Junction Points

Doc Brown Explaining the Junction Point Theory

In the 1989 sequel, Back to the Future II, Doc Brown explains to Marty McFly that November 12, 1985, “… contains some sort of cosmic significance. Almost as if it were the temporal junction point for the space-time continuum,” for all three movies’ events. Doc Brown even draws a root cause diagram of how one point in time branched off into an altered history independent of the one that should have been.

FAA Headquarters

It’d be interesting to follow a timeline to see at what focal point the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) became ineffective, what went wrong and when. The FAA – aviation’s RAINO (Regulatory Agency In Name Only) – veered from mission years ago. Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, didn’t start the decline, his predecessors did. His inane policies won’t fix what’s broken. Sadly, it was from Level 10 of 800 that aviation was ultimately deceived.

What’s the old FAA saying? Safety cultures work from the top down. In business, upper echelons, the Vice Presidents through the Chief Executive, form a company’s future strategies; they look at where the industry is going and plan the company’s place in it. They’re also the ones who set the serious tone with which the workforce views safety, leading by example. If they shun safety, the workforce shuns it; if they respect the safety culture through communication and example, the workforce follows their lead.

In a nepotistic government agency, there’s no leadership talent. A government upper echelon (UE) may not have business experience; they don’t exercise strategies born of skill. Government UEs are un-fire-able; they can’t be terminated; they’re like relatives that don’t (won’t?) work for a living. Government agencies, like the FAA, have safety cultures (if it can be called that) that are determined by political UEs, aka those ‘in charge’. These UEs get their marching orders from politicians and bureaucrats influenced by lobbyists, who don’t care a flip about safety.

The new FAA approach to qualifying ATC controllers

Evidence of destructive political practices are everywhere. For instance, the FAA surrendered control of industry qualifications and is relegating its own in-house training. Aircraft maintenance (MX) and air traffic control (ATC) training are now structured by those without oversight experience, authority, or knowledge. MX training requirements were downgraded from the Title 14 code of federal regulations – CFR – Part 147 Appendices. MX schools now decide and control airframe and powerplant (A&P) curriculum – not the FAA. Schools now have full authority to qualify ATC controllers, putting the future of training consistency at risk. How long before pilot training consistency is lost, if not already. This recklessness is so embedded it’ll take decades to correct. The ignorance is unsustainable.

FAA Academy training is losing quality. Veteran inspectors and instructors teaching the present and new-hire FAA aviation safety inspector (ASI) are being replaced with the inexperienced, those who just ‘read from the slides’ as if training ASIs was nothing more than Library Story Time. Virtual classes have replaced effective and proven learning environments. Inexperienced course mentors dictate class material with no subject matter experience to draw from. No regulations. No guidance. No policy. No clue.

Once authority is lost it cannot be regained. To have curriculum control restored takes five years of back-and-forth with industry, some of whom lobbied for these controls to begin with. Why, then, would the FAA – for that matter, any government agency – replace skill with inexperience? Money, of course. Have money decisions crippled other workforces? Look at McDonalds. After being forced to raise minimum wages to $15.00/hour, McDonalds fast-forwarded its artificial intelligence (AI) plans. Kiosks were the first response, replacing high wage employees to afford those $15 pay raises. Other service industries are finding creative ways to reduce high-wage employee numbers with technology because … Money.

Would that happen in aviation? Aren’t there plans for single-pilot airliners? Money saved when airliners went from 3-man to 2-man cockpits was impressive. The technology’s there, it’s only a matter of time, followed closely by pilot-less airliners. The Air Line Pilot Association – ALPA – union wrote articles denouncing how unfair this technology research is. However, these articles were innocuous; no good punches were landed. Beyond the façade, unions don’t really support their members anymore, such as auto manufacturer unions during last year’s pay negotiations. Or the pilot unions during the vaccine mandates. What was the phrase? “Just take the (fill in offensive adjective) shot!”

Unmanned Vehicles conducting aircraft inspections

Aircraft mechanics will become nothing more than parts replacers, no troubleshooting skills required. AI will perform visual inspections faster and cheaper. Aircraft have self-tested since the 1990s; press a button and the plane can interrogate every … single … system and spit out the results within a minute. It’ll even tell the mechanic what to replace and how to do it. With the FAA’s complicity in removing regulated MX curriculums and industry’s cost savings ideas, how long before restrictions on certification or even requirements to speak English will be re-regulated? Open borders now make sense.

FAA Jobs posted on EnergyJobLine.com

The FAA only used government websites, such as USAJobs, a .gov site that is (was?) the only site to fill its ASI candidate pool. Now, FAA uses headhunter sites, like EnergyJobLine, a .com site. Is there low interest in the FAA – like the military? Why change hiring strategies? What’s next, pizza boxes? Bus or subway panels? Ever applied for a job these days? No company directly hires anymore; headhunters do the legwork. These people don’t work for or understand the hiring company. Applicants must ‘volunteer’ gender and race info to companies that hire for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Applicants who don’t meet DEI standards are rejected with a NO-REPLY email in form letter format. What disqualifies an applicant? Are they white? Or male? Hiring for DEI guarantees aviation safety will suffer.

Since 2019, the FAA hasn’t been out in the industry. Certificate holders are policing themselves. Some repair stations and air carriers – both domestic and international – haven’t seen an FAA ASI … in years. Nobody’s watching the store, folks. And while the cat’s away …

Government officials route Sky Marshalls everywhere but where they’re needed

Since 2012, the FAA has decayed into a shadow of its former self. It’d be easy to blame Buttigieg, but the two previous Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretaries – Elaine Chao and Anthony Foxx – have overseen the DOT’s decline in safety; Buttigieg just greased the skids. Don’t look for Sky Marshalls. They’re not protecting passengers from terrorists. They’re following people in DC on January 6th, 2021, or handing out water to illegal aliens at the border. Last April, Buttigieg visited the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City for a meet-and-greet. Scripted questions asked of him weren’t just ‘softball’ questions – they were NERF® balls … rolled to him … slowly … through a cordon of protective Stepford manager types, because relevant aviation questions weren’t allowed to reach Buttigieg’s ears.

What do DEI policies lead to? Tolerance – and not the good kind. DEI is for people who can’t handle stress or work; people who want to change the workplace to suit themselves, instead of adapting to the workplace. Last month I was eating in a popular restaurant. At the next table was a young mid-20s woman eating lunch with her parents – just her parents. When they left, the woman was followed out by her emotional support animal – a dog (in a restaurant???). An emotional support animal (ESA) owner has become the archetypical symbol of intolerance and selfishness. Imagine this woman so emotionally challenged she can’t even eat with her parents without her dog, her emotional crutch, there. Does this woman become emotionally paralyzed from real life situations, such as the stresses of driving or of an adult people job? What have we done to our young people? Why are they so emotionally crippled?

NOTE: By the way, the Department of Health (as defined by the Americans with Disabilities Act in Q3 and Q32) forbids an ESA from being in restaurants or anyplace serving food.

Question: What if that young ESA lady was your pilot or flight attendant? Is that so hard to imagine? You know it’ll happen. Would your pilot entering the cockpit with a labradoodle give you confidence? Or a flight attendant giving the preflight safety briefing holding her Pomeranian? How would you feel knowing the captain needed an ESA to shoot a CAT III approach? Would you consider the pilot to be emotionally dependent – or emotionally disturbed? These dependencies – these crutches – are everywhere but we ignore them … for now. How long before emotionally dependent pilots and their ESAs are found in the cockpit? Do you think ALPA would fight it like they fought the mandates?

Why aviation? What does it matter? There are more important evils to face now: child trafficking; the murder of innocents; terrorists crossing the border; illegals flooding in from the north and south; a kneecapped military; forced mandates; climate change corruption; people imprisoned for political or religious vengeance; vaccine-caused illnesses; Christians persecuted; Israeli victims; farmers losing their businesses. We need to pray – pray hard – every day, for these people in these situations.

So, again, why aviation? Millions worldwide are now in danger – some fatally – by non-existent safety requirements, downgraded skill prerequisites, dismissal of regulation intent, and professional positions lost to the maladroitness of DEI standards. It’s what happens when we, as an industry, ignore the obvious, surrender such important objectives as regulatory integrity, experience, and time-in-position, to lobbyists with no interests beyond the financial.

Comedy is tragedy plus time. There’s nothing comical about this and tragedy will happen in time. The Back to the Future trilogy was made for demonstrating how accidentally straying from the norm can lead to laughs. What’s being forced on the aviation community amounts to purposely straying from the proven safety norms that can lead to a safety culture that will become a laughingstock; a tragedy over time. Consequently, it appears both the movies and the FAA’s actions were intentional.