If you won two free plane tickets, where would you go?
Nowhere.
Travel is such a piece of crap anymore (Crowdstrike anyone) that I’d prefer not to travel by air.
Let’s see, TSA hassle, waiting in lines to be in a tube with a bunch of people I’d never choose to be with, being a mule that has to haul around your life in a box while you are gone, no. Then going to places that I don’t really want to go to (or I would have) while having to live out of a suitcase.
On top of that, Boeing just paid mega millions for building faulty airplanes so I don’t trust them either (DEI anyone?).
Even if you had the total first-class package, the flight part is over relatively quickly and you are stuck somewhere until you can get home. You still have to wait in the airports and if there is a delay, you are as screwed as everyone else
This is like the travel question a few days ago. Get a nice summer house and enjoy a relaxing time
Instead of waiting at an airport with flights canceled by computer glitches, I’m up in the mountains where it is 30 degrees warmer than home. The food is grown on organic farms nearby and traffic is rare. The only sound I hear while typing this is birds chirping and my dog is at my feet.
I traveled for business for many decades. It was a time when you got service and comfort. Those are long gone now replaced by inconvenience and a general lack of concern by the service and travel industries.
There isn’t much to make me want to get on another cattle car to go wait in lines.
I also grew up in Central Florida before Disney World was built. I watched people pay exorbitant prices to wait for hours in the blazing sun for hours. I went at night or in the 2 weeks that are the Florida winter when my friends who worked there gave me tickets. That isn’t my idea of fun either.
I’d still like to hear from those who like it. It counter balances my position
Photographs show that a central window pane is shattered with cracks in several areas, but investigators have been unable to determine what caused the damage.
🚨✈️ VIRGIN ATLANTIC BOEING WINDSCREEN CRACKS AT 40,000 FEET, FORCING RETURN TO UK
A packed Virgin Atlantic Boeing jet's windscreen cracked at 40,000 feet on a flight from Heathrow to San Francisco, forcing a return to the UK.
Remember when flying was the safest form of travel? Then came woke and DEI. I bailed on traveling this week because I hate the planes, the travel experience and their safety track record.
Twelve passengers and crew were injured on a Qatar Airways flight after a packed Boeing passenger jet plunged mid-flight.
Eight passengers aboard a commercial Boeing Dreamliner jet required hospital treatment upon landing in Ireland on Sunday.
The aircraft had reportedly suffered turbulence en route from Qatar, according to official statements.
“Qatar Airways can confirm that flight QR017 a Boeing B787-9 from Doha to Dublin has landed safely,” Qatar Airways stated in a post on X.
“A small number of passengers and crew sustained minor injuries in flight and are now receiving medical attention.”
The jet was on its way from Doha to Dublin when it began shaking as it flew over Turkey.
Airport authorities confirmed that the jetliner landed on schedule just before 1:00 p.m. at Dublin Airport.
“Upon landing, the aircraft was met by emergency services, including Airport Police and our Fire and Rescue department, due to 6 passengers and 6 crew [12 total] on board reporting injuries after the aircraft experienced turbulence while airborne over Turkey,” they said in a statement.
One dead, others injured due to severe turbulence on board a Boeing aircraft from London to Singapore.
UPDATE: The picture is today the video included is not from the Singapore Airlines flight today. Instead, it's from a flight from Pristina to EuroAirport Basel in 2019. pic.twitter.com/M1DMrkyVZD
‘Plus size travel’ activist calls out Seattle airport staff for making her walk up jet bridge, refusing to push wheelchair
Following a trip to Seattle, prominent “plus size travel” activist and self-described “proud fat girl” Jae’lynn Cheney claimed that her request to access a wheelchair service was ignored, and that she had been instead forced to walk up part of the jet bridge between the plane and the terminal.
In a TikTok video, Cheney alleged that when she deplaned, an employee was waiting, but upon realizing that she’d be pushing her, “started to walk away with the wheelchair while making comments about my size.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which handles claims of retaliation against workers who blow the whistle on their employer, received the complaints of retaliation between December 2020 and March of this year, according to a table of figures compiled last month by officials at the agency.
The documents, obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera via a freedom of information request, do not provide details of the alleged workplace violations or alleged retaliation by Boeing in each case.
However, 13 of the complaints were filed under a statute that protects whistleblowing related to aviation safety, specifically.
Bag and tag? Meet name and shame. Here’s a list of airlines ranked by bags mishandled per 100, or BMPH. FYI: All five airlines lose at least one bag per every 200 bags handled.
JetBlue (0.52 BMPH) — It’s been on my no-fly list since it moved my flight to an earlier time without warning.
Spirit Airlines (0.53 BMPH) — Anyone else think they’d be higher up on this list?
Alaska (0.57 BMPH) — No excuse for a smaller airline, IMO.
United Airlines (0.73 BMPH) — Who remembers the viral “United Breaks Guitars” video? So good.
And at No. 1: American Airlines (0.76 BMPH) — American sits at the top … of a massive pile of lost luggage. It misplaced 800,198 bags in 2023, or nearly one in every 100 bags it handled. Talk about emotional baggage.
One bright spot:
Without a single lost bag at Japan’s Kansai International Airport (KIX). Yup, officials there say they haven’t lost a customer’s bag since 1994. The workers confirm it but say it’s NBD; they’re just doing their jobs! I wish U.S. baggage handlers had the same idea — then, we wouldn’t need an AirTag in every bag!
h/t Kim Komando
I’ve all but given up on traveling. Whatever there is to see is not worth the hassle that comes along with it. For me, that goes beyond the airlines, it’s an introvert thing anymore, me wanting to be alone in my home.
Having to live the first part of your trip without luggage, the hassle of dealing with the airlines to find it and the delays on the other side of the trip is a big downer. I’ve done it.
I’ve been to Japan. It’s a 17 hour flight time trip, 24 including the airport waits. It was nice, but not worth it just to find a place that won’t lose my luggage.
Sure, it’s easy to say get woke and go broke, but when you have Bud Light, Target, Disney as real world examples it can ring true. They are all just different flavors of ass tasting ice cream.
Now we have Boeing and Ford.
FORD
Ford loses $132,000 on every electric car it builds, or $5 Billion a year. Henry Ford is turning in his grave.
First published JoNova; Ford CEO Jim Farley still plans to push forward with his loss making electric vehicle strategy. (dumbass)
Ford just reported a massive loss on every electric vehicle it sold
By Chris Isidore, CNN Updated 2:10 PM EDT, Thu April 25, 2024
New YorkCNN —
Ford’s electric vehicle unit reported that losses soared in the first quarter to $1.3 billion, or $132,000 for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold in the first three months of the year, helping to drag down earnings for the company overall.
Ford, like most automakers, has announced plans to shift from traditional gas-powered vehicles to EVs in coming years. But it is the only traditional automaker to break out results of its retail EV sales. And the results it reported Wednesday show another sign of the profit pressures on the EV business at Ford and other automakers.
The EV unit, which Ford calls Model e, sold 10,000 vehicles in the quarter, down 20% from the number it sold a year earlier. And its revenue plunged 84% to about $100 million, which Ford attributed mostly to price cuts for EVs across the industry. That resulted in the $1.3 billion loss before interest and taxes (EBIT), and the massive per-vehicle loss in the Model e unit.
The losses go far beyond the cost of building and selling those 10,000 cars, according to Ford. Instead the losses include hundreds of millions being spent on research and development of the next generation of EVs for Ford. Those investments are years away from paying off.
And that means this is not the end of the losses in the unit – Ford said it expects Model e will have EBIT losses of $5 billion for the full year.
After stating that DEI/DIE was the most important part of their business, they just burned through $3.3 billion in one quarter cleaning up the mess:
Top jet manufacturer Boeing reported on Wednesday a net loss of $355 million in the first quarter after months of scrutiny over recent safety issues.
Operating revenue declined 8% year over year in the first quarter, from approximately $17.9 billion to $16.6 billion, with the company burning more than $3.9 billion in free cash flow in the time frame compared to $786 million a year ago, according to Boeing’s first quarter earnings report. Recent scrutiny of safety with Boeing products began in January after an Alaska Airlines flight had a door plug fly off mid-air, resulting in an emergency landing and an investigation into the company’s quality assurance.=
“Our first quarter results reflect the immediate actions we’ve taken to slow down 737 production to drive improvements in quality,” Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said in the report. “We will take the time necessary to strengthen our quality and safety management systems and this work will position us for a stronger and more stable future.”
Boeing reported an over $3.3 billion operating cash flow loss in the first quarter, compared to a $318 billion loss at the start of 2023, according to the earnings report. The decline in profits led to a core loss per share of $1.13 for shareholders in the first quarter, lower than the $1.27 loss in the same time frame last year.
There are only two companies in the world capable of building and exporting the largest type of civilian aircraft, the “jumbo jet”: Boeing and Europe’s Airbus.
Since 1992, Boeing has gone from enjoying 70% market share to falling behind Airbus in orders and manufacturing.
2/n
Manufacturing aircraft is very expensive and technically challenging.
Only about a thousand large civilian aircraft are sold every year, so margins are small despite government subsidies, unlike say cars or microchips.
Any advantage or efficiency is crucial.
3/n
It was thus disastrous when, in 2018-19, two new Boeing airplanes crashed, killing 345 people in total.
And, since January 2024, Boeing planes have seen a series of incidents, some nearly catastrophic, including a mid-air nosedive that injured over fifty people.
4/n
These two series of incidents are unrelated.
But both stem from succession failure: when the power and skills to succeed in a position within an organization are not passed down from one person to their successor, especially including tacit and informal knowledge.
5/n
Succession failure in the engineering offices caused the two fatal crashes, as Boeing ended up designing and then delivering planes that, essentially, were programmed to crash themselves during a particular set of circumstances.
Which they then did, twice.
6/n
To date, nobody has been held responsible for the series of fatal errors.
But that is because no error on its own was fatal, just the combination of them, which no engineer at Boeing recognized in time or had the authority to act on, if they did recognize it.
7/n
Boeing is not the same company it once was.
Its non-technical managers and executives favored new factories in South Carolina rather than its core Seattle factories, where experienced workers were unionized and more expensive.
Go here to find out about them trusting the MBA mentality instead of the people who knew how to build planes, solve problems and run a company.
They got infected by DEI also and woke ruins everything it touches
These days, the US aviation industry is like watching a disaster movie, but this is no film—it’s real life, and it’s unfolding right above us. The latest “movie disaster” unfolded on the runway in the DC Swamp. Two planes, one from Jet Blue and the other from Southwest, nearly collided. You could hear the panic crackling through the air traffic control tower as they scrambled to handle yet another near-miss moment.
southwest + jetblue planes nearly collided on the runway at Reagan airport in DC today
ATC directed the southwest plane to cross a runway where the Jetblue plane was already cleared to takeoff
Sadly, the situation in the control tower reflects this diversity emphasis, but not in the way we’d hope. The chaos up there sounds like it comes from a diverse group, alright—at least their panic is inclusive. The real trouble seems to circle right back to the left’s DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) agenda, which prioritizes charity over excellence. This shift in focus is hitting us where it hurts, turning our air traffic control towers into scenes from the movie “Airplane!” And that’s no joke for anyone who’s up in the air. This should scare the heck out of every single American traveler.
On our way into Portland, our pilot was on final approach. A few hundred feet off of the ground, he pulled up and hit the power and I knew we were going around.
Later, he said over the intercom that even though we were cleared to land, there was another plane on the runway.
When I say hell, of course I mean Portland. It’s a shithole now. Oregon is beautiful, but for some reason all the shit not in California or Washington is in Portland. It’s the required trip to the family.
All I hear or read is about problems with Boeing jets, DEI in Air Traffic Control and parts falling off of jets because maintenance workers require diversity. I don’t want to get on a plane, but there is no way out. I figured the statistics are with me and if some shit does go down, my rare flights should exempt me.
When I get there, I’ll get to deal with a city rampaged by Antifa, BLM and many other miscreants. Other than SF, it is the homeless capital of the world, not to mention walking on the streets to the freak show and shit on the sidewalks.
I’ve scheduled some posts and meme’s to enjoy, including stories and observations of mine. It’s a look into my head when I put these out. I’ll cover introverts, the gym fashion show, sibling hell, lots of meme dumps and other stuff.
I may get a post in about my adventures while there, but no promises. Maybe I’ll keep some readers, like Ellie K, a new subscriber. With all the shit I post, I’m surprised she’s still there, but there you go.
The history of Boeing over the past thirty years is a story of a critical American institution that sold off its engineering culture and embraced an asset-light focus on margin instead of product vision, and then executed that strategy poorly. In 2024, Boeing is producing fewer planes than it did a decade ago and faces an onslaught of headlines about spectacular accidents, nagging regulators, and disappointing earnings.
A large part of the issues can be traced back to the Boeing-McDonnell Douglas merger in 1997. The deal seemed like a good idea at the time. By 1996, McDonnell Douglas commanded only 4% share in U.S. commercial aviation, and its production lines were languishing. Meanwhile, Boeing had a $100 billion backlog, and needed more assembly capacity to ramp deliveries and fulfill its orders. Yet in the event, the joke on Wall Street became that “McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money.” McDonnell Douglas CEO Harry Stonecipher and John McDonnell, the chair of McDonnell Douglas’ board, became the largest shareholders of the combined entity after a stock swap worth $13 billion and they brought McDonnell Douglas’ bureaucratic defense contractor culture of margin-focused, risk-averse financial engineering with them.
But DEI is only part of the problem. Historically, Boeing has achieved great results by centralizing authority and control in the hands of the most exceptionally talented engineers. Today, the culture at Boeing is the opposite: listening sessions with the downtrodden, coddling the broken, and tiptoeing around the oppressed. Authority diffused throughout an entire organization’s hierarchy is no authority at all; accountability to technical results becomes challenging, if not impossible, when managers are serving two masters.
Meanwhile, management is rearranging deck chairs to make them more diverse. In 2022, Boeing tied managers’ incentive compensation to the ‘diversity’ of their interview slates, meaning that their bonuses depended on whether or not they considered women, racial minorities, and the disabled for positions they were hiring for. In Boeing’s Global Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (GEDI) 2023 Report, Sara Bowen, vice president of GEDI, Talent Intelligence, and Employee Listening, wrote: “We know diversity must be at the table for every important decision our company makes — every challenge we face, every innovation we design. Equity, diversity and inclusion are core values because they make Boeing — and each of us individually — better.”
The continuing and almost daily airline incidents in recent weeks, with planes repeatedly being forced to make emergency landings because of mechanical failures, has too often been blamed by the media on Boeing and the airplanes it builds, when almost all of these mechanical problems have had nothing to do with that airplane manufacturer. Once Boeing sells a plane to an airline, it becomes the airline’s responsibility to maintain it and keep it airworthy. Boeing itself might have serious management and quality control problems making its new planes suspect, but when older planes fail it is not Boeing’s fault. For example, all of the recent failures at United were clearly due to failures of United’s own maintenance staff, failures quite likely instigated by that company’s decision since 2020 to make race and gender the primary qualifications for hiring, not skill, talent, or knowledge.
We are now seeing the same phenomenon at American Airlines (AA), which since December has experienced its own string of flight emergencies:
December 6: 2023: An Airbus plane made an emergency landing at Phoenix when the flight crew reported one of the plane’s flaps had failed.
December 6, 2023: A different Airbus was forced to return to Phoenix because of low oil pressure in one engine.
December 23, 2023: An Airbus A319-100 was forced to make an emergency landing because of a brake issue detected during take-off.
January 8, 2024: A Boeing 787 made an emergency landing in Los Angeles due to an as yet unclarified “mechanical issue.”
February 29, 2024: An Airbus A321 was forced to make an emergency landing when one engine stalled in flight and could not be restarted by the crew.
February 29, 2024: A Boeing 777-200 on its way to Madrid had to turn back to Boston due to a cracked windshield
March 11, 2024: An Airbus A321 had to turn back to Raleigh-Durham airport because a sensor told the crew a cargo door was still open.
March 13, 2024: A Boeing 777 made an emergency landing in Los Angeles when the crew detected low pressure in one of the landing gears.
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — A United Airlines flight that departed from San Francisco International Airport Friday morning lost a panel, which was discovered after landing in Oregon, the Rogue Valley International Medford Airport confirmed to KRON4.
Flight 433 landed safely at Medford Airport around 11:30 a.m., according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The missing panel has not been found. At this time, it is unknown how the panel fell off the plane. No damage to the plane was reported, and normal airport operations resumed, Medford airport officials said.
United did not declare an emergency landing as there was no indication of damage to the aircraft during the flight. According to the airline, there were 139 passengers and six crew members on board. The plane involved was a Boeing 737-800.
This afternoon, United flight 433 landed safely at its scheduled destination at Rogue Valley International/Medford Airport. After the aircraft was parked at the gate, it was discovered to be missing an external panel. We’ll conduct a thorough examination of the plane and perform all the needed repairs before it returns to service. We’ll also conduct an investigation to better understand how this damage occurred.United Airlines Spokesperson
I can tell Boeing how it happened. It’s just like the others that just happened. When you hire based on diversity, you get crappy quality. Hire on meritocracy and the planes won’t fall apart in mid air. Don’t let it be lost that it was United, who leads the industry in this farce
An American Airlines flight had to make an emergency landing in California on Wednesday evening after the pilot reported a potential mechanical issue with the Boeing 777 aircraft, the airline said.
Flight345, which had taken off from Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, landed at Los Angeles International Airport at around 8:45 p.m. without any incident, according to American Airlines. The plane was able to taxi to the gate under its own power, and passengers disembarked as usual.
There have been at least six reported incidents involving Boeing planes in the past week. It was reported that a blown tire might have caused the emergency landing, but American Airlines did not confirm this.
A group of almost a dozen attorneys general across the United States have sent a letter to the Biden administration warning that DEI hiring practices within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are putting airline passengers in danger.
“We are troubled by some recent reports regarding your agency’s hiring practices and priorities,” Kansas Republican AG Kris Kobach and 10 other attorneys general wrote to FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker. “It seems that the FAA has placed ‘diversity’ bean counting over safety and expertise, and we worry that such misordered priorities could be catastrophic for American travelers.”
According to the letter, the FAA under the Biden administration “appears to prioritize virtue-signaling ‘diversity’ efforts over aviation expertise” and “this calls into question the agency’s commitment to safety.”
Kobach and the other attorneys general allege that the FAA is no longer focusing on merit when hiring employees and has instead put its focus on diversity and pointed to statements made by the FAA related to a “five year strategic plan” to “diversify its workforce by rethinking its hiring practices and capitalize on opportunities to hire people who will bring new and diverse skills to the agency and reflect the demographics of the U.S. labor force.”
“These efforts follow on work that reportedly started under the Obama Administration when the agency shockingly sought out applicants with ‘severe intellectual’ and ‘psychiatric’ disabilities to staff the agency responsible for air traffic control, aviation safety, major airports, commercial space regulation, and security and hazardous materials safety,” the letter states.
Four bolts were missing from a door panel that blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight last month while the Boeing 737 Max 9 plane was flying over Oregon, according to a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board.
The bolts are there to prevent the non-operational panel, known as a door plug, from moving upward, the NTSB said. But last year, before the plane was delivered to Alaska Airlines, the door panel had to be opened and four bolts removed at Boeing’s Renton, Wash., factory to replace damaged rivets nearby, the report says.
As part of the investigation, the agency found that the “absence of contact damage or deformation” around holes associated with vertical movement bolts indicates that four bolts of the door panel were missing before the panel moved up off the stop pads, according to the report.
It’s unclear why the bolts were missing. Records show that the rivets were replaced, but photos obtained from Boeing Co. by the NTSB show that the door panel was put back without bolts in three visible locations. The fourth location is obscured in the photo by insulation, the NTSB said.
Buried below are the words that the DHS allows illegals to fly without ID’s. That tells you a lot. They controlled groups of people in Germany during the 1940’s by putting them on trains and taking them to camps. This is the digital train ride.
According to the MSN, the CAT-2 scanners incorporate facial recognition technology by capturing real-time pictures of travelers and comparing them against their photo IDs. They will be expanded to every federal airport.
These units have been deployed at nearly 30 airports nationwide and are expected to expand to 430 federal airports in the coming years.
For now, it’s optional for passengers. How long will that be the case?
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Office of Field Operations, officers take biometric photos of passengers prior to boarding a flight at Houston International Airport on February 12, 2018. ..Photographer: Donna Burton
A bill, The Traveler Privacy Protection Act, has been introduced with bipartisan support. It calls for the government to end the invasive policy and stop expansion without congressional approval.
After the bill was announced, that’s about the time that DHS decided to move ahead.
Storage of the Biometric Data
According to MSN, “The TSA emphasizes that photos are not stored after a positive ID match, except during limited testing for evaluating technology effectiveness. This testing involves two to four weeks at specific locations, with data collected and submitted to the DHS Science and Technology Directorate for independent analysis.”
Allegedly, TSA won’t keep the data, but how long will Homeland Security and other entities keep it, and who can control what they do with it?
This is the DHS that lets illegal aliens fly without IDs. They aren’t trustworthy and don’t care about the safety of the people. So, why are they doing it?
It’s no secret that the US airline industry is currently plagued with scandal, fear, and a lot of turbulence. Much of the turmoil is linked to their obsessive focus on the left’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agenda. DEI prioritizes factors like skin color, gender identity, and sexual orientation over actual skills and talent in their hiring process. Let’s look at four recent examples of failed DEI hires.
This is one of the craziest things I’ve ever read.
First, the FAA gave secret code words to students in the Black Caucus of Federal Aviation Employees to put in their resume that would skip them to the front of the line.
In another instance of the signals to go to the front of the line was to say the high school class you received your lowest grades in was “Science.”
Yes, they literally shot you to the front of the line if you said your worst grades were in Science.
This is one of the craziest things I’ve ever read.
First, the FAA gave secret code words to students in the Black Caucus of Federal Aviation Employees to put in their resume that would skip them to the front of the line.
That, Medicine and law enforcement are the wrong places to be cutting corners. We have to get rid of it. Judging based on the color of skin is racist, any color….or gender
I don’t even want to get on an airplane right now. Between DEI in the Air Traffic Control and woke pilots, not to mention sudden deaths from the Covid Jab the pilots were forced to take, it’s a gamble now to fly.
A new report from AAR Corp., a company that provides aviation services to commercial and government operators, MROs, and OEMs, warns that the aircraft mechanic shortage has reached a critical point.
The company’s 2023 Mid Skills Gap report urges employers to “break down silos” and collaborate with high schools, colleges, non-profit organzations, and elected officials to expand early access to aviation maintenance curriculum and training.
“Mid skills” describes careers that require industry certifications but not a college degree, including aviation mechanics, according to officials with AAR, which has been putting together the report since 2011.
The 2023 report includes several suggestions to increase the number of aviation mechanics, including:
Work with lawmakers and state agencies, nonprofits and educators to launch a national campaign to raise awareness of aviation careers.
Encourage training programs to teach people with industry experience how to instruct others to build the faculty population.
Ask lawmakers to pass common sense immigration policies that allow aviation companies to recruit talent from abroad to meet demand and keep airplanes flying safely.
Make it easier for veterans to quickly transition their skills to appropriate industry jobs.
Push to eliminate restrictions on AMTs taking the FAA general exam as pilots can do with their written exams. Getting these exams completed early will lead to increased certifications for the industry, officials noted.
Increase training capacity by creating programs to make experienced retirees instructors in education programs.
The CEO of Alaska Airlines said new, in-house inspections of the carrier’s Boeing 737 Max 9 planes in the wake of a near-disaster earlier this month revealed that “many” of the aircraft were found to have loose bolts.
In an exclusive interview with NBC News senior correspondent Tom Costello, Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci discussed the findings of his company’s inspections so far since the Jan. 5 incident, in which a panel on one of its Max 9 jets blew out midair on a flight carrying 177 people.
“I’m more than frustrated and disappointed,” he said. “I am angry. This happened to Alaska Airlines. It happened to our guests and happened to our people. And — my demand on Boeing is what are they going to do to improve their quality programs in-house.”
So, as I predicted in 2008, after a moderate first term helped Barack Obama get reelected in 2012, in 2013 Obama let loose his people to pursue their agenda of Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE).
White House officials decided in 2013 to purge the hiring list of over 1,000 graduates of the air traffic control course at colleges like Arizona State who had also passed the cognitive exam for hiring. Instead, it made air traffic control job-seekers start over with a new “biographical” test to “add diversity to the workforce.”
This was in response to complaints from the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees that only 9.47 percent of FAA workers were black compared with 17.6 percent in the federal civilian workforce. “Thus, the FAA would be required to increase their complement of African American workers by 8.13 percent to reach parody [sic] with the Federal Civilian Workforce.”
This is not a parody.
The Obama administration’s new biographical test was blatantly rigged to boost blacks and hurt whites by leaning in to anti-black stereotypes. From the lawsuit against the FAA filed by the Mountain States Legal Foundation:
…a candidate could be awarded 15 points, the highest possible for any question, if they indicated that their lowest grades in high school were in science…. In contrast, an applicant was awarded only 2 points if they had a pilot’s certificate and no points were awarded for having a Control Tower Operator rating or having Instrument Flight Rules experience…. In addition, one question on the Biographical Questionnaire awarded an applicant 10 points, the most available for that question, if the applicant answered s/he had not been employed in the prior three years. Another question awarded 4 or 8 points if the applicant had been unemployed five or more months in the prior three years. Statistics from the Department of Labor indicate that African Americans had the highest unemployment rate in 2010–2014.
Even the federal organization that made up this absurd biographical test reported to the FAA that it hadn’t been validated.
I’ve never wanted to get on a plane less than I do right now. They have crazy people in Air Traffic Control with mental issues and DEI ruining aircraft maintenance. A pilot who couldn’t qualify other than through diversity almost crashed his plane because he shouldn’t have been flying to begin with.
Diversity and woke ruins everything it touches, but in this case a plane is coming down soon because some assholes think that equality and diversity is more important than skill and training.
Look, I don’t care what color the pilot is. I want the one that is going to get my ass there without crashing, not one that got hired on diversity. Racism is racism no matter what the color you discriminate against.
Meritocracy is dead.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, in a recent interview, admitted that they are no longer seeking the most qualified candidates to safely transport their passengers on commercial flights.
Instead, Kirby says, “We have committed that 50% of the classes will be women or people of color,” instead of the most qualified individuals they can find.
What could go wrong with putting one’s skin color or gender over safety and competency?
Anti-whiteness appears to be evolving into a trend in the airline industry.
Wall Street Silver, a popular finance account on X, warned people that they should not fly with an airline that puts woke DEI standards over safety:
“At this point, I think people really need to think twice about flying on United. The top priority of any airline on 100% of their hiring, especially pilots and mechanics, needs to be safety. Anyone who thinks DEI (racism) should play any role in hiring, that person needs to be removed from the process. The board of directors should terminate the CEO immediately and focus on safety, and only safety.”
Elon Musk also chimed in, saying, “This is messed up.”
The hard landed occurred on July 29th as a previously uneventful United Airlines Boeing 767-300ER flight from the Newark Liberty International Airport to the George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH) in Houston turned awfully dramatic.
“According to the [National Transportation Safety Board’s] preliminary report, while landing at IAH, the First Officer was flying and, despite best efforts to keep the nose wheel from bouncing, the nose wheel made contact with abnormal force,” as reported by Simple Flying, an aviation news source.
“The airplane appeared to bounce, and he reacted by pulling aft on the control yoke, in an effort to keep the nose wheel from impacting the runway a second time. Subsequently, the speed brakes deployed, and the auto brakes engaged which resulted in a second bounce of the nose wheel.”
These bounces reportedly caused significant damage to the airplane.
Delusions of Adequacy 