedIn profile of one Damian Campbell who works as an air traffic controller in Austin, Texas. The LinkedIn link has since been scrubbed:
Notice that, apart from being a Damian Campbell in Austin, Texas, who works as an air traffic controller, the brief bio above mentions service in the military, which would match the Times’ description of Campbell as a Navy veteran. It is also noteworthy, though not dispositive, that there is a self-published book of poems by a Damian Campbell titled “Soul of a Fatherless Child.” The Damian Campbell referred to in the Times report is also a “self-published poet.”
The case of Damian Campbell and the near-collision incident in Austin, together with numerous other such incidents, raise troubling questions that deserve further scrutiny. Revolver News conducted an investigation into the matter in considerable depth. We spoke with several air traffic and FAA personnel, most of whom insisted on staying anonymous and off the record.
While the disturbing decline in aviation safety is complex and multifaceted, we identified two major contributing factors that have received scant media attention. The first such factor is the likely contribution of disastrous COVID-era policies to the staffing shortage of many air traffic control rooms. The second factor is that aggressive affirmative action policies implemented during the Obama administration have resulted in a catastrophic collapse in the quality of controllers. In short, COVID policies have gutted the quantity of air traffic controllers, and diversity policies have gutted the quality of air traffic controllers, creating unprecedented danger for the aviation industry.
The implications of these findings reach far beyond the scope of aviation, as important as this industry is. Rather, the collapse of the aviation industry must be understood in the context of a broader collapse in our ability to maintain the infrastructure of a First World society. This is a major and significant trend that we highlighted years ago in our coverage of the repeated failures of Texas’ electric power grid.
The mess with the Texas power grid is only the beginning. In the years to come, American infrastructure will fail more and more often, as America becomes less capable of maintaining the core elements of a First World country.
Read the Rest: Texas’ Power Grid Disaster Is Only the Beginning
Technologists and entrepreneurs have long lamented a persistent scientific stagnation marked by a disappointing lack of innovation in various fields of science. The condition described above is still more dire, as it speaks to our increasing inability to merely maintain, much less innovate, our basic infrastructure and complex systems, as we noted in a follow-up to the piece on the electric grid excerpted above.
At its bedrock, infrastructure is substantially just people: a population of workers with the expertise and experience to keep a complex system functional, reliable, and accident-free. Decline in this infrastructure — the human infrastructure — may be papered over with improved technology and automation. But when problems do arise, it is impossible to miss the decay.
Read the Rest: America Lost the Hardworking Men Who Held Her Together, and Now She’s Crumbling
The extensive treatment of the aviation industry that follows builds upon the groundwork described above and represents another entry into a multiple-part series chronicling in detail the collapse of America’s ability to maintain the infrastructure of complex systems.
Safety Concern or Illusion? Loss of Separation, Near Misses, and the Fog of Propaganda
According to the FAA, a Near Midair Collision (NMAC) occurs when two aircraft are within 500 feet of one another. Commercial flights travel up to 575 mph. In the most extreme case, if two planes with 500 feet in between are flying in opposite directions, they will come into contact within 0.29 seconds—the same amount of time as a blink of an eye. Most near misses do not happen midair but closer to the ground when planes takeoff and land. These are less terrifying in the imagination than midair collisions, but just as fatal to the passengers when they occur. Close calls of this variety are called Runway Incursions, which occur when two planes are too close to each other, or when one plane is landing on the same strip where another plane is taking off, or when someone or something is on the tarmac, which is considered an interference. As mentioned above, from 2002 to 2022, Runway Incursions increased from 987 to 1732 in spite of advanced technologies becoming more available.
The close call metric for midair events is known as a Loss of Separation, which, set by the International Civil Aviation Organization, is defined as a loss of the minimum horizontal and/or vertical distance between two planes in flight. An aircraft is meant to have at least 15 minutes or 3 nautical miles between itself and a plane ahead or behind; there must be a 1,000-foot gap between an aircraft and another above or below. Of course, different flight paths and angles change the calculation, and bad weather such as turbulence should increase the minimum.
Interestingly, the Loss of Separation metric is frequently used to dismiss any media attention to “close calls” as pure fear mongering. A particular interpretation of Loss of Separation events is in fact one of the four common ways the FAA, federal PR spokespeople, and other mendacious actors shrug off the concern that air travel is becoming more dangerous.
The four ways are:
(1) Loss of Separation. A common refrain is the fact that if two planes are only 2.99 miles apart in their longitudinal path and not 3 miles apart, it will qualify as an incident. In online forums, there are countless examples of pilots assuaging the fears of anxious flyers with this least-dangerous example. This could be for many reasons: pilots might want to quell irrational fears about flying; practitioners in the industry might be tired of mainstream media exaggerating minor incidents, such that they feel compelled to overcorrect; or, because these online forums are highly visited, it would be the least surprising if these pilots-cum-posters are official public relations representatives.
(2) Technology. Another diversionary tactic is to reference the Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS). This technology detects other aircraft through antennae on all planes. It creates a three-dimensional safety bubble around the plane in flight, alerts the pilots to intruders, and advises the pilot to make specific, often drastic, maneuvers. Any intruder appears on a screen, which has a similar appearance to a radar display. It’s something that has saved many pilots from lethal accidents. However, after a collision is narrowly avoided, many media relations experts will hail the success of TCAS and diminish anyone expressing concern.
This line of reasoning has been internalized by some pilots and ATCs. Furthermore, several senior ATCs our investigative team talked to noted that the reliance on TCAS and other helpful technologies has allowed ATCs with poor memory and insufficient skills to seem capable. They compare what’s happened to ATCs with the “Google Effect,” whereby people refuse to learn necessary information because they can simply look it up. This may be trivial for day-to-day work, but it is existential for air safety.
(3) Relative numbers. Many are prone to dismiss the increased number of near-collisions over the past decade on the assumption that there has also been an increase in flights from year to year. But is that true? According to data collected by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, no. In 2002, there were 9.1 million flights by U.S. and foreign carriers landing in America. The total number of flights fluctuated between 9 and 11 million from then until 2020. In 2020, the number dropped to about half: 5.7 million. In 2022, there were 8.7 million flights. It turns out that we are indeed seeing far more close-call incidents, despite better technology, and despite the same or a lesser number of flights.
(4) Fatalities. The USA hasn’t seen a fatal airplane accident since 2009, when 49 passengers were killed. This is admittedly a compelling statistic. The worst thing we could do, however, is to use this tremendous record as an excuse for negligence or indifference to a genuinely dangerous trend that could prove catastrophic. Since 2009, there have been over 300 near-collisions, which is more than double the previous decade. Just a decade ago, there were also headlines such as this one: “Tarmac trouble: U.S runway close calls soar.” Obviously, things have become not better but worse.
Though it’s relatively easy to see who’s acting in bad faith, it’s very hard to understand the exact magnitude of the problem. On the one hand, very little information is publicly available. Most close-call incidents are recorded by voluntary submission, so it’s very hard to know the precise numbers (and many ATCs our investigative team spoke with wanted to remain off the record out of fear of losing their job; the clear incentive is to keep these incidents discreet).
Without exception, the agencies in charge of air safety have abdicated their commitment to transparency. In response to our request for very basic information, the FAA refused to comment. Instead, their Public Relations Specialist, Crystal Essiaw, evaded all questions with the added sass that’s typical of American administrators who naturally comport themselves with a manifestly unearned air of superiority despite typically possessing an IQ between 85 and 90. While federal agencies generate PR to make everything seem safe, legacy media, on the other hand, tends to sensationalize, stoke fear, and encourage hysteria.
The only way to get any real answers is to talk to actual Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs) and pilots directly and to probe whatever documents have been made public.
So, what exactly is going on? There are two main culprits our investigation found: understaffing and a general decline in competency. We will address the former first.
Read the rest here.
Hedged Portfolio Performance Update
In a post last week (Why The Market Melted Up Despite The Carnage In Gaza), we mentioned that our aggressive hedged portfolios had performed well versus the market recently.
Why The Market Melted Up Despite The Carnage In Gaza
— Portfolio Armor (@PortfolioArmor) November 4, 2023
This week showed the Israel-Hamas war is unlikely to spread--and will likely shorten the Russia-Ukraine War. https://t.co/TRkK1I5Ene$SPY $SPX
That continues to be the case. Here is how a hedged portfolio built on May 10th for an investor unwilling to risk a decline of more than 15% over the next six months has performed since then.
You can see an interactive version of that chart here.
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