(Headline USA) The Federal Aviation Administration is deliberately hiring employees with “severe intellectual” and physical disabilities as part of its diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, according to a new report.
The DEI initiative aims to make the FAA, which is tasked with overseeing and regulating the nation’s air traffic and individual airlines, more “inclusive” and “welcoming.”
The agency claims on its website that this “diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond,” according to Fox News.
“Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” the FAA’s website states. “They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”
The report, which comes at a particularly sensitive time following a series of recent plane mishaps, increases concerns about whether the FAA’s DEI agenda is putting at risk the safety of airline employees and passengers.
Reports recently revealed airlines were being pressured to hire pilots who met certain diversity requirements—even if they were not the most qualified.
In 2021, for example, United Airlines announced it was launching its own DEI hiring policy.
“Over the next decade, United will train 5,000 pilots who will be guaranteed a job with United, after they complete the requirements of the Aviate program—and our plan is for half of them to be women and people of color,” United CEO Scott Kirby said in a media release.
Concerns about air safety have become a top priority in recent weeks after a panel blew off a Boeing jetliner operated by Alaska Airlines in midflight. One of two plugs on the jetliner blew out shortly after the plane took off from Portland, Oregon, leaving a hole in the plane. The cabin lost pressure and the plane was forced to return to Portland to make an emergency landing. No serious injuries were reported.
