Somehow I don’t think this will be a very popular move by United
I can’t really imagine that all that many people will be thrilled with this announcement:
“Over the next decade, United will train 5,000 pilots who will be guaranteed a job with United, after they complete the requirements of the Aviate program – and our plan is for half of them to be women and people of color,” said United CEO Scott Kirby. “We’re excited that JPMorgan Chase has agreed to support our work to diversify our pilot ranks and create new opportunities for thousands of women and people of color who want to pursue a career in aviation.”…
To break down the financial barriers that limited access to the airline pilot career path for generations of women and people of color, United has committed to fund $1.2 million in scholarships. The airline’s credit card partner, JPMorgan Chase has also committed $1.2 million to support women and people of color who are accepted to United Aviate Academy.
“We are proud to partner with United to support the Aviate Academy’s mission to enable thousands to pursue their dream as a commercial airline pilot,” said Ed Olebe, President of Chase Co-Brand Cards. “Investing in this program directly aligns with our efforts to advance racial equity by expanding career development opportunities and making tangible progress in a field where women and people of color are underrepresented.”
How many people’s wokeness extends to supporting affirmative action for pilots?
And how can we be assured that standards will not be relaxed?
Also, is it even legal for banks such as Chase to offer loans on the overt basis of race and sex? United calls its own contributions “scholarships,” but I’m not sure that gets around the problem.
Lastly, I was under the impression that the usual career path back in the day for commercial pilots used to be through piloting in the military. Did that stop being the case recently? The answer is yes, and not even all that recently (the linked article is from 2013):
…[M]ost of the airline pilots today come from a civilian background. The time (in years) that the military demands from pilots is over 10 years after graduation from flight school. It used to be 6 years. Additionally, the demand for the number of military pilots has decreased. When both of these factors are accounted for, the pool of military pilots available to be hired by airlines is decreasing. The number of civilian pilots being hired by the airlines has risen to the point that in recent years there are more civilian pilots than military.
The corporate executives who put their name to these inane public statements remind one of the characters in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.
You have gender-norming of performance scores in the military. If you have a gander at Virginia Military Institute and The Citadel, I’ll wager you you’ll find the same thing. Yes, standards will be relaxed.
See (the late) Kara Hultgren.
Well given the fact that we now know getting the right answer in any math problem is RACIST!!!, we can expect some “high quality” airplanes that will fall apart, so pilot competence is not really needed.
Lastly, I was under the impression that the usual career path back in the day for commercial pilots used to be through piloting in the military. Did that stop being the case recently? The answer is yes, and not even all that recently.
I am reminded of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father. From his Chicago activist days, he met Kyle, the 14 year old son of one of his staffers. His mother had told Obama that Kyle wanted to go to the Air Force Academy and become a fighter pilot. To his credit, Obama gave Kyle a book on airplanes for a Christmas present.
Several years later, Kyle was having problems. At his mother’s request, Obama spent some time with Kyle.
Obama knew so little about the history of blacks in the USA that he didn’t provide Kyle with the obvious rebuttal: the Tuskegee Airmen. (I knew about the Tuskegee Airmen before I was out of high school, and I didn’t have the privilege of attending an elite private school, as did Obama.)
I suspect United has had a history of discriminating against the visually impaired. I wonder if they intend to diversify in that respect.
I also heard at one point that outfits like FedEx, which had pretty stringent delivery guarantees, needed pilots that could take off and land in all sorts of weather conditions, those with the best training and experience. In short, military pilots. To get them, they paid better than the passenger airlines. I’m not sure if this is still true but it speaks volumes about our values that the most skilled pilots were, at some point, paid better to safeguard our packages than they were to safeguard our lives.
I just finished chatting with our pool service guy. On the weekends, he is an instructor pilot for people seeking their PPLs. He does that to build the hours he needs to apply for a pilot position, preferably with United. He cleans pool during the week to pay for his expenses in building the 1500 hours necessary not to be classified by the FAA as a restricted pilot, which is/was a hiring bar at United. Unfortunately, he’s a white guy working hard to better himself, and neither Chase or United seem to care for his race or gender.
I can almost always tell when we have a former Naval Aviator. They land rough.
You know, the pitching runway.
Wow. $1.2M in funding from United and a matching amount from JPMorgan Chase. Jamie Dimon might have to trim his expense account spending a little. What will fund the other 4,980 people in the program?
I was watching a bad recently made movie the other day. When referring to the lone Air Force man in the group, one guy kept calling him, “Hey Chair Force!” The plight of the drone pilot.
Don’t worry AI and computer systems will land the plane even if the pilot is a dunce. Oops, 737Max proved that to be incorrect; pilots were not able to think quick enough to rectify a bad situation in the Kenya Air crash IIRC?
But today President Cloth Head (RedState.com) said to envision riding a train that is as fast as a jet airliner. Well at least the victims won’t be flying through the air from 20,000 feet to their last arrival. Something about train engineers on drugs comes to mind ….
All of this sounds like fertile soil for rightwing lawfare. Most obviously, it sounds like United is saying it is going to discriminate against white males. Even given the current status of affirmative action laws and jurisprudence, I suspect that is problematic.
Additionally, the first time something bad happens involving any non white or female United pilot hired after this announcement, I suspect United’s financial exposure increases because of this policy.
Abandon merit and you embrace mediocrity. Mediocrity rarely manages to cope with emergencies. In flight, death is often the price reality extracts for incompetence.
“Stupid is, as stupid does”…
Scholarships!
I believe there are some millions of endowed college scholarships to which eligibility is highly limited, phrased as, for example, “To fund full tuition for one red-headed girl from Topeka, Kansas annually”, which is distinct from being admitted to the institution for study because of a red head or a black skin.
Nothing is stated or implied that United will lower the bar for competent performance in the cockpits, is there? $2.4 mill will not get very many females or blacks thru flight school, so not to worry. Like so much that surrounds us, this is corporate symbolic BS. Those that get thru flight school will be in the right seat in the cockpit for a while; seniority has its privileges!
There was an episode of Corrupt Crimes, I think, about a police department in Louisiana that wanted more POC and minorities in their ranks.
They trained a black woman whose background and psychological tests should have disqualified her. After working for awhile, her evaluations were not good but she remained on the force.
She was still employed and worked part-time as security for a Chinese(?) restaurant. One night, she and a friend, who was a criminal whom she befriended, entered the restaurant, shot an officer working security and two or three others. Three others hid the money then locked themselves in the freezer.
The officer dropped her friend off, went to the station to report the robbery then was one of the first “responding” officers at the restaurant.
The employees told other officers of her involvement and she and her friend were arrested and convicted.
This demonstrates when you hire only for a goal without adhering to standards, very bad things can happen.
For police, as well as airlines, the standards must be consistently applied for everyone so the public is served and protected properly.
Not a problem, but an opportunity.
Now that we live in a world when anyone can choose their sexuality on the LGBTQWTF spectrum at a whim, I strongly recommend anyone and everyone to do that. On a regular basis. Changing it on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. After all, it is only YOUR choice that makes any difference.
Likewise is self-identification as any one of a thousand racial / racial combinations. Ultimately it is YOUR choice what you self-identify yourself as. Change that choice on an irregular basis and you’re gonna make the Borg nuts.
In a way, this is an application of Alinsky’s Rule 4. Let them deal with it. Good and hard. Cheers –
From what I’ve been told, the civilian path to becoming an airline pilot pays very poorly. You get hired by a company, fly their small plane to it’s destination, spend the night in that city, and fly back home the next day. And then you repeat that cycle.
And for spending half of your nights away from home, you get paid peanuts.
Once again, we are seeing major corporations making unsound business decisions. The people making them are not stupid or “woke”.
To me this is indicative of extraordinary political pressure (dare I say extortion?) at work.
This is right in my wheelhouse. I spent 38 years as a pilot – 13 Navy and 25
with an airline.
The airline industry is a difficult one. It requires immense amounts of money and skilled employees to operate. If times are good, they may get enough passengers to pay their bills. Most airlines bleed money when times are bad, like they are right now.
In the past the airlines got most of their pilots from the military, but along about 1990s the military began cutting back on pilots and asking for more time in service after training. Then the typical path to a job became to get a commercial license with an instrument ticket, get hired by a local airline that flies small turboprops, build time there , and wait to get hired on one of the majors. A tough path because it meant building hours that you pay for until you get on with the local carrier, then several years of low pay on the local. If things went well, you could expect to be on with a major airline by age 30-35. And , of course, each step was the earned by proving you had the flying skills and headwork to pass check rides.
Being a pilot is all about constantly building your skill and knowledge. so that you can pass all the written, oral, and flight checks that come at regular intervals. Then, of course, there are the two physicals a year. It is all about maintaining high standards. Those airplanes cost millions and the safety reputation for an airline is priceless. So, I doubt that standards will be lowered. Unless United’s CEO has lost his mind.
The airlines will have to start some kind of schools like the United Aviate Academy to train future pilots because the military can no longer supply pilots and there will be a huge need in the near future as many pilots are retiring. I would assume that entrance requirements would be quite high. Can they find enough women and blacks to meet the standards? They can certainly try. This may be a case of virtue signaling. I don’t know, but I don’t think you can risk expensive airplanes and your safety reputation. with unqualified pilots.
I flew with a number of black and women co-pilots in y last few years on the lie. They were all capable and well trained. But they were a small percentage of the pilots at the airline.
J.J.
Thanks for your comment!
Great comment from JJ.
The problem as we all know is not with Blacks and Women flying planes. There will always be Blacks in the right tail who will make great pilots. Whether such highly capable Blacks who are in great demand everywhere because needed to fill diversity slots requiring high competency will choose to become pilots instead of Investment Banking Interns is another whole question. The issues with women are different, but again there are highly capable women who make great pilots.
The problem comes with the Diversity Racket’s hothouse forcing functions.
We want all commercial pilots of whatever ilk to be those who chose the career because of a love of flying and a huge determination to overcome financial and other barriers in order to get there. Start giving people a leg up and you get opportunists and main chance takers and show up to be paid types. All this before we even get to the inevitable lowering of standards required to achieve ‘correct’ proportional representations. There simply aren’t enough high enough IQ Blacks out there for 13% of commercial pilots to be black and 13% of brain surgeons to be black, etc., etc. And as for 50% of pilots being female… are there enough women out there with sufficient spatial awareness to fill the quota?
Hands up who wants to fly with Kara Hultgreen in the left hand seat?
Zaphod:
There simply aren’t enough high enough IQ Blacks for 13% of commercial pilots to be black and 13% of brain surgeons to be black, etc., etc.
Several years ago the NYT had an article on the dearth of blacks among tenured math professors at the 50 best university math programs: 0.7% them were black. This, according to the NYT journalist, was an indication of “exclusion,” or whatever such word the journalist used. A comment pointed out that most math professors would have scored 750 or better on the Math-SAT. An article from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education informed us that in 2005, blacks constituted 0.7% of those scoring 750 or better on the Math-SAT. Which was also the same proportion of blacks among tenured math professors at the 50 top math programs. Exclusion? Don’t think so. ( the JBHE article said that ~250 blacks scored 750 or better on the Math-SAT that year. )
To what degree those SAT scores were a result of nature versus nurture, I leave to others more qualified than I.
I thought that Charles Murray had a very apt comment on this, on his Twitter feed:
“There are well-validated tests of flying aptitude. It seems a reasonable thing for United to reassure us by posting means and SD’s of its pilots by ethnicity”
Yes – since you brought ethnicity / gender up as a selection factor, let’s examine the data!
Time to trot out La Griffe du Lion:
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/index.html
Lots of thought -provoking stuff there. In the article below he demonstrates that at least in the sciences, Blacks are somewhat over-represented given their relevant population distribution parameters.
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/women_and_minorities_in_science.htm
My oldest daughter is taking aviation classes at her high school in hopes of being a commercial pilot one day. A friend sent her that same United Airlines statement today and told her to go for it! She doesn’t have the right skin color but she’s definitely the favored gender. Once she realized that people would always question whether she was hired to meet a quota rather than by qualifying on her own merit, she announced that she’d take a pass on United. Smart girl.
All of the airline pilots in our family were trained in the military: my husband was a Naval aviator, as was one of my brothers; my brother-in-law was an Air Force pilot and my sister flew Black Hawks in the Army before transitioning to corporate jets and commercial airliners. Their training was top notch. But the patriarch of our family topped them all: 23 missions as a B-24 pilot in Europe before WWII ended, then two more foreign wars. My father served his country well.
No doubt this is a bad move, an unpopular one, and a poor business decision, but my question is – how is it legal?
@gmmay70:
Good Question. Bad Era to be asking it.
🙂
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gmmay70 — it is likely three bad things all in one row.
Boeing’s decline and near fall into bankruptcy has been credited to the work of a Woke HR Department, empowered by upper management to counter elite demands for genuine skills and competence and therefore “advance” underrepresented minorities.
I have no doubt that similar anti-competence successes await United, just as Boeing sacrificed engineering first tradition for bean counting window-dressing, killing POC innocents in the process.
Well done, fellow Comrades! (But Will the People be allowed to know the Truth?)
Zaphod. La griff du lion is out of date, and the slide towards declining aptitude has increased, accelerating under Obama — eg, MCATs push SWJs to enter Med School, and universities do too.
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/women_and_minorities_in_science.htm
REMEMBER: 2019 was the first SWJ doc class. You were warned. Act accordingly when it really matters with those you love.
The War Against Excellence is furthering American decline. Time to Party Like it’s 1999!
“The corporate executives who put their name to these inane public statements remind one of the characters in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.”
HALP!
I am finishing reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I 100% do not understand the scene involving that play with the students and the teacher and the floating away, etc. Do I need to read the play to understand what Kundera is doing in L&F?
Many thanks!
Obama knew so little about the history of blacks in the USA
Years ago I lived on a naval installation whose CO was a black aviator who had gone to Harvard.
Art Deco…”The corporate executives who put their name to these inane public statements remind one of the characters in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.”
Or those in Heinlein’s ‘Year of the Jackpot’….actually, I think we are living at the intersection of these two stories:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/60689.html
No doubt this is a bad move, an unpopular one, and a poor business decision, but my question is – how is it legal?
I’m no lawyer, and I also think this is a bad idea, but Grutter v. Bollinger made it so using “diversity” as a reason to accept students at U of Michigan was considered completely constitutional. I could see lawyers using that case as their precedent.
Hmm, Tucker takes Scott Kirby’s declaration as true.
See his opinion here:
http://video.foxnews.com/v/6247341243001/
Well, it would not be the first time an airline CEO made a stupid statement or implemented a stupid policy. Call me cynical, but in 25 years in the industry, I saw many stupid things done/said by upper management. It began when Frank Lorenzo seized control of Continental Airlines in 1982. But throughout all those years of labor strife and hostility between the pilots and managements, the flight training and checking standards were never relaxed. It’s hard for me to believe that Kirby intends to lower standards to achieve a racial quota. It would be intentionally damaging the airline’s safety – its most prized possession. I could be wrong about Kirby, but I don’t want to believe he’s doing anything more than virtue signaling.