The Tuskegee Airmen, Air Traffic Controllers and Air Safety: How Air Traffic Operations Worked Under Mr. Trump and the Biden Administration

He added that the rigorous standards for hiring pilots, mechanics and air traffic controllers were never relaxed to meet diversity goals, but rather that previous administrations and the commercial air industry overall have worked to remove barriers to entry.

Of the more than 900 Black pilots who made up the Tuskegee Airmen, only one became a commercial pilot, he said. Before the civil rights movement, Black men and women could not work in the industry.

Robert Fowler Jr., a pilot and professor of aerospace at Middle Tennessee State University, said that costs and time required to qualify for a pilot’s license were still significant obstacles. Despite the industry’s attempt to provide scholarships and cast a wider recruiting net, diversity efforts have not been all that successful.

There has never been a single incident where D.E.I. has ever been attributed as a single cause or contributing cause.

A post on Medium said one of the candidates graduated from the F.A.A. Academy and became an air traffic controller. The exact number of people who graduated from that program is not known.

“The candidates in this program will receive the same rigorous consideration in terms of aptitude, medical and security qualifications as those individuals considered for a standard public opening for air traffic controller jobs,” the F.A.A. said in 2019. Those standards include passing an air traffic skills assessment and a medical exam.

And that’s how it worked in the Biden Administration, says Kelly Buckland, who was the disability policy advisor to former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Any hiring of people with disabilities at the FAA, Buckland told NPR, “would only be qualified people with disabilities, with the emphasis on qualified.”

This is not true. When it came to recruitment for air traffic operations, the efforts to recruit people with certain disabilities began under Mr. Trump’s own administration, though the language regarding hiring those with Disabilities more generally preceded his first term. And there is no evidence that the government’s efforts to recruit more people with disabilities or the Obama or Biden administration’s diversity efforts were to blame for the crash.

“This was in the Obama administration, just prior to my getting there — and we took care of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, we took care of everybody at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. It’s one of the reasons I won — but they actually came out with a directive. Too white.

The agency has a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative that allows workers with intellectual disabilities, mental and physical conditions, as well as other special needs, to be hired.

President Trump lashed out at his predecessors and the FAA for their diversity goals as he updated the public about the deadly collision over the river.

Even as he acknowledged that he had no evidence, but was instead relying on “common sense,” he suggested that efforts to hire more people with disabilities and diversify the ranks of the F.A.A. were to blame for the accident late Wednesday that killed 67 people.

“Despicable,” Buttigieg responded in a post on X, formerly Twitter. (Let’s say where the post Can we say where the “As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, we drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on or watch.”

Trump criticized the secretary of transportation, Buttigieg. Trump said that he had run it right into the ground.

Trump suggested diversity efforts at the FAA, including the hiring of people with disabilities, had compromised air safety. He said the crash of a commercial jet and a military helicopter Wednesday night “could have been” caused by diversity in hiring, but noted that the investigation into the cause is still going on.

In his press conference about Wednesday night’s accident, Trump quoted that Fox News article to say, falsely, that unqualified people with disabilities were being hired in positions like air traffic controller.

There is a history of people trying to link air safety problems to diversity, including the hiring of people with disabilities when a Boeing aircraft lost a door during a flight last January.

“To scapegoat people with disabilities for this tragedy justseems inconsistent with the facts,” said a chief executive officer of The Arc of United States.