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Comment by Jimmc414 | Hacker News Reader

> when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.

Respectfully, thats not accurate.

The article actually shows that dei considerations were central to the original changes, not just recent framing. The FOIA requests show explicit discussions about "diversity vs performance tradeoffs" from the beginning. The NBCFAE role and the "barrier analysis" were both explicitly focused on diversity outcomes in 2013.

The article provides primary sources (internal FAA documents, recorded messages, investigation reports) showing that racial considerations were explicitly part of the decision making process from the start. This is documented in realtime communications.

The scandal involved both improper hiring practices (cheating) AND questionable DEI implementation. These aren't mutually exclusive; they're interrelated aspects of the same event.

> Taking old, resolved scandals

In what way do you consider this resolved?

The class action lawsuit hasn't even gone to trial yet (2026).

The FAA is still dealing with controller shortages. (facilities are operating understaffed,controllers are working 6-day weeks due to staffing shortages, training pipelines remain backed up)

The relationship between the FAA and CTI schools remains damaged, applicant numbers have declined significantly since 2014.

View on HN

Congress stopped the shitty behavior quiz 9 years ago

> The relationship between the FAA and CTI schools remains damaged, applicant numbers have declined significantly since 2014.

> The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.

Separate from the above posts, the FAA continued their discriminatory policies. For example, setting several DEIA initiatives and only one target for hiring more Air Traffic controllers. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/office_org/hea...

Was deeply aware of it at the time - was not really a DEI issue even then - it was pure cronyism.

The source article includes primary material that strongly contradicts your anecdote. The policy change arrived in 2013, and there are materials from that same year indicating DEI.

For example, here's an FAA slide from 2013 which explicitly publishes the ambition to place DEI as the core issue ("- How much of a change in jo performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?"):

https://archive.ph/Qgjy5

The evidence in this source does not discuss cronyism, although I believe you that it could have been relevant to your personal experience; it's just false to claim the issue as a whole was unrelated to DEI.

Actually the source article is quite clear about the implementation of cronyism - friends were emailed the answers to the bizarre hiring test and others were not. It is typical behavior of machine politics - give good jobs to those who support you and block others from having them. Certainly the FAA did have DEI goals, but you can't attribute this patronage to them.

I think might be misreading the article.

It says the answers were sent from the FAA to members of the "National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees". It went to all of them, not just friends. It was DEI, not cronyism.

Soon, though, she became uneasy with what the organization was doing, particularly after she and the rest of the group got a voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:

You might be confused by this line:

As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly’s friends in the program encouraged her to join the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees

That may or not be cronyism, but once she joined, the whole org got the answers, so clearly it was aimed at getting more Blacks through the process.

It can be both.

I get that you’re trying to contribute to the conversation, but you do realize that what you’re saying sounds racist?

In addition, this is a diversion from the elephant in the room, which is that right after some dramatic executive action, many people died within a short amount of time due to a crash that had nothing to do with race and everything to do with chaotic governance.

Oh no, what he said sounds racist! He shouldn’t contribute to the conversation then.

"Friends" here means members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.

... You concede that it was cronyism here. Unless you want to expand on what you are saying.

He concedes no such thing. Reserving jobs for members of a "black coalition" that any black person can join is obviously DEI, not cronyism. It's a de facto race-based filter, not one based on favour-trading or past links to the applicant.

Why not both? Near as I can tell, Cronyism goes hand in hand. Someone has to gatekeep who counts in what bracket, someone has to represent the bracket, etc.

And the beauty is, the more brackets, the more true this is, and the more can be extracted from the system.

You're asking the wrong person there. "Both" concedes that it was "DEI"

But to actually answer the question: while it can absolutely be both, you need to provide proof of the additional claim. "People cheated for DEI reasons" and "People cheated for cronyism reasons" are two separate claims. The article provides plenty of evidence for the former and not much for the latter.

What do you consider cronyism except ‘members of this organization share cheats and get each other in’?

"Cronyism (noun, derogatory): the appointment of friends and associates to positions of authority, without proper regard to their qualifications."

Cronyism is advancing the interests of your personal connections. Friends and family. If you want an explicit cutoff, the Dunbar Number suggests this group should have 100, maybe 150 people in it.

Conversely, there's 40 million black people in the US, and I really doubt anyone is even associated with all of them, much less calling them one of their friends.

You can change who you're friends with a lot easier than you can change your skin color, so the two result in different problems. They're both bad, of course. Similar to how "wage theft" and "shoplifting" are different crimes, even though both of them involve taking money from someone else.

Associates. You know like people who literally belong (aka associate) to the same organization?

Only hiring people who belong to the same fraternity is also cronyism, and is the same problem.

In this case, a criteria for joining this ‘fraternity’ is the color of their skin.

Hence double applicable with DEI.

Why do you keep insisting on ignoring half of what you are pasting?

> Associates. You know like people who literally belong (aka associate) to the same organization?

First, the FAA and the NBCFAE are different organizations.

Second, "Associate" does not mean "employed at the same massive organization". It means someone you actually know, on a personal level. You and I are not "associates" just because we both post on Hacker News.

Third, the question is whether you're associated with the individual, not the organization that they're a part of.

> Only hiring people who belong to the same fraternity is also cronyism

If you only hire from Harvard or some other prestigious university is that also cronyism?

Are all internal promotions cronyism?

If you only hire people who live in your city, is that also cronyism? Keep in mind that there's plenty of rural towns that have fewer people than a big fraternity does. Does this change if all th qualified workers in the town are black, so you're only hiring black workers?

You presumably have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise "only hiring US citizens" is also cronyism. Where, exactly, are you suggesting that line should be?

I’m saying going out of your way to get people from a specific organization that you are also a member of hired where you work, is cronyism.

Also, going out of your way to hire people of specific skin color where you work, is racism.

Seems like a bunch of folks at the FAA were doing both here, yes?

Totally agreed on this being racist, illegal, and just absurdly unethical. I just think the way you're understanding the word "cronyism" is going to lead to a lot of confusion, because it's not the way most people use it.

I'll offer up the Wikipedia definition, since it is perhaps slightly clearer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronyism defines it as "friends or trusted colleagues".

give up. you won't convince anyone. if corruption have any minority scape goat, it's "them".

I found one thing odd, which was outside of the scope over the zero sum game being fought here.

If you are understaffed, AND you are hiring traditionally, it would make sense that recruiting people would go up. That would mean diverse hires anyway - based on the article, it seems that even increasing diversity was not between undeserving candidates and ideal candidates (the second band section of the article)

Is the third variable at play here a lack of funding from congress for recruitment?

If you are trying to reach race/gender based quotas, you simply cannot hire white men anymore when they are 90% of the applicants. Or at least, you must attempt to minimize it as much as possible. Math.

Yeah but thats not how any quota based system works. Thats the strawman of quota systems. The article itself showed that the quota is some fraction of total applicants that results in minimal impact to performance.

Also I heard "math" with a youtube overlay.

The quota issue isn't that you have an explicit hiring quota for each race -- which might even be illegal. It's that if, at the end of the year, the number of people you hired had a large racial disparity, that's bad optics and you'll get in trouble, which you know so you fudge things to change it however you can.

So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants. Worse, if you hire based on highest test scores you'd only hire 2 of the black applicants and end up with 99.6% white hires. The obvious thing to do to improve the optics is to figure out how to hire all 10 of the qualified black applicants, which is the thing that would have "minimal impact to performance", but you have two problems. First, picking them explicitly because of their race is illegal, so you have to manufacture some convoluted system to do it in a roundabout way. Second, even if you do that you're still screwed, because even hiring all 10 of them leaves you with 98% white hires and that's still bad optics.

Their workaround was to use a BS biographical test to exclude most of the white applicants while giving the black applicants the answers. If you do that you can get 90 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants. That'll certainly improve the optics, but then you have 400 unfilled slots.

> So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants

What you're supposed to do is go to places with more black people and start advertising to people in general they can become air traffic controllers. Then take them through air traffic controller training school and at the end, you *don't* have only 10 qualified black applicants.

There are only so many black people in the country. Every skilled job has this problem; poaching can make you look slightly better but it does nothing overall and will make wherever you poached your qualified black applicants from look worse.

> There are only so many black people in the country.

The US population is around 1/8 black. Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black. Which seems like a good outcome.

If 1/8 of the population is black and someone is trying to get 1/4 of air traffic controllers to be black, that seems like a mistake.

> Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black.

It doesn't mean that at all.

Well, depending on what you mean. It could just be that your premise is known to be false.

Of course my premise doesn’t hold, and the glaringly obvious cause is historical inequality. This doesn’t mean that the FAA should mess with its hiring process in an ill-conceived and very likely illegal attempt to make it look like the problem doesn’t exist.

But, to me, it would be absurd to suggest that the air traffic controllers should be “diverse” in the sense that a “minority” group should be represented in excess of its representation in the overall population, that there aren’t enough black people the US for a fair hiring process to achieve this, and that therefore an unfair process should be used to increase this sort of “diversity”. That’s all kinds of wrong!

> Of course my premise doesn’t hold, and the glaringly obvious cause is historical inequality.

No, this is false. You don't appear to know what you're trying to postulate.

Only if black candidates meet the criteria equally, are as interested to work as air traffic controllers as anyone else, have equivalent lifestyles and family support to allow them to do the job as effectively as anyone else, etc.

There are enough differences in socialization, current population education levels, current incarceration rates/history in the population, etc. to make that essentially impossible yes?

As to if they are fair or not? Probably not. are you going to fix it, and if so, how?

We can argue about theoretical from birth path differences all we want, but no one on the hiring side has the time to deal with those or to control them - and if looking at things from a coarse population level - it just doesn’t reflect actual reality right now, yes?

Then keep chasing the symptom backwards until you find the root cause. It's standard troubleshooting, not rocket science.

If your problem is who to hire this week, root causing back to someone’s childhood conditions 20 years ago does absolutely fuck all for you.

You're telling me they had this diversity mandate 10 years ago and in the last 10 years all they could think to do was to disqualify white people from hiring and there were absolutely no opportunities to go and encourage people to be air traffic controllers?

Now that's proof that white hiring managers are incompetent! (that's a joke)

No? What are you talking about?

The article specifically talks about how the college courses were in community colleges, not bastions of privilege of any kind.

Ah yes, but that isn't guaranteed to work, and if someone is going to get in trouble if they don't make their numbers then they start making contingencies.

Or you stop trying to force blacks into the job and hire whoever applies and is the most qualified. This way people don't die just so leftists can feel satisfied.

Which part of setting up a stall in a job fair in a more diverse part of town is "forcing blacks into the job"?

From what I saw, people did that years and years ago. What happens when that isn’t sufficient?

The problem, of course, is that due to "disparate impact" doctrine, this (and colourblind hiring in general) is de facto illegal, and DEI scale-tipping is de facto mandatory (even though it's almost always de jure illegal).

Large American employers basically all face the same double bind: if they do not disriminate in hiring, they almost certainly will not get the demographic ratios the EEOC wants, and will get sued successfully for disparate impact (and because EVERYTHING has disparate impact, and you cannot carry out a validation study on every one of the infinite attributes of your HR processes, everyone who hires people is unavoidably guilty all the time). But if they DO discriminate, and get caught, then that's even more straightforwardly illegal and they get sued too.

There is only one strategy that has a chance of not ending you up on the losing end of a lawsuit: deliberately illegally discriminate to achieve the demographic percentages that will make the EEOC happy, but keep the details of how you're doing so secret so that nobody can piece together of the story to directly prove illegal discrimination in a lawsuit. (It'll be kinda obvious it must've happened from the resulting demographics of your workforce, but that's not enough evidence.) The FAA here clearly failed horribly at the "keep the details secret" part of this standard plan.

Curious to see if "disparate impact" criteria gets softened, i.e., impose requirement to find "intentional bias" (c.f. status quo)

What I think is weird is how many firms have this reason, but do it for other stated reasons and don't simply state this compliance nuance. I figure more people would accept your "paragraph three strategy" as an acceptable means to a required end. Maybe this threat is more of a "what if" that has lower probability of enforcement so in practice, getting hunted for this is not that likely.

What grandparent said wouldn’t lead to people dying though.

Depends if you are able fill the slots, and how quickly.

It looks like the thing that stopped the slot filling was funding, not a dearth of candidates.

We had 500 open positions. We filled 100, and argued over 10.

That’s still a gap of 400 positions. We have only 110 qualified applicants.

The Math is missing a third variable.

Having been on the (explicit) receiving side of this - you just don’t fill the other positions until you find the right candidates (where right is whatever criteria you can’t say out loud - though has been said out load often in the last few years).

Alternatively, this is a way for your boss to meet budget targets while not explicitly laying people off, and giving hope to people that help is coming.

Advertising your jobs to more people (including black ones) might help you find more candidates. If you're not finding enough candidates AND you're only finding white candidates, something is wrong, innit? There are all those people who aren't white who might be candidates who for some reason you're ignoring.

How long do you go before you call it quits, and how many white candidates do you need to pass over before you find ‘enough’ black candidates? What consequences need to happen with all those unfilled roles before it is ‘enough’?

Especially since the market of people willing to work the job AND take the pay AND work in the area is not infinite.

We’re talking about a group which went out of its way (apparently) already to recruit folks with the specific colors they wanted + these other criteria.

Don’t forget, everyone else in the country has been having similar constraints and has been trying to do the same thing near as I can tell.

Why do you think they were sharing test answers (it seems), and still only got x candidates in?

And also, doesn’t this entire thing seem actively unfair and racist (albeit to everyone except the chosen minority) instead of what at worst was perhaps a passively unfair and racist situation before? (Albeit to everyone except the majority)

How is that actually any better, except that it pisses off the majority instead of the minority?

Seems like a good way to lose elections, frankly. Or have a majority of the population angry at every minority out there.

Why pass over any white candidates?

You have more spots than you have qualified candidates. Even if you take your second band candidates, its still short the number you need.

Because if your hiring numbers (and workforce composition) don’t line up with what the gov’t expects (applies even more to the gov’t itself) then as a hiring manager you’re in deep shit.

Straight from the president up until Trump (for many administrations), affirmative action is required.

And what the gov’t expects is that your workforce composition aligns with the population as a whole, percentage wise.

Again that doesnt make sense.

You have 100 open positions.

You filled 50.

You left the other 50 spots open so that you could have the right composition amongst HALF of the required workforce?

Heck, if you hire everyone, you solve this problem completely.

There seems to be implication of confusion of what a qualified applicant means in your example above.

If there's a test used as the basis of consideration, and some process has decided that any score over X makes the candidate qualified, but then you are later going to claim that actually, given that there were candidates with a score of X+Y, a score of just X does not really constitute "qualified" and the higher scoring candidates should have been chosen, then the whole nature of the test and the ranking becomes rather suspect.

So either everyone who is judged to be qualified really is qualified, and it makes no difference that they were not necessarily the highest scoring candidates ... or ... the test for "qualified" is not suitable for purpose.

Suppose you have a test which is a decent proxy for how well someone will do a job. The median person currently doing the job scored 85 and their range is 70-99. If you put someone who scored a 4 in the job, people will die almost immediately. If you put someone who scored a 50 there, people will be at a higher risk of death and you'd be better off passing on that candidate and waiting for a better one. From this we might come up with a threshold of 70 for the minimum score and call this "qualified". Then if you have to fill 5 slots and you got candidates scoring 50, 75 and 95, you should hire the latter two and keep the other slots unfilled until you get better candidates.

But if you have to fill 5 slots and you have 10 candidates who all scored above 70, you now have to choose between them somehow. And the candidates who scored 95 are legitimately expected to perform the job better than the ones who scored 75, even though the ones who scored 75 would have been better than an unfilled position.

Assumptions:

1. there is a test that is a decent proxy for job performance

2. the relationship between job performance and test score above some passing score is linear

These both sound "common sense", but I suspect fail for a huge number of real world scenarios.

According to the article they actually tested the first assumption and it was true.

The second assumption is not required. If people who score a 95 are only 5% better at the job than people who score a 70, all else equal you'd still pick the person who scored a 95 given the choice.

Non-linear doesn't mean "still monotonic". My experience has been that beyond a certain threshold on a given test, job performance is essentially uncorrelated with test performance.

As for the article, it's not given me particular solid vibes, a feeling not helped by some of the comments here (both pro and con).

> Non-linear doesn't mean "still monotonic".

Satisfying the first assumption means "still monotonic".

Also, if you had a better test then you'd use it, but at some point you have 10 candidates and 5 slots and have to use something to choose, so you use the closest approximation available until you can come up with a better one.

> Satisfying the first assumption means "still monotonic".

Sorry, but I just don't agree. There are "qualifying tests" for jobs that I've done that just do not have any sort of monotonic relationship with job performance. I'm a firefighter (volunteer) - to become operational you need to be certified as either FF I or FF II, but neither of those provide anything more than a "yes, this person can learn the basic stuff required to do this". The question of how good a firefighter someone will be is almost orthogonal to their performance on the certification exams. Someone who gets 95% on their IFSAC FF II exam is in no way predicted to be a better firefighter than someone who got 78%.

> AND you are hiring traditionally

And the FAA stopped doing that. They revamped the hiring process to screen against the White applicants. The way they did it, is also highly insulting to Black people, btw.

By "hiring traditionally" they may have meant "posting a job description and application instructions". They definitely didn't continue to interact with the CTI schools.

What they didn't appear to do, at least it is not discussed, is targeted advertising towards underrepresented groups.

The answer to the question you've quoted is important, since it could be "none", "a little bit", "a lot", "any amount", each of which has very different ramifications. There is no answer on the slide ...

They decided that at least some amount was acceptable - the minimum score on the AT-SAT was changed so that 95% of test takers would pass because the original threshold where 60% passed excluded too many black applicants. This was despite previous studies showing that a higher score on the AT-SAT was correlated with better job performance.

No, that's not an answer to that specific question.

Performance on the AT-SAT is not job performance.

If you have a qualification test that feels useful but also turns out to be highly non-predictive of job performance (as, for example, most college entrance exams turn out to be for college performance), you could change the qualification threshold for the test without any particular expectation of losing job performance.

In fact, it is precisely this logic that led many universities to stop using admissions tests - they just failed to predict actual performance very well at all.

> Performance on the AT-SAT is not job performance.

No, but it was the best predictor of job performance and academy pass rate there was.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA566825.pdf

https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/data_research/resear... (page 41)

There are a fixed number of seats at the ATC academy in OKC, so it's critical to get the highest quality applicants possible to ensure that the pass rate is as high as possible, especially given that the ATC system has been understaffed for decades.

That is NOT what the first study you've cited says at all:

> "The empirically-keyed, response-option scored biodata scale demonstrated incremental validity over the computerized aptitude test battery in predicting scores representing the core technical skills of en route controllers."

I.e the aptitude test battery is WORSE than the biodata scale.

The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.

I'd also say at a higher level that both of those papers absolutely reek of non-reproduceability and low N problems that plague social and psychological research. I'm not saying they're wrong. They are just not obviously definitive.

> The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.

How is that a criticism? It is always possible that someone could invent a better test.

In any case, the second citation directly refutes your point in another sub-thread with AnthonyMouse, the assertion that higher-performing applicants above the cutoff do not perform better on the job:

"If all applicants scoring 70 or above on the AT-SAT are selected, slightly over one-third would be expected to be high performers. With slightly greater selectivity, taking only applicants scoring 75.1 or above, the proportion of high performers could be increased to nearly half."

Also:

"The primary point is that applicants who score very high (at 90) on the AT-SAT are expected to perform near the top of the distribution of current controllers (at the 86th percentile)."

> I.e the aptitude test battery is WORSE than the biodata scale.

You're mistaken, it's the opposite. The first one found that AT-SAT performance was the best measure, with the biodata providing a small enhancement:

> AT-SAT scores accounted for 27% of variance in the criterion measure (β=0.520, adjusted R2=.271,p<.001). Biodata accounted for an additional 2% of the variance in CBPM (β=0.134; adjusted ΔR2=0.016,ΔF=5.040, p<.05).

> In other words, after taking AT-SAT into account, CBAS accounted for just a bit more of the variance in the criterion measure

Hence, "incremental validity."

> The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.

You're right, and I can't remember which study it was that explicitly said that it was the best measure. I'll post it here if I find it. However, given that each failed applicant costs the FAA hundreds of thousands of dollars, we can safely assume that there was no better measure readily available at the time, or it would have been used instead of the AT-SAT. Currently they use the ATSA instead of the AT-SAT, which is supposed to be a better predictor, and they're planning on replacing the AT-SAT in a year or two; it's an ongoing problem with ongoing research.

> I'd also say at a higher level that both of those papers absolutely reek of non-reproduceability and low N problems that plague social and psychological research. I'm not saying they're wrong. They are just not obviously definitive.

Given the limited number of controllers, this is going to be an issue in any study you find on the topic. You can only pull so many people off the boards to take these tests, so you're never going to have an enormous sample size.

If we step away from the traffic controllers nonsense for a moment, the actual problem sounded like a military pilot to me. It's my understanding that people who have a family line of pilots go into that funnel knowing a specific nepotism related result occurs such that when it comes time to become a commercial pilot you are probably from such a family.

I have no idea if helicopter pilots work the same way or are starting to work the same way, but whenever I see a BS move like this I think that there's probably an opposite interpretation that doesn't fit what their demographic wants to hear.

Robust systems are designed to avoid single points of failure. Humans are fallible. So, for example, both the pilot and the air traffic controller are intended to be paying attention so that if one of them makes a mistake the other can pick it up. If the pilot is making an error, the air traffic controller gets on the radio to tell them they're getting too close to another aircraft, in time for them to course correct.

If air traffic control is under-staffed, now the warning the pilot gets might come a minute later than it would have otherwise, and already be too late. Then you no longer have a robust system and it's only a matter of time before one of the pilot errors the system was designed to be able to catch in time instead results in a collision.

There's obviously some number of mistakes one party can make in a single incident such that the other has a limited probability of preventing an accident. If flight control is the robustness, it would take flight control with a lot of free time to be reducing those mistakes in pilots by following up on all sorts of errors unrelated to an incident until a pilot rarely makes multiple overlapping mistakes.

You're still going to try to reduce the errors by each party as much as you can. The point is that if they each do the right thing 99.9% of the time, the overlap allows you to prevent a problem 99.9999% of the time. Whereas if you compromise one of them so that it's 80% instead of 99.9%, the chance that something makes it through the net increases by a factor of 200.

It's not entirely fair to choose this flight as a random sample, but assuming for a moment that it is.. The pilot has a 85% or lower, how many 9s on the controller fix that?

If controllers were like traffic cops they would take time to raise or remove that 85% when they caught it and pay limited attention to current traffic to take actions to reduce future traffic risk. But they are not that as you just explained again.

It's not about a particular pilot, it's about the system as a whole. As long as 99.9% of aircraft don't require any remediation, the air traffic controllers have the bandwidth to catch the few that do. Until you don't have enough air traffic controllers.

The pilot is an example consistent with no actions to correct pilots. Double controllers and these pilots can now fly twice as many missions before they kill someone.

Controllers talk like an extra 9 for them is the focus and it is for them, the public acting like their ceremonies are about fixing the majority of the problem is a bold faced lie.

There are already many actions to correct pilots. But human efforts are never perfect and we don't expect them to be, for both the pilots and the air traffic controllers. Which is why they're designed to backstop one another, and why compromising either one of them increases the probability of a collision.

> If the pilot is making an error, the air traffic controller gets on the radio to tell them they're getting too close to another aircraft, in time for them to course correct.

They did.

Pretty sure military aircraft just don’t have to listen to them.

They did after it was too late, because the crash happened. Unless the crash was intentional (and I'm not aware of any evidence of that), getting the warning sooner could have given the pilot more time to correct.

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