https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/01/07/united-airlines-questioned-about-dei-impact-on-hard-landing-in-houston-1425612/

Hard landing damaged the fuselage, crumpling the frame.

In a tweet posted Friday, she claimed the pilot was a DEI hire who’d “failed multiple trainings” but been hired anyway because he or she had checked the right identity boxes.

“Was the co-pilot a former flight attendant who was FIRED and then rehired through United’s DEI program despite being on a list to not return to United?” St. Clair wrote in her tweets.

“Am I correct that this individual failed multiple trainings including simulator training? Am I also correct that United has covered up this DEI disaster and many others?” she added.

Was the #2 at the Denver hiring center also onboarded through DEI? Did she or did she not change fail grades for DEI hires because “it makes the numbers look bad”?

Did the instructor who failed this co-pilot ask corporate why they passed him?

When billionaire Elon Musk noted that this puts a lot of lives at risk “if true,” Ashley responded: “Wish it wasn’t & far from the only instance. Lots of very concerning corners being cut with DEI at United…”


https://veritastechpilotacademy.org/2024/01/10/the-dei-rot-in-the-airline-industry-is-way-worse-than-you-think/

In December of 2022, a Boeing 777 operated by United Airlines took off from Hawaii in heavy rain. About a minute into the flight, the aircraft plummeted towards the ocean. It came just 750 feet from hitting the water at high-speed, which almost certainly would have killed all 280 people on board. In the end, the pilots saved the aircraft by a matter of seconds.

Late last year, we got something of an official answer. It turns out that, according to the NTSB, the captain called for the flaps to be retracted to the 5 degree setting, which is a normal setting for takeoff. But the first officer thought the captain had called for a 15 degree setting, so he selected that one. That misunderstanding caused a major problem because the plane was going far too fast for that flap setting.

To avoid damaging the plane, the captain started to slow the aircraft while he tried to diagnose the problem. Instead of realizing his mistake, the first officer suggested that maybe the instruments were malfunctioning. The two pilots continued to troubleshoot the problem, and in the process they became disoriented as the plane quickly lost altitude. The pilots’ confusion continued until the plane blared an alarm telling them they were about to die if they didn’t apply maximum power and pull up.

Late last year, we got something of an official answer. It turns out that, according to the NTSB, the captain called for the flaps to be retracted to the 5 degree setting, which is a normal setting for takeoff. But the first officer thought the captain had called for a 15 degree setting, so he selected that one. That misunderstanding caused a major problem because the plane was going far too fast for that flap setting.

To avoid damaging the plane, the captain started to slow the aircraft while he tried to diagnose the problem. Instead of realizing his mistake, the first officer suggested that maybe the instruments were malfunctioning. The two pilots continued to troubleshoot the problem, and in the process they became disoriented as the plane quickly lost altitude. The pilots’ confusion continued until the plane blared an alarm telling them they were about to die if they didn’t apply maximum power and pull up.

Incredibly, both pilots of that flight are still employed by United Airlines. They nearly killed everyone on board through their incompetence, but that’s not disqualifying apparently. Beyond some basic information about their flying experience, we still don’t know much about these two pilots. For example, we know that the first officer has a total of 5,300 hours of flying experience, which is respectable for his position. But at the time of the incident, he only had 120 hours in the Boeing 777. And according to a report by Tucker Carlson last year, which cited an anonymous source at United shortly after this near-catastrophe took place, this first officer was a “new hire” at the airline. Could that lack of experience have played a role? And more to the point, could either of the pilot’s identity have played a role in their hiring — or the airline’s refusal to terminate them after they almost steered a passenger jet into the ocean?

We don’t know. We’re not allowed to know because the federal government and the airline don’t want us to know any more information about the identity of these pilots, or any of their pilots who are involved in near-disasters. There is an ongoing information blackout about these kinds of events, and it’s deliberate. But in their various public statements and press releases, United Airlines has made it very clear that they’re mainly interested in hiring pilots on the basis of skin color and gender, rather than competence. In fact, they participated in a Vice documentary back in 2022 about their DEI initiatives. Watch:

One of the popular statistics-focused accounts on X, which uses the name i/o, noticed that two of the schools that United has decided to team up with — Delaware State and Elizabeth City State University — are, “in the bottom 2% of all undergraduate institutions in the United States.” Elizabeth State, the account noted, “had the distinction in the 1980s of being the only university in which the average SAT math score was lower than that score which would have been produced if a person had guessed ‘B’ on all the multiple choice questions on the test.”

That’s a pretty sobering statistic, especially if you plan on flying United anytime soon. To be fair to United, they don’t just recruit from HBCUs with no standards. As a writer who goes by the pseudonym Peachy Keenan found, United also recruits from an organization called “Sisters of the Skies.” Yes, this is an organization that sends pilots to United Airlines, and their acronym is literally “S.O.S.”

A few years ago, in February of 2019, an Amazon Air cargo plane — a Boeing 767 operated by a contractor called Atlas Air — plummeted into Trinity Bay near Houston. The reason for that crash? The first officer, Conrad Aska, accidentally pressed a button giving the plane a massive jolt in thrust, which pitched the nose up. Instead of reacting calmly to the situation, he panicked, and forced the control column all the way down. The plane broke through the clouds and disintegrated on impact with the water.

Conrad Aska never should have been flying that plane. Prior to joining Atlas Air and Amazon, he had worked for seven different airlines, where he developed a reputation for pressing random buttons in emergencies. He would always panic in the simulator and just lose all situational awareness. But airlines kept putting him in the cockpit anyway. That’s why, in its final report on the crash, the N.T.S.B. cited, “systemic deficiencies in the aviation industry’s selection and performance measurement practices, which failed to address the first officer’s aptitude-related deficiencies and maladaptive stress response.”

What explains those “systemic deficiencies”? Well, we can’t say for sure. We do know that Conrad Aska was born in the Caribbean nation of Antigua.