A recent trip to San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)….
They’ve gone big into Yayoi Kusama, still productive and creative at age 95.
Both of these works are from 2023! (Perhaps she had some help with the physical construction.)
The “Get in the Game” exhibit appears to be about sports, but a sign explains that it is actually about “gender” and “race”:
Frontiers of aeronautical engineering… a lead airplane from Anselm Kiefer:
Old-school Dan Flavin, made with simple fluorescent lights of color (these could be updated, perhaps, with LED bulbs so that different color patterns can be offered at different times of day):
The museum quotes Kerry James Marshall as wanting to see only pictures of Black people and then obliges with a show of Amy Sherald’s work, in which only Black people are depicted (even in San Francisco, nobody wants to see paintings of Taiwanese people fabbing the chips that hold up the SF AI economy? A Black person standing around is more valuable to Humanity than a TSMC employee making an Nvidia H100?).
Speaking of Black people who aren’t fabbing H100s… there is a huge lobby area devoted to Kara Walker’s work:
The major photograph show is devoted to pictures of Black people… by a white woman:
There’s a smaller show by a “woman of color” (from Peru) who “rewrites male-dominated history” by recreating Edward Weston’s photos using herself as a model:
Here is a Weston for comparison (Americans had better-defined waists back in 1936, apparently):
Exit through the gift shop, at which a complete home library may be purchased (or replace your worn copy of The Story of Art Without Men):
What do the streets outside look like after this $42 per person experience for Californians who say that they will pay any price and bear any burden to end homelessness?
Honda is in talks to merge with or purchase Nissan. I can’t figure out the rationale. In the old days maybe you’d say that it takes a long time to build factories, establish dealer networks, etc. and, therefore, Nissan’s assets might be valuable. But Tesla and BYD started from nothing and quickly built factories, company-owned stores (better than dealers), engineering, and everything else necessary for being in the car business. In any case, Honda doesn’t have to start from scratch in the car business because it is already well-established in the car business. If Nissan has some good people, Honda could try to hire them away and set them up within their proven-to-be-profitable structure.
What do we see below that Honda doesn’t make or couldn’t make?
The $120,000+ Nissan GT-R is kind of fun, but only about 1,000 are built each year.
More generally, given what Tesla and BYD have accomplished why would a car company ever want to buy another car company?
Today is the 80th anniversary of the Yalta Conference, in which the UK, US, and Soviet Union agreed on plans to force German civilians to work as slaves for years after the war. Clearing minefields was a popular assignment (popular with the assigners, that is) and also agricultural labor (i.e., American president FDR was carrying on in the rich American Democrat tradition of agricultural slave labor). This post looks at the question of whether the benefits of this slave labor justified, for the UK, the costs of going to war and staying at war.
I’ve been listening to When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day, in which participants describe the heroism of the British and their Allies during the 1944 Normandy invasion (also the cheerful and willing collaboration of most people in France). It’s a worthwhile book, but it doesn’t explain why the British sacrifice was worth it other than “Nazis are bad.”
Let’s back up to 1900. Is it fair to say that the UK circa 1900 was the most successful and richest country in the history of humanity? The sun never set on the British Empire, which included India. The Royal Navy was the world’s most powerful. Compare to today. The UK is an predominantly Islamic society (measured by hours spent on religious activities) jammed with low-skill immigrants. Wages are absurdly low by U.S. standards. GDP per capita is lower than in the poorest U.S. states. After decades of open borders, the core English part of the UK lacks cultural cohesion. The main project of the UK seems to have been assembling humans from the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies and expecting that they and their descendants won’t behave in a violent or dysfunctional manner once parked in the UK. The result is the Southport stabbings (by a young UK-born Rwandan) and the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal and similar. The trajectory of the UK from 1900 to the present looks like that of a country that lost multiple wars, each one having drained away its resources and treasure and each one resulting in the country being occupied by millions of non-British people.
What if the UK had never fought World War I? (As the victors, we typically think of Germany as the aggressor but it was the UK, without ever having been attacked, that declared war on Germany in 1914.) Let’s assume that Germany would, therefore, have attained all of its war goals. Would that have been worse than what the UK has done to itself? Germany’s goals in WWI were to steal some territory from neighboring countries, especially ports, but certainly not to take anything from the UK other than perhaps a competitive edge in colonizing far-away places that the UK didn’t hold onto even after ostensibly “winning” WWI. By not entering the war, the UK would have avoided the death of 6 percent of its male population (nearly 1 million men, though let’s keep in mind Hillary Clinton’s trenchant observation that “Women have always been the primary victims of war.”) and preserved a huge amount of treasure that it could have applied to beefing up its home defense and Royal Navy. Perhaps even more important, would the German people have elected Adolf Hitler if Germany had won WWI? The Nazis represented a dramatic change from previous German governments and a big part of Hitler’s appeal was that he would turn around the downward trajectory of the loss of WWI and the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. Without the British stepping in to fight WWI, therefore, they wouldn’t have had to consider whether to fight WWII. The UK would have needed to coexist with a more powerful Germany, but not a Germany with a plan to dominate all of Europe. Maybe a more powerful Germany could have pushed the UK aside in some of its colonial ambitions, but the UK lost all of its colonies in the “fight WWI and WWII” case.
The “fight WWI, but leave the Nazis alone and don’t fight WWII” analysis is a little tougher. Hitler supposedly didn’t want to fight the English, whom he admired. He envisioned a German-dominated European union (not too different from today’s “European Union”, including the idea of Jew-/Israel-hatred in most parts of Europe) and, even after the British declared war (without having been attacked in any way), a negotiated peace with the UK (see the background section of Operation Sea Lion in Wokipedia). If the British had used their resources to turn Britain into an island fortress rather than into daily fights with the Germans maybe Germany would never have bothered to bomb or invade the UK (Ireland was neutral regarding the Nazis and Germany never bothered Ireland). The UK might have lost some of its worldwide influence to a more powerful Germany, but the UK has lost all of its worldwide influence in the “fight WWI and WWII” case. As bad as Nazi Germany was, it never did anything so bad that the French weren’t happy to collaborate with the Nazis. Given the huge cost in lives, money, and years of home-front sacrifice, it seems that the UK would be in a better place today if it had let the Germans have a free hand in Europe from 1939 onward.
We can’t even say that the British sacrifices in WWI and WWII defeated the Nazis because we are informed that Nazis today (“far right”) are more numerous than ever and live all over the US and UK. Who wants to explain how the UK’s involvement in WWI and WWII makes rational sense in the light of how things turned out for the UK (i.e., the spectacular decline of the nation).
Related:
Proving that none of my ideas are original, the Journal of Diurnal Epistolary Communication (Daily Mail) published a scholarly work on this subject in 2009… “PETER HITCHENS: If we hadn’t fought World War 2, would we still have a British Empire?”: how come we look back on the Second World War from conditions we might normally associate with defeat and occupation? … We are a second-rate power, rapidly slipping into third-rate status. … We had then, as we have now, no substantial interests in Poland, the Czech lands, the Balkans or – come to that – France, Belgium or the Netherlands. … [regarding WWI] We had gained little and lost much to defend France, our historic enemy, against Germany. In a strange paradox, we had gone to war mainly to save our naval supremacy from a German threat – and ended it by conceding that supremacy to the United States, our ally. … What about the Holocaust? There seems to be a common belief that we went to war to save the Jews of Europe. This is not true. We went to war to save Poland, and then didn’t do so. … When, in 1942, the Germans began their ‘Final Solution’, reliable reports of the outrage were disbelieved or sat on. Later, when the information was beyond doubt, we turned down the opportunity to bomb the railway lines that led to Auschwitz. It is certainly hard to argue that the fate of Europe’s Jews would or could have been any worse than it was if we had stayed out of the war. [Maybe Jews would have been better off if the Nazis hadn’t been opposed in their efforts to dominate Europe. The Germans might have become so strong that they could have forced the UK to give up some of its colonial territory and then Germany would have forced Jews to move there, which was the original Nazi idea (get Jews out of Europe, not kill all Jews).]
The three mothers had always voted Democrat. One had a Bernie Sanders mug on her desk. They worked in helping fields — international aid, mental health, yoga instruction. They volunteered at their children’s schools. They fit right in to suburban Newton, with its liberal leanings and vaunted public education.
(Note that may be “vaunted” simply due to high test scores and the magic of heritability; the children of parents who scored well on tests tend to score well on tests.)
“At first we were just trying to understand the drastic changes that took place while no one was in school during COVID,” says one of the mothers, Vanessa Calagna. “It was like we were trying to put a puzzle together. And then we were trying to ring the alarm.”
Those changes involved a heightened emphasis on racial equity and antiracism, including a district commitment to “dismantle structures rooted in racism” and seek “more equitable outcomes for all students.”
Among the moves made in the interest of equity was an initiative by Newton’s two celebrated high schools to combine more students into “multilevel” classes. Rather than students being divided into separate classes by level, students at varying levels would learn together — even in math, science, and languages. The goal: to break the persistent pattern that white and Asian students predominated in “honors” classes while Black and Hispanic students tended to be clustered in less-challenging “college-prep” classes.
The Bernie voters get tarred as “right-wing” (not quite all the way to “far right” like Nazi Party member Elon Musk?):
In late 2022, the mothers and their allies launched a petition to create an advisory panel that would give parents more voice on academic issues, modeled after a similar Dedham committee that had been well received there. The proposal drew more than 300 signatures. It also drew fierce opposition. The mothers and their allies found themselves portrayed online and in public as dog-whistling bigots doing the bidding of right-wing national groups. Social media comments painted their side as “racism cloaked as academic excellence” and “right-wing activism cloaked as parental concern.”
At that four-hour-plus meeting, one speaker — a professor — compared the petition’s backers to the white women who helped perpetuate segregation and white supremacy.
Speaker after speaker declared that academic excellence and racial equity are not contradictory at all, and in fact complement each other.
Are these folks aware that there is a founded-in-1854 political party that shares their point of view? No:
As for Calagna’s trio, they identify as people with “traditional liberal values.” Calagna herself has never filled in a Republican circle on a ballot, she says.
What’s next? Aping Donald Trump in getting rid of the word “equity”!
In fact, the district’s existing tagline — “Equity & Excellence” — has become “divisive,” Nolin said. It will soon be changed to “Where All Children Thrive.”
Summarizing all of the above… Democrats in Massachusetts want and vote for social justice, equity, etc. But they don’t want it for their own children.
Loosely related… I was riding the MBTA’s Green Line out towards Newton last month (while up in Cambridge to teach at MIT). Here’s one of the righteous who has taken the trouble to wear a mask on the train, but refuses to follow the directions and shave his/her/zir/their beard (note that he/she/ze/they sits in a seat reserved for the disabled):
Donald Trump has demanded that Canada stop sending us fentanyl and undocumented migrants. (why wouldn’t Canada try to keep at least all of the migrants for itself since we are informed that low-skill migrants make any country richer?) Canada refused to try to do this so Trump has hit them with 25 percent tariffs and now the Canadians are retaliating with their own tariffs (NYT). Do the tariffs keep escalating until all trade stops? Then what? The Canadians (example) seem to think that the less-export- dependent country will cave in (34 percent of Canada’s GDP is exports; 12 percent of U.S. GDP is exports). Americans don’t think or care about this?
What does Canada produce that we can’t make domestically, albeit at a presumably higher price? On their side, why does Canada need the U.S. as a trade partner? If they are all about resource extraction why can’t they sell their extracted resources to the Chinese and Europeans?
To the extent that a reduction in trade with Canada harms New York, Vermont, Maskachusetts, etc., I wonder if the trade fracas will be a net positive for Florida, which doesn’t border Canada and doesn’t get any power from Canada. A righteous New Yorker who suddenly has to pay twice as much for electricity could reasonably consider that the last straw and move to Democrat-dominated Orlando.
Speaking of Florida, here are a few pictures from Juno Beach yesterday, which featured shockingly cold (to Floridians) 72-degree ocean water, a pelican sushi bar, and a lunch menu that RFK, Jr. would certainly appreciate:
Some Canine-Americans who don’t seem to be concerned about a trade war:
One tends to think of government as slow-moving, but President Trump’s order to stop preaching the rainbow flag religion seems to have been implemented at near-Silicon Valley speed. As of Friday evening, all of the CDC pages that recognized gender as distinct from sex seem to have disappeared. All of the links below, for example, went to “Not Found”
LLMs don’t have gender IDs as far as I know and, therefore, the LLM equivalent of gender dysphoria would be an LLM imagining that it identifies as some other LLM. Has this ever happened?
As you can see, after trying to discern if I was talking about Gemini AI or some other Gemini, DeepSeek replies, “If it’s about the AI, then the question is comparing me (which is ChatGPT) to Gemini.” Later, it refers to “Myself (ChatGPT).”
We are informed that membership in the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is the highest distinction to which a human can aspire so perhaps DeepSeek’s fluid identity is a sign that artificial general intelligence has already been achieved?
More than 36 square miles of Pacific Palisades were burned, which is a tragedy, of course, but also an opportunity for California’s central planners. We are informed that California is suffering from a housing crisis, an affordable housing crisis, a crisis of unhoused people, and a crisis of housing for noble undocumented migrants. Also that housing is a human right. Californians, if they were sincere in their principles and commitment to solving these crises, could use eminent domain to buy the burned square miles (at whatever the raw land value was prior to the fire) and develop it as a cluster of fireproof (and earthquake-proof) concrete-and-steel high-rises. Built to the same density as Manhattan of 73,000 people per square mile, this would become home to 2.6 million people. If we assume 3 people per unit, the county and state would be building approximately 870,000 units. “Housing Underproduction in California: 2023” says “California must build 3.5 million housing units by 2025 to end the state’s housing shortage”. In other words, a project of this nature would solve about 1/4 of California’s housing problems.
Could Californians afford it? In City rebuilding costs from the Halifax explosion we learned that it cost roughly $555,000 per unit at pre-Biden prices to build in Boston (assuming free land). Adjusted for Bidenflation, California’s higher costs, and the need to pay for the land let’s assume $1.5 million per unit. The total cost would then be $1.3 trillion, but let’s assume that not all of the units are given away free to noble no-income and low-income residents. Perhaps half the cost is eventually recovered via rent or sales. Thus, the total cost is $650 billion. Divided by California’s 39 million people, this works out to less than $17,000 per Californian, which seems like a small price to pay to take a big chunk out of the housing shortage/crisis and also reduce fire risk going forward (concrete and steel won’t burn and homeless encampments have been a source of recent fires (NBC)).
I’m so old that I mail out hardcopy Christmas/New Year’s/Kwanzaa cards. Quite a few friends hadn’t received them by New Year’s, which seemed odd because I’d put nearly all into a mailbox before Christmas.
One friend sent me a picture of the card that he received in Berkeley, California on January 4. It was postmarked December 23. That’s nearly two full weeks for the check to be in the mail, admittedly minus two days on which USPS employees don’t work (Christmas and New Year’s).
Maybe because I used an OSIRIS-REx stamp rather than a Kwanzaa stamp?
I’ve seen various progressives on X expressing a combination of rage and fear regarding the possibility that Donald Trump and his hated Republican junta will attempt to privatize the USPS. To figure out how bad this would be, perhaps we should start by considering what would happen if the USPS were simply eliminated. We would then have no mail, right? This is the same logic that is applied when we arrest migrant drug dealers. As soon as we have all of the drug dealer in prison there will be no more drugs sold. There is no chance that new migrants will walk across the border and begin dealing drugs into a lucrative open market (nor that any native-born American will start a career as a drug dealer).
What actually would happen? Delivering junk mail seems to be lucrative. My guess is that some company that already visits most houses in the U.S., e.g., Amazon, FedEx, or UPS, would start up a junk mail delivery service. Maybe there would be a printer in the delivery van so that physical documents didn’t have to be transported. First class mail delivery would get way more expensive and, perhaps, faster. This would lead to a lot of restructuring. No more hardcopy bills for $5 from health care providers. Americans who live in extremely remote settlements would need to pay for the “last leg” of delivery (maybe their settlement would do this on a bulk basis and fund it via property tax).
Of course, Americans will never give up on the USPS just as we won’t give up on the penny. So the above is just a thought experiment. But maybe USPS could be privatized as post offices in some other countries have been. In that case maybe they would adopt some of the above tweaks, e.g., an amazing printer inside the vehicle so that “junk mail” didn’t get “mailed”, a much higher price for the handful of first class letters that anyone still needs to send (I would adapt by switching to all-electronic cards).
Anecdote: About 25 years ago I went to Argentina. My Argentine friend said “Don’t bother to send postcards. They’ll never get to the U.S. It can take two weeks for a first class letter to arrive domestically in Argentina. The post office is a disaster.” I ignored his advice, of course, and had some fun trying to figure out how to buy stamps and use the post office to send cards to my mom. All of the postcards arrived in the U.S. after…. about two weeks.
Friends have been asking me about this evening’s crash between a U.S. military Black Hawk helicopter and a Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ) that was on final approach to DCA (Reagan National).
It’s a terrible tragedy, of course, and has led to speculation on X regarding terrorism. A review of the ATC recording shows that there was plenty of room for human error. Because the liveatc.net server is overwhelmed right now, I copied over the relevant recording of DCA Tower. Note that military aircraft communicate via UHF and, therefore, we will hear Tower talk to the Black Hawk, but not the Black Hawk talking to the Tower.
Below is the airport diagram. The Potomac River is to the right and above. Runway 33 begins at the center right of the drawing near the “Elev 10” (10′ above sea level) and “EMAS” (Engineered Materials Arresting System, designed to stop a plane overrunning opposite-direction Runway 15). The runway name of “33” indicates that an aircraft landing on it would be pointing roughly magnetic 330 (333 in this case) or northwest.
At 12:20 Bluestreak 5307, a CRJ-700, checks in and is cleared to land Runway 1 after rejecting an ATC-proposed change to 33 (“unable”). At 12:57 Bluestreak 5342, another CRJ-700, checks in and accepts a modified clearance to land Runway 33 (helps ATC get more departures out). At 13:50, the Tower says that winds are from 330 (northwest) at 15 knots, gusting 25 knots (will be bumpy in a helicopter).
At 15:05 there is some communication with PAT25 (the Black Hawk). At 15:50, Tower tells PAT25 about the CRJ’s lateral and vertical location and also where it is heading (“PAT25 traffic is south of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge a CRJ at 1200′ [landing?] Runway 33”). After an inaudible-to-us reply from the Black Hawk on UHF, the Tower says “visual separation approved” (this approval can be given in Class B airspace only if an aircraft says that it has positively identified another aircraft; we were given this approval every 5 minutes or so when operating our Robinson R44 helicopters in Boston Class B airspace for photo and sightseeing tours over the city; it was necessary because we were within a certain number of miles of the airliners even though we were never anywhere near the approach or departure paths of the jets).
At 17:25, DCA Tower asks PAT25, “Do you have the CRJ in sight?” (in hindsight, would have been much better if Tower had asked “Do you have the CRJ at your 10 o’clock in sight?”) Presumably the Black Hawk pilots answer in the affirmative, having seen or continuing to see what they believe to be the CRJ that ATC is talking about, but we can’t hear this on a recording of the VHF traffic. DCA Tower then instructs the Black Hawk to pass behind the CRJ (might require a slight turn or slowdown).
At 17:47, we hear background conversation in the Tower (a reaction to the crash, perhaps).
At 18:10, American Airlines 3130 is told to go around. The recording for the next few minutes indicates some rough times inside the Tower.
It’s too early to say definitively what caused the crash, of course. However, it seems that there were multiple jets in the air and even multiple CRJs. It is easy to see airplanes, especially airlines, at night, but not necessarily easy to tell a CRJ from an ERJ or a CRJ from an Airbus A319. A two-pilot crew in a Black Hawk would almost surely be able to avoid a crash with an airliner had they seen it more than 1.5 minutes earlier, which they say they did. Thus, the most plausible explanation is that the Black Hawk crew and DCA Tower were talking about two different airliners (i.e., talking past each other).
So… there were some excellent humans with excellent training in the airliner, in the Tower, and in the Black Hawk. Everyone was operating in the most restrictive low-altitude airspace (Class B) that we have in the U.S. and under time-tested rules that have ensured safety despite congestion. At the same time, however, we have the limitations of a natural language (English) and the human brain, which may latch onto and commit to the first plausible airliner that it sees.
A few potentially complicating factors:
Black Hawk pilots will fly with helmets, which reduce peripheral vision.
Black Hawk pilots may use night vision goggles (NVGs), which make it easier to see dark stuff on the ground but harder to see brightly lit objects, such as a CRJ in landing configuration. NVGs dramatically reduce peripheral vision (Update: Pete Hegseth says that they were using NVGs)
Military aircraft sometimes use modern standard ADS-B transponders that transmit x,y,z position, airspeed, and direction, but perhaps not always, and therefore the collision warnings provided by modern avionics might not be triggered
Airliner Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) has some inhibitions below 1000′ and below 500′ so as not to distract pilots during landing, so even if the Black Hawk had its ADS-B transponder on the airliner’s avionics might have inhibited a collision warning
Visual clutter from all of the city lights; it’s easier to pick out airports and aircraft at night in places where there aren’t brightly lit buildings, parking lots, and towers
For those who aren’t regular readers of this blog: I’m an FAA-certificated helicopter instructor as well as a former CRJ pilot for a Delta Airlines subsidiary. Landing and taking off at DCA were part of the Delta job. I also teach an aeronautical engineering class at MIT. I have never flown a Black Hawk, but I have trained experienced Army Black Hawk pilots to fly the Robinson R44. I have spent hundreds of hours in Class B airspace, the same kind of airspace that surrounds DCA, in helicopters while airliners were landing at Boston’s Logan Airport (it was very rare for us to need to cross the final approach course, for the jets, though; we typically avoided airliners by flying over the top of the airport at 1,500′ or above or by staying as low as 300′ above the ground when underneath the final approach course to an active runway).
What could have prevented the accident?
First, let’s reflect on the fact that last night’s situation was a common one for the past 60 years or so and there weren’t any previous accidents. So the interaction among river-following helicopters and landing/departing airliners wasn’t obviously unsafe. On the other hand, safety rested on human excellence and vigilance and none of us can be vigilant 24/7.
The easiest way to have prevented the accident would have been to eliminate the Army aviation unit involved in favor of Singapore-style congestion pricing for surface transport in the D.C. area. The aviation unit exists primarily to ferry around senior military personnel who don’t want to sit in traffic like the peasants must. As D.C. traffic has intensified over the decades and helicopters have become safer (twin engines; everything precision-machined; two pilots) more VIPs have decided that they’d rather get around by helicopter than by car. But let’s assume for this post that congestion pricing can’t happen and military brass won’t use Zoom and, therefore, what is essentially an air taxi operation is required.
Winston Churchill defined a fanatic as someone who won’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. That’s certainly me when it comes to the crying shame of modern software capabilities not making it into the cockpit or onto the workstations of air traffic controllers. Our desire for FAA-certified perfection makes it prohibitively expensive to put the kind of intelligence that we expect from a $500 drone into a $30 million airliner or $20 million Black Hawk. Imagine if the Black Hawk had an onboard assistant that could have said to the pilots “There’s an airliner at your 10 o’clock that you’ll hit if you don’t slow down to 50 knots.” That would, presumably, have redirected their attention away from whatever airliner they thought they were supposed to focus on and prevented the accident. All of the data necessary for such an assistant are available in any non-antique aircraft: position, velocity, track over the ground, position and velocity of other aircraft (broadcast via ADS-B, which is its own disappointment). The only thing that was missing on the Black Hawk was a $1,000 computer wired to the audio panel and a straightforward-to-write-but-ruinously-expensive-to-certify computer program. Similarly, ATC could have benefitted from a program that spoke “It doesn’t seem as though the Black Hawk is doing anything to avoid the CRJ, despite your instruction.” The controllers will, no doubt, share some blame for not noticing an alert on their screens, but these types of alerts are too common and insufficiently specific for humans to deal with reliably hour after hour day after day.
(Check out Beacon AI for an example of a company that is trying to deliver smarter in-flight software to deal with the fact that we demand ever higher levels of safety in a world where humans aren’t getting smarter or more vigilant. Beacon AI has some military contracts and things may move faster in that domain because the military is not bound by FAA certification rules.)
What about “Trump blames DEI for weakening FAA in aftermath of Reagan National plane crash” (The Hill)? Although the FAA has invested heavily in DEI, I don’t think that was the proximate cause of this accident. There will inevitably be a distribution of ability among air traffic controllers. DEI-based hiring will sadly increase the number of those with lower ability, just as in any other field of endeavor. On the other hand, there are only 37 Class B airports in the U.S. out of roughly 500 airports with control towers. Thus, these 7 percent most-critical airports are going to draw their tower controllers mostly from the top 7 percent of all tower controllers. A mediocre or low-performing controller can be parked at an out-of-the-way airport that has just a fraction of KDCA’s roughly 800 operations per day (Westover, Massachusetts is a civilian-military airport that has a control tower and only about 50 operations per day, for example). In 1996, the FAA was trying to bend its rules to favor women (report). In 1999, the FAA was working on bending the rules to favor “African-Americans” (report). See also “Obama-era FAA hiring rules place diversity ahead of airline safety” (Fox News, 2018) and this undated recruiting video. Perhaps it would be fair to blame the FAA’s focus on DEI as a factor in slowing the agency’s ability to adopt innovation simply because time and money spent on DEI can’t be spent on improving operations.
Some previous articles that I’ve written about the negative impact on safety of the financial and calendar obstacles to certification (perfection is the goal and it becomes the enemy of near-perfect solutions that would be huge safety improvements):
I don’t think that there will be anything interesting to learn from the cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders other than, perhaps, a precise altitude for the crash (Update: the CRJ’s black box places the jet at 325′ MSL (NBC).)
the NTSB and FAA will pull the tapes (maybe they’re still actual tapes) from DCA Tower so that they can can hear both the UHF (Black Hawk transmissions) and VFR communications