The topic was “the end of the all-male, all-white cockpit.”
The context: A June 3, 2022 TV episode, in which Fox News personality Tucker Carlson beseeched viewers to look beyond the race and gender of pilots, to his or her competence. “What’s color to do with competence?” he demanded to know.
Mr. Carlson was appealing to the wrong audience.
In America, where woke is ruthlessly propelled by the private-sector, the commercial aviation industry has been itching to replace humble men like Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger, III, with black women.
Using their employees’ opposition to forced vaccination as a proxy for backbone, moxie and rational thinking—the commercial aviation industry is increasingly shedding very many magnificent, military-trained pilots.
Just so there’s no confusion: Pilots with the right stuff are being selected out of their profession.
Granted, correlation is not causation, but if there is a statistically significant correlation between gender or race and the likelihood one survives a plane flight—well then, one might just want to consider these variables as proxies for safety and survival, however politically impolite it is.
Tucker might want to check the aggregate accident statistics to determine who are the best, safest pilots. By ScienceDirect’s telling in 1996, “… females employed by major airlines had significantly higher accident rates than their male counterparts overall.” [Emphasis added.]
With Woke comes a prohibition on inquiry, hence the dated study. However, logic dictates that matters in the aviation industry have gotten way worse, as standards then were way more stringent than we have now in the airlines.
To be expected, ScienceDirect then launches a fusillade of excuse-making weasel words to conceal with bafflegab that if you fly with a female, you’re a little less likely to reach your destination. It’s a ghost of a chance, but hey, life matters. Do you want to lose it?
Yes, female pilots have a higher error/accident rate, but never mind that say the Fake Science purveyors; this is only so because they are younger and less experienced. Airlines should make every effort to recruit and retain “experienced” females and manage diversity, they exhort.
Essentially—and while plummeting to his death—the passenger should search his bigoted soul. In addition to letting go of your life; you must release all bigotry. Those thoughts about how race and sex could well correlate with flight safety, and how you wish you had checked the pilot before you took the fatal flight: Let them go. Oh, and by the way, RIP, you sexist, you racist.
The desired outcome is that you fly with a less able pilot, ceteris paribus. This is astonishing, really, for impartial, scientific inquiry is meant to concern itself with facts, yet the authors of “Comparing pilot-error accident rates of male and female airline pilots” conflate and collapse what ought to be two separate categories: The reality of sex-based differences in pilot competence, and the confounding variables (age and experience) on the one hand, and how one might feel about these differences, on the other.
Or, as a rational reader put it:
The article “states in the beginning that females had a higher accident rate, then it states they are about the same as males. So, which is it???”"
Pretty much.
I wonder. Does anyone grasp the difference between a veteran of the Air Force versus a “pilot” trained at an affirmative-action, feel-good girlie flight school? It’s life and death.
Remember Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger’s famed “Unable; we’ll be in the Hudson”? His was the very embodiment of “manliness (not a miracle) on the Hudson.” Nothing but cool hands and a mind to match at the controls.
Capt. Sullenberger’s airbus, carrying 155 passengers, had lost the thrust in both engines following a “double bird strike.”
Having been informed of the emergency, Ground Control radioed the captain: “Which runway would you like at Teterboro?”
Capt. Sullenberger to Ground Control: “Unable; we’re going to be in the Hudson.”
Those were the laconic, spare words of the iconic “Sully,” as he calmly prepared to crash land Cactus 1549 in the Hudson River.
With no engine power, flying at a low speed, at low altitude, “over one of the most densely populated areas on the planet,” Captain Sullenberger managed to glide the jet, using its “forward momentum to provide the air flow over the wings,” so as to enable “sufficient lift.”
The river was the only “viable” surface on which to land with a chance of survival. That, Sullenberger had determined after “two and a half minutes into the flight—and just one minute after the birds had hit.”
Who do you want in the cockpit during such an event? Sullenberger, a high- intelligence retired Air Force fighter pilot? Or dreamy Ms. Zakiya Percy and Ms. Cetrena Simmons, to be introduced shortly.
Avoid flying United Airlines, which has started its own flight school, The Aviate Academy. At “least half of the new pilots will be women or people of color. Of the 121 students enrolled so far, about 78 percent are women or nonwhite.”
Republic Airways, likewise, stacks its flight school with pigmentally pleasing faces, who pay to pilot. “Two years and about $100,000” in tuition fees is what qualifies a pilot, protests Zakiya Percy, who is a pilot for UA, and also a psychology major.
By contrast, consider one of the pilots this writer has had the pleasure of “meeting” through this column:
Retired from the military some years back as a naval officer and pilot, my acquaintance had gone to test pilot school in 2005 and spent 9 of a storied 20-year career in the Navy, flight-testing the FA-18 aircraft. He did four total overseas deployments, twice in Iraq and twice in Afghanistan. He flew the EA-6B jet aircraft during three of these four deployments logging 397 carrier landings. His first deployment was in 2002 and last in 2013. The man has a BS in mechanical engineering and a masters in Systems Engineering and was a test pilot for Boeing.
Stack this pilot’s bewildering accomplishments and intelligence—the aircraft is an extension of his body and mind—against Ms. Percy’s, bless her, who is a graduate of a two-year course run by a corrupt industry, has a degree in psychology and the perfect complexion. Or, against Ms. Cetrena Simmons, 29, who started her pilot training at Republic Airways’ flight school in 2018, and is now piloting planes for the airline.
As Idiocracy’s iconic Dr. Lexus (IQ around 60) would say, “Kickass.”
He’d add reassuringly: “My first wife was ‘tarded; she’s a pilot now. There are plenty tards out there living really kickass lives.”
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Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian think piece since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Gab, Gettr YouTube & LinkedIn; banned by Facebook, and has a new video-podcast.