As I have watched the debacle which is the Biden-Harris regime unfold since he was sworn in on January 20th, I knew, by his campaign promises, what was coming. Cancelling the construction of the southern border wall, allowing hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens to enter our country during the current pandemic, and an assault on our voting system and the Second Amendment were all expected. I have opinions about all these issues, but no actual hands on experience in dealing with them.
However, now an issue has arisen in which I do have decades of experience. That issue is the hiring and training of pilots for the nations airlines. For the average individual reading this piece, it might seem reasonable to lump the field of aviation in with all the other occupations and job specialities that make up our countries work force. In some aspects, that is reasonable. Mechanics, clerical workers, or various service personnel who occupy the ticket counters, clean or fuel the aircraft, or load and handle baggage or cargo can be compared to similar positions in various other corporations. But for the pilots, who occupy the cockpits, it is a completely different situation.
In many, if not most corporations in this country, the job of hiring, and even promoting employees has been delegated by managements to the corporate “HR” personnel. These “Human Resources” departments have morphed from being tools for corporate management to help them select appropriate job applicants, into the final arbiters as to whom is hired and later promoted. Frankly, I think this is a bad idea on it’s face, but is particularly inadvisable where technical positions are concerned. The people who have the expertise to do those jobs are the ones who should select new employees, and promote them, based not on artificial criteria developed within the HR Department, but rather on the skill level and performance of the individual involved. Simply said, it should be based on merit alone.
Now, based on amorphous principles of “Equity”, some airline CEOs are making decisions which will determine who will occupy the cockpits of our airliners for years to come, and potentially place crews and passengers in great danger. If there is one single place where all hiring and promotion should be determined by demonstrated merit and competence it is in the hiring and training of airline pilots. That “merit firewall” may be coming to an end. A classic example of that situation involves Scott Kirby, the new CEO of United Airlines.
Perhaps bowing to pressure from the current administration, Kirby recently announced a hiring program which will provide more “diversity” in the cockpits of United’s aircraft. He recently stated that:
“Our flight deck should reflect the diverse group of people on board our planes every day. That’s why we plan for 50% of the pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color”.
It may well be that the other major airlines in this country will follow suit in an effort to placate the current government and so receive federal grants and other financial aid.
That is a very bad idea!
One of the dirty little secrets about the airline industry over the last decade and more is that pilots are relying more and more on computerized auto-flight systems and less and less on basic “Stick and Rudder” skills. That concept has been promoted by airline managements focused on the bottom line financial results. Indeed, the computers can be programed to provide the most fuel efficient flight profiles, but like all computers, even they are subject to failure, and when they do, life threatening situations can emerge with dazzling rapidity.
A classic example of that is the case of the crashes of brand new Boeing 737-Max airplanes operated by Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines, which caused the deaths of nearly 400 passengers and crew. The initial reaction of the worlds press and indeed many government agencies was that there must be a fatal flaw in the design of the aircraft, which caused the accidents. While that was partially true, due to the addition of the “MCAS” system, not installed on former models of the 737, the airplanes were absolutely flyable in the manual mode after the electric stabilizer trim system was turned off, and the aircraft trimmed using the manual trim wheels. Unfortunately, the crews involved relied almost exclusively on the autopilot for the operation of the aircraft, and were virtually incompetent when “hand flying” the airplane. As a result, everyone onboard both airplanes died a horrifying death.
For many years, the pilots of foreign airlines mainly came from airline owned “Flight Academies”, which were frequently based in the American Southwest because of the good weather conditions which prevailed there year round. Although some foreign airlines also had pilots trained by their militaries, there simply weren’t enough of them to meet the needs of expanding airlines. Most students at these academies had no previous flight experience, due to the cost of private aviation flying in Europe and elsewhere. They were instead chosen for their level of education and passing certain “aptitude” tests.
The United States military traditionally supplied the majority of pilots to Americas airlines (over 90% was the rule) due to the number of military pilots trained and available after they ended their military service to our country. That changed during the Vietnam War when military pilots were not being released, and later when our military began reducing the size of our air arms, relying instead more on missiles and later drones, “flown” by operators (also referred to as pilots) on the ground. These days, there is a growing shortage of qualified former military or civilian trained pilots, so the “Flight Academy” concept is springing up here as well.
What has made pilots from this country some of the very best in the world is their desire to become pilots, either by volunteering for the military, with all the obligations that entailed, or paying for their own expensive pilot ratings through civilian general aviation. In either case, these people wanted to be pilots, and were proud of the skills they acquired. In short, they loved aviation, and wanted to climb to the top of that ocupation, which was generally accepted to be in the left seat of an airliner. Becoming an “Airline Captain” was right up there with Medical Doctors as the most respected profession.
So, will the candidates hired by politically motivated airline HR departments live up to the high professional standards of the past? Will they hone their cherished flying skills because of a love of their profession? Or, will they simply be drawn by the lure of a good paycheck or a politically correct quota agenda? As I said before, the hiring and promoting of airline pilots because of their gender or skin color, or by any other basis than skill and merit, can have catastrophic “unintended consequences”. It is A Very Bad Idea!