For more than a year the US Air Force has been working to “remove barriers” to “underrepresented” groups, both within its ranks and for potential recruits. Recently, thanks to the Air Force’s official LGBTQ Initiatives Team, the Air Force even identified and eliminated a “restrictive policy that was being used against transgender Airmen.” (That policy was the longstanding limitation on what was allowed to be in an Air Force signature block, which even Mikey Weinstein has supported. Now, happily, all Airmen can put their preferred pronouns in their signature blocks.)

Other ‘inclusive’ emphasis has been placed on recruiting Air Force pilots.

Last fall, the Air Force made some very specific changes to its officer candidate testing programs: the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test (AFOQT) and the Test of Basic Aviation Skills (TBAS). Whether you agree with battery testing or not, both of those tests are important in helping the Air Force choose who will be its officers and pilots. From this point forward, candidates for a position as an Air Force pilot can:

– Use their highest composite scores from any Air Force Officer Qualifying Test (AFOQT) rather than the most current score.
– Complete the Test of Basic Aviation Skills (TBAS) up to three times…
– Re-take the AFOQT and TBAS after 90 days compared to the previous 150-day requirement for the AFOQT and 180 days for the TBAS.
– Participate in [group] study sessions…if [the group] has never taken the AFOQT.

The Air Force also limited the value of previous flight experience, cutting off any benefits after a potential applicant has 60 hours of flight time [emphasis added]:

Prior flying experience, the second largest component of an applicant’s PCSM score, particularly poses a socioeconomic barrier to candidates without access to or financial means to pay for flying lessons. To address this barrier, the Air Force now considers only a candidate’s initial 60 flight hours when scoring a candidate.

The changes seem relatively benign, but the message they send – and the Air Force’s takeaway – is rather condemning [emphasis added]:

“Our studies concluded that these changes will result in more qualified candidates of underrepresented groups being selected for training,” said Lt. Col. Brandi King, the working group’s AETC lead.

The Air Force statements don’t seem to explicitly define “underrepresented groups,” which it awkwardly abbreviates “URGs,” but at various times it includes “Black/African American, Hispanic and Latino, Asian, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander” and female as URGs.

The problem is the targeted revisions to the AFOQT and TBAS are explicitly intended to give applicants more attempts and more help to improve their scores and, presumably, their chances of becoming an Air Force pilot. In particular, Changes 2 and 3 give more chances to take the test and over a shorter period of time. Change 4, for the first time in almost 20 years, permits group study sessions for Air Force personnel testing. (The governing regulation, AFMAN 36-2664, has specifically banned such studies over the years in a stated effort to discourage cheating.)

In theory, those changes would help all candidates, but the Air Force is saying these changes were made explicitly for the benefit of “underrepresented groups”. The Air Force is directly saying that URG pilot applicants need to be given more testing attempts and the ability to study as a group so they can become pilots — while white, male applicants presumably do not.

This is also notable in the change in flight hours. The report specifically says that lowering the benefit of applicant flight hours, in order to mitigate a “socioeconomic barrier”,

would have resulted in 69 more Hispanic, 47 more female, and 26 more Black/African-American qualified applicants over a 12-year period.

(For some perspective, consider that over that 12-year period those 142 “URG” pilots would have represented less than 1% of the 15,000 pilots produced by the Air Force.)

Note that the Air Force does not say that lowering the flight hour benefit would have resulted in a single additional white male qualified applicant over those same 12 years. Does the Air Force really believe there are no white males whose socioeconomic status limits their ability to get flight time prior to joining the Air Force?

Of course, one issue for the Air Force is that the entire population of applicants can benefit from these changes, which means that unless the Air Force truly believes that only URG applicants will benefit from, say, a third testing attempt, then the relative proportion of candidate applications among the groups will remain relatively steady – and pilot demographics in the Air Force won’t substantially change.

Then again, if a government institution really does believe that a specific demographic needs more attempts to succeed than others do, what does that say about the government’s opinion of that particular demographic?