United Airlines’ slogan is “You can run but you can’t fly.” But now you may want to run, not fly, with news that United is prioritizing “diversity” over meritocracy in its pilot-training program. In fact, the airline aims to train 5,000 pilots by 2030, half of them women and “people of color.”
“Backed by scholarship commitments from United Airlines and JPMorgan Chase, United Aviate Academy will create opportunities for thousands of students, including women and people of color to pursue a career as a commercial airline pilot, one of the most lucrative careers in the industry,” the company boasted in a press release. United also tweeted:
Diversity? Should the NBA, which is 75 percent black and has almost no Asians, “reflect the diverse group of people” watching it? Why “should” it?
The above tweet is courtesy of Breitbart, which reports more on the story, writing:
United said it will fund $1.2 million in scholarships, and its credit card partner, JPMorgan Chase, committed the same amount to those accepted into the program.
“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,” Ed Olebe, president of Chase Co-Brand Cards, stated.
“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,” Olebe continued.
Because, of course, it’s as with our military, which is now prioritizing wokeness over effectiveness. An airline’s purpose apparently isn’t to earn money providing air transport as efficiently and safely as possible, but to “advance racial equity by expanding career development opportunities.”
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At least, however, there’ll now be congruence with the air-traffic-control corps, which already has been dumbed down. As the Blaze related in 2018, citing a Tucker Carlson Tonight report:
According to Carlson, due to changes implemented during the Obama administration, air traffic controller candidates are now required to complete a “biographical questionnaire” before even being considered for a job with the FAA.
If they don’t pass, they aren’t considered for a position — no matter how much experience they have or how qualified they are.
Fox News obtained a copy of the questionnaire and how it is scored. According to Carlson, candidates whose worst subject in high school was science [and who played a lot of sports] and candidates who are unemployed receive the most points possible on the test. In contrast, licensed pilots and those with extensive air traffic control knowledge aren’t highly scored.
“In other words, the FAA actively searched for unqualified air traffic controllers,” Carlson later said. “That is insane, and they knew it was insane when they did it, but they did it anyway.”
As for United’s scheme, there’s nothing to say that a woman or minority can’t be a fine pilot. The point is that anytime anything is prioritized over merit, competence diminishes. This is an immutable rule of life.
I mentioned the NBA earlier because sports analogies perfectly illustrate this point. The NFL, NHL, and MLB are 100 percent male. Would the quality improve if they reflected the wider population and were 51 percent female?
One reason quotas aren’t effected in sports is that any team embracing a proportionality model would lose miserably, be embarrassed, and cost its owner money. But does this diversity-trumps-merit reality change in other areas (e.g., science) simply because the results are harder to quantify?
There has never been a time or place in history in which all groups were proportionately represented across endeavors. We can debate this phenomenon’s cause, nature, nurture, or both, but it’s reality.
Today, for example, most American surgeons are white men. If your child needed a life-saving brain procedure, would you be comforted if this reality had been altered by constituting the neurosurgeon ranks via racial quota?
Of course, this is all part of the “Left’s” race obsession, where the wholly unproven proposition “Diversity is a strength” is dogma. This philosophy infects most everything today. The Obama administration even dictated that school punishment be administered not commensurate with the transgressions committed, but based on racial quota. It’s a policy that contributed to the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting in 2018, as killer-to-be Nikolas Cruz was left on the street partially because of it.
It’s tragic that what we wouldn’t visit upon sports will enthusiastically be applied to life-or-death matters. We should bear in mind, though, that there’s no affirmative action in the laws of physics. No matter who’s in the cockpit, gravity still accelerates an object toward Earth at approximately 32.2 ft/sec2.
