January 22, 2024

United Airlines became the subject of derision and mockery recently as a viral video emerged of United’s CEO Scott Kirby proclaiming his company’s potentially disastrous and deadly mission to have half of their future hires be “women or people of color” as part of its corporate quest for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), an ideological cancer that has been eating away at America’s academic, economic, and societal strength for years.

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The reasons for the acute public outrage aren’t mysterious.  Millions of Americans fly commercially, and the idea of plummeting 30,000 feet over several minutes in anticipation of you and your family’s death is a frightening enough prospect for most people that the very idea of prioritizing race or gender in selecting pilots and mechanics seems nothing short of insane. 

And in the past weeks, we’ve learned that the door plug of an Alaska Airlines fuselage blew off of the aircraft at 16,000 feet, depressurizing the cabin and creating a scenario so harrowing and nightmarish that one passenger felt compelled to send a presumedly final text: “Mom our plane depressed. We’re in masks. I love you.”

The Boeing 737 Max was the plane involved, which some may remember was grounded after two deadly crashes overseas in 2018 and 2019, which claimed 346 lives in total and were both deemed the result of faulty equipment on the airplane. 

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As many Americans are only now discovering as a sidenote to other outrageous DEI news, such as the FAA being decidedly hellbent on taking DEI to its most ludicrous extent by “actively recruiting” people who suffer from “severe intellectual abilities,” Boeing has also long been suicidally devoted to woke DEI initiatives.  They now claim, for example, that they want their employees to “look like America,” but are looking to have 92.5% of interview slates be “diverse,” i.e., non-white males.  This, of course, means that they are quite illegally prioritizing non-white male applicants for employment, and I am very much looking forward to the forthcoming lawsuits on these grounds. (See: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.)

Also involved was the manufacturer of the malfunctioning door plug, Spirit Aerosystems, which is so devoted to woke DEI policies that it even created a cringy marketing video of its all-girl crew of employees sashaying to Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman.”

But all of these things that we know to fear about what DEI has wrought in aviation pales in comparison to what we should fear about what we don’t know.  Or rather, what we haven’t been told. 

You likely didn’t hear about it at the time, just over one year before the Alaska Airlines nightmare, a United flight from Maui to San Francisco began climbing, reached 2,200 feet, then rapidly plunged more than 1,400 feet at a rate of 8,600 feet per minute, before the craft was miraculously righted just a few seconds before impacting the Pacific Ocean.

The problem, we’re told, is that the pilots weren’t in sync.  The captain called for the flaps to be “reduced to five degrees,” but “the first officer thought he heard the captain say fifteen degrees, rather than five degrees.”

Personally, I’m embarrassed at how many times I had to read that explanation before realizing that it’s an obvious lie.  The words “five” and “fifteen” sound absolutely nothing alike when spoken.  Yet it’s being reported, over and over, that the first officer “heard” the captain “say” fifteen, when he actually requested the flaps to be set at five degrees.