Tucker Carlson tells the sad tale of one Conrad Jules Aska from back in 2019. Conrad is a pilot of color as you can see…
Born in Antigua he was quite the pilot….
….except for the whole “grossly unqualified and unsuited to be a pilot” thing.
“The first officer in this accident deliberately concealed his history of performance deficiencies, which limited Atlas Air’s ability to fully evaluate his aptitude and competency as a pilot,” said NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt.
The report said Aska’s “tendency to respond impulsively and inappropriately when faced with an unexpected event during training scenarios at multiple employers suggest an inability to remain calm during stressful situations.”
Acted impulsively you say? Of course his family tried to sue
They claimed maintenance and poor pilot training was to blame although even at this point the NTSB realized it was pilot incompetence and error. Of course had Conrad Aska being fired for incompetence, his family likely still would have sued because of racial discrimination.
As I said in yesterday’s post, America Has Too Many Qualified Doctors And Pilots!, if you have an incompetent toll booth attendant, perhaps you get back incorrect change but an incompetent pilot? Your plane goes into the ground.
Over the next decade this is going to start to really come to a head as these “diversity” selections become pilots and engineers and doctors. The list of disasters promises to grow exponentially.
As an employer, you will be sued for discriminating against an incompetent diversity hire.
As an employer, you will be sued for not discriminating against an incompetent diversity hire.
Common theme here: As an employer, you will be sued. Period. Full stop.
Fortunately for me, I work deep in the bowels of high tech and have resisted every attempt to promote me to any position where I am even tangentially responsible for some other person’s efforts. I refuse even to be a mentor to new hires and recent grads, seeing what is now coming into my field.
Digital electronics don’t lie, have no feelings and won’t change teams halfway through the operation. A ‘1’ is a ‘1’ and a ‘0’ is a ‘0’. There is something uniquely satisfying about that.
Your attitude is correct, however I take issue with the statement that a 1 is a 1 etc…
Maff is so hard so we must change the racist and discriminatory rules, to include the values of digits.
Because you can’t teach maff to 60 IQ sub humans.
It’s all relative. 60 to 65 is perfect for a carefully cellared Malbec. But when it comes to IQ…not so much.
I speak jive.
I’m a retired USAF instructor pilot. Oh, The stories I could tell about POC pilots, and I have to add, most female pilots, even if they are white. Never had a POC student that I felt was good enough to be a PIC (pilot in command) and even as a copilot required supervision by an experienced PIC. There are a few white women pilots who are outstanding, even some of the best, but they are far and few between.
The take away? If the flight deck crew is anything other than two white males or one white male and one white female, get off the airplane!
Call me a bigot, I simply don’t care. Flying aircraft requires high standards and competence. Equity will not get you there and carries a high risk of disaster.
Just retired last year.
Concur. 100 percent.
The people making this all be the way it is do not give a single fuck about you or me.
Same thing is, and has been happening in medicine for many years. There is a reckoning coming, people will pay with their lives in this arena also. But hey, we got diversity so all is well right.?…..right?
So true. My son got a 526 on the MCat and graduated college with a 3.967 and could not get into med school. It’s all about diversity now and how good a story you have. Merit means nothing. I can’t prove it but I would bet my life that if he was a minority….. he would have countless acceptances!
Last year, United Airlines announced in so many words that going forward, women and minorities would be preferentially recruited into United’s ab initio pilot training program at Goodyear AZ. They even went so far as to announce that “women of color” would be given the highest priority in terms of slots awarded in their United Aviate ab initio pilot training.
I don’t think most people realize the real world implications of this. Ab Initio is a term from the Latin that means literally ‘from the beginning’. The way airline pilot hiring has traditionally worked in the US is that pilots who already have at least several thousand hours of flying experience, preferably with at least some turbine (turboprop or jet) experience, and ideally already with an Airline Transport Pilot rating, will be the ones preferentially recruited and ultimately hired by the airlines. At this point in a pilot’s career, a very substantial weeding out process has already taken place, and the airlines pretty much know that they are hiring the best of the best. And these pilots incidentally tend to be overwhelmingly White males. The roughly 5-8% of female pilots who are hired are also almost 100% White.
European airlines on the other hand have for decades now used the ab initio system. They feel that they can create a better pilot by taking someone with NO flying experience and train them from day one to fly ‘their way’ ot the airline way. These airline trained pilots tend to become first officers in airliners with just hundreds rather than thousands of hours of flying experience.
Historically, the pool of people hired into European ab initio pilot training programs have been White men, and thus the results have been reasonably good. (Although the Air France flight 447 pilots who flew a perfectly good Airbus into the Atlantic Ocean were ab initio trained pilots.)
However, now that United Airlines has adopted the ab initio model, and now that the majority of slots will be awarded to minorities and women (and especially to women of color), and coupling that sobering fact with an anticipated pilot shortage in the years to come, a new reality is about to rear its ugly head. Within the next several years, we will begin to see new first officers in United Airlines cockpits who are manifestly unqualified to be there, despite whatever training they may have gotten through, simply because they do not have the natural aptitude needed for that particular occupation.
I for one will go out of my way to avoid flying on United, and any other domestic airline that adopts a similar race and gender based pilot selection criteria.
Simple solution… don’t be an employer, use independant contractors.
Historically, the states were a clollection of farmers, and artisans making product for trade. The notion of an employer/employee relationship started with industrialization, but became ubiquitous when the IRS divided people against each other to get them to rat each other out in financial forms, and “withold”. Don’t be an employer. Also, don’t repair people’s stuff. Buy broken stuff, repair it, and resell. Make all business relationships “peer” relationships.
And of course, stop using their money.
You are correct. I vaguely remember that United wanted 80% of their pilots by 2025 to be female or black, ideally black women which is why they started their own flight school. I was a million mile flyer on United. Was is the operative word, If i cant drive, i don’t need to go there. Now this same trend is ongoing with producing more black surgeons as well.
ummm, i hate to point out the obvious, but we probably won’t even have a country within a decade…..so there’s that…
There IS that.
George True, great letter! Also on ab initio remember Turkish at Schipol with the mpl First Officer. As far as United and past diversity faux pas remember the Mt. San Bruno compressor stall almost crash? And the Maui 777 ” nobody quite knows what, but boy are they secretive about it” incident. This stuff came really close before, the new wave will multiply the possibilities thousands fold. Conrad Jules Aska is a case study in how the invincibility of “diversity” is a steamroller once it gets moving. The whole industry couldn’t get rid of this guy even though he was as bad a pilot as has ever existed! Anywhere he applied they couldn’t not hire him, and once hired they couldn’t get rid of him, and he couldn’t pass a check ride to save his life! Why ? Because he was black. The pink elephant in the middle of the room no one dares speak of.Yep United will get to ” celebrate diversity” it should be entertaining, to say the least.
More Atlanta stuff.
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/south-fulton-county/father-suspect-murder-15-year-old-peachtree-city-girl-killed-bank-parking-lot/5AN5JNXDU5BOXAF63OPVQXGLM4/
It will be interesting to see the degree to which auger-ins go up in the next few years. Where I live and work, I don’t have to worry about racial entanglements because there aren’t any black people here. Even if there were, I can’t see them wanting to work for a construction company…
In the future, if this does become a problem, I am sure we can arrive at some arrangement.
Full fucking blown Idiocracy!!
There might be some hope from the Insurance Industry. If I was in charge of the insurance firm that had Atlas Air on risk, I would refuse to pay out for the crash and deaths. My reason would be that the management allowed someone that was obviously unfit to fly the aircraft to do so.
Try hiring a car without a valid driving license. No license, then no hire because the car hire company would be in violation of the terms of the policy. I can’t see how this situation is different.
Potentially, if a passenger aircraft crashed killing everyone on board and it was found that the pilot in command was allowed to fly although clearly incompetent to do so then the lawsuits, claims and punitive damages will make international dialling telephone numbers look like the tally of loose change in the passengers pockets.
It could be the end of aviation as an industry because of “diversity”.
But we’ll see what we’ll see I suppose.
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