DEI The Friendly Skies

I’ll stress that it’s too early to know the cause of the crashed Delta flight in Toronto, but this is a bad look.

More from John KonradDEI is a problem, but in many companies, it’s just a tool — a loyalty test HR directors use to expand their own power and budgets while purging anyone they don’t control.

38 Replies to “DEI The Friendly Skies”

  1. OMG.

    From here on. I’m flying my own plane, it’s not as fast or the range.
    But I know who is flying.

    1. “Made an unconventional landing with no survivors.”

      Now that’s the way to put a happy face on DEI.

  2. I get your point but the pilot on the radio was clearly a male. Not sure about the pilot flying.

    I’ll add that female pilots are like females driving pickup trucks. They have a certain je ne sais quoi.

  3. The HR department for my old employer insisted that diversity IS merit.
    That was after a long discussion on why they were giving preference to hiring women despite lower qualifications instead of hiring on merit.

  4. Wonder if Coulter’s theorem will be accurate in this case.
    The longer it will take to reveal the crew, there is more likelihood that it will be one of the designated victims group. (Paraphrasing).

  5. Yes, too early. When you watch the 30 second clip of the place hitting the ground, everything looks normal the first 4 seconds and then the plane levels and descent appears to accelerate the next 5 seconds. Will wait for the results but shows you how fast things can go wrong.

    1. It’s precisely that video that makes me think it’s going to turn out to be one of those unpredictable microburst issues. Toronto winter weather sucks at the best of times and the past week was particularly bad.

      To paraphrase the old saying about military strategy, the problem with Man’s mastery of Nature is that Nature still gets a vote.

      1. Microbursts are a thunderstorm phenomenon. There were no thunderstorms there at all.

        The pilot did not flare the airplane for touchdown. There was no change in the attitude, no arresting of the descent. It hit hard on the right main, failing it, and with the crosswind from the right forcing the tail left, and the drag of the wing on the ground, the airplane veered to the right into the snowbank and the right wing tore off. The forward speed was still high, so the left wing lifted and rotated the fuselage over onto its back.

        That’s how I see it, and I was a Commercial Pilot whose only commercial flying was as a flight instructor. Still a lot more knowledge and experience than the average armchair critic.

        Yes, DEI certainly might have been a factor. The video is not reassuring. Flying airliners is a very serious business, not a form of recreation for pilots.

        1. Dan’s explanation is consistent with all the reports I’ve seen the past couple of days.
          Question I would ask is if the pilots understood what was happening to the aircraft only too late to do anything, or, as I have seen someone say, the pilot attempted to flare, but the jet engines lagged and took too long to respond.
          Something brought the plane down in a hurry in those last few seconds.

          1. The engines are not used to flare. The elevator is used to raise the nose to increase the wings’ angle of attack, and therefore lift, to stop the descent. A secondary effect is to slow the aircraft. Adding power would just increase speed and make things more difficult.

        2. In the first nine seconds of the dashcam video showing the actual crash, the plane seems to be coming in at an appropriate nose-up angle (I can’t tell if the flaps are down or how far). *Something* happens in the half-second while the plane passes behind the car frame (about 10 seconds into the video), because in the next moment the plane is visible (00:11 to 00:13), the nose has perceptibly dropped, levelling the fuselage out, and the wings are visibly wobbling. That looks very much like a last-minute wind shear or turbulence effect of some kind, if not a full-on dry downburst — and there was a lot of wind reported that day.

          If it wasn’t a weather effect, what kind of plausible pilot error — something that neither pilot could have caught or corrected in time — would have produced the same result? I’m not looking to make excuses, I just don’t want to jump to obvious conclusions of blame.

        3. “The pilot did not flare the airplane for touchdown. There was no change in the attitude, no arresting of the descent. It hit hard on the right main, ”

          I’m no pilot, but I do understand physics. That airplane appeared to hit the ground *hard*…much harder than landing gear is designed for. I live two miles from YVR and have watched countless planes land in my lifetime, and none of them have ever landed like that. As I’ve said before, it looked like an F-14 trying to catch a wire on a carrier landing.

        4. What!? Hiring via an Elvis soundtrack of “Burning Love” doesn’t inspire you?

          https://youtu.be/zWDcot2YezA?si=euuUU00Dzfietfxw&t=29

          Those girls have a Burning Love for each other … and for flying. Competency? Intelligence? Scholarship? Puhleeze!? That’s so 1980’s … get with the BURNING LOVE!

          Girl, girl, you’re gonna set me on fire … yikes!! Did nobody check the lyrics of their bouncy tune!?

  6. I really don’t give a damn, as long as they know to fly on the left side of the road when we’re in the UK.

  7. Just watch a handful of episodes of Mayday. Count the number of times the airplane will lose power to the hydraulic controls and have to be operated by human muscle. Usually two men who are barely able to keep the plane airborne. Now replace them with two smaller women.

    Suddenly a lot more episodes of Mayday end badly.

    1. That’s older aircraft: modern ones are fly-by-wire. Look at any Airbus cockpit, the yoke has gone, replaced by a small sidestick very similar to a gaming controller on a computer, which basically it is.

      I’ve taught a number of young ladies to fly, and some of them are very good.

      1. “…and some of them are very good.”
        I sense a Freudian slip.

        Some of them may be very good… what about the rest of them? 😉

  8. In the early days of DEI, I made a critical comment on X. I had mistakenly spelled it DIE and was suspended. It seems I wasn’t far off the mark after all.

    1. As an instructor I found the women as capable as men, other than in physical strength. In my Aircraft Systems class, I found that the women actually studied and absorbed the stuff, as opposed to a lot of the guys who assumed they already knew it all. We had some students damage several airplanes, all of them male.

      With DEI, the bar is lowered so as to accommodate those who are less capable or talented or willing to achieve the usual standard. The standards were developed over many decades to address the factors that resulted in accidents. Dumbing down the standards will result in more accidents.

  9. 1st woman airline pilot flew for Central Airways in 1934, there were no ‘majors’ at that time.

    But anyhow, this is silly and likely to bring the wrong people on to the flight deck.

    6% of flight crew are female apparently, does this number give all females an inferiority complex?

    1. So what you’re saying is that there is less than a .4% chance a two person flight crew would only be female if they were randomly selected, distributed, and could fill either role. Far lower number if there are 3 or they could only fill one of the positions. Makes me think they are grouped together for some other reason…

  10. CBS Mornings

    Delta CEO Ed Bastian appeared on CBS Mornings on Wednesday to discuss the plane that crash-landed in Toronto this week.

    Ed Bastian refused to identify the pilot of the doomed plane amid rumors it was an all-female crew.
    The doomed flight was operated by Endeavor Air – a regional airline obsessed with promoting all-female flights.

    How is an all female crew diversity?

  11. I know quite a few women pilots: GA, Glider (inc former world champ), a few Airbus drivers*. All good – you don’t get to be there if you’re not, same as the blokes. And it’s one of those skills that’s not sex dependent. So, unless you are letting sub-standard flight crew a free pass because of sex it shouldn’t be an issue. But I guess that’s the problem with DIE.

    *So Marnie, if you’re reading this I’d recommend you and your girl first officer and cabin crew to any Easyjet passenger 🙂

  12. Right wing low for sideslip into the crosswind, no flare, the right gear collapsed on impact, right wing tore off, forward speed still providing lift to left wing, and she rolled over. Every soul on board had an important destiny to be fulfilled in the future so fate let them live.

    Now, why did the pilot not flare? Visibility is poor due to blowing snow and perhaps they lost visual contact with the runway? Turbulence got them busy? Wind shear slammed them down hard? Some other distraction in the cockpit? Probably all of the above and something else ran the pilot out of mental bandwidth and they got behind the aircraft at a critical moment.

    I’ve been flying for over four decades. My father was a pilot as well (still alive but his ticker could let go at any moment so they pulled him a long time ago.) He and his friends had three absolute things a pilot must not run out of or else: ideas, fuel, and daylight. This looks like an idea problem but you never know.

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