American Airlines and Delta are scrapping the requirement that their pilots have a 4 year degree, because requiring people to be educated is racist or something.
Remember what happened last time major airlines were flown by pilots without degrees.
Categories: Race baiting
11 Comments
joe · January 10, 2022 at 2:16 pm
the reason aliens haven’t stopped and talked to us… we are too stupid to survive
ChuckInBama · January 10, 2022 at 2:39 pm
Has the pilot received flight training from a certified instructor at an accredited flight school ? Does the pilot have a few years experience ? Does the pilot have a few hundred hours in the type I’m riding in ? If the answer to these questions are “Yes”, why should I care what, if any, degree he or she has ? Employers have spent years looking for college graduates because there had to be a market for college graduates in order for banks and universities to push student loans on young adults who knew no better. Now, if they are going to hire LaKeesha with her GED and McDonald’s experience over Jimmy Cracker who has been flying crop dusters for 10 years, we got a problem.
Big Ruckus D · January 10, 2022 at 2:59 pm
Two things:
First, how close are we to the point where a majority of people realize a college degree is a liability, due the universities being straight up indoctrination centers? I already know of a few small companies who disqualify applicants based on their degrees being from certain schools that those who make the hiring decisions find undesirable for their unabashed leftism.
Second, how shitty does commercial air travel have to become in order to dissuade most people from continuing to utilize it? They seats got shrunk. The meals and snacks were heavily downgraded. They tried to make the seats “cheap” as a come on, then nickel and dime you to death with BS fees. TSA. And presently a huge number of cancelled flights for staff shortages, leaving many people stranded. The insults to the customer keep piling up. And still they come back for the abuse. There has to be a failure point.
It's just Boris · January 11, 2022 at 8:01 am
People will keep flying until either there’s a good alternative, or it becomes impossible.
Trains? If you want to take a train for the sake of taking a train, fine. But except along the northeast seaboard it’s as pricey as flying and as slow as driving.
Busses? Cheap but as slow as driving with many of the personal-space disadvantages of flying.
Driving? Depending on the trip (car and driver, passengers if any, etc.) anything over around 500 miles is going to be more than a day, and slower than flying.
I fly a lot for business, and it’s no fun; but since it’s routinely across two time zones per trip, I don’t have a good alternative if I don’t want to lose too much time on the travel itself.
Jason · January 10, 2022 at 5:21 pm
Griggs v. Duke Power is what started the whole “need a degree” thing. Also, remember that in WW2 many pilots had no degree and then went on to the major airlines. Thus, add this to Big Ruckus’ point and you see the (I hope) rationale behind this. Now if they do the quota thing all bets are off….
Big Ruckus D · January 10, 2022 at 5:45 pm
It’s 2022. Odds that this is an excuse to further the quota thing are approaching 100%. Remember these companies are now temples of wokeness, apparently above all else. But that it were simply a move away from requiring degrees, which are now conferred – with minimal effort required – on unqualified affirmative action students anyway. They are so desperate for diversity in the cockpit, they’ll have it even if it kills them. And us.
I’d say that business model wouldn’t last long for what should be obvious reasons, but look at what the typical flying public at large has tolerated already, insofar as the quality of air travel is concerned. Couple that with the percentage of the public that has tolerated and even embraced the massively destructive official policies in “the war on covid”, and apparently a lot of people will value presenting the appearance of being socially enlightened, and the status they believe is thus gained, over their own lives. We are dealing with delusions of inconceivable depth and strength here.
Like I said, there has to be a failure point. Damned if I know where it is though. I clearly cannot accurately predict the breaking point of putatively “normal” people to create a backlash, because to my perception, it should already have been long past.
PaulB · January 10, 2022 at 5:25 pm
The airlines have problems. Pilot accreditation is not one of them, IMO.
Pilot salaries have not kept up with inflation. I mean nothing has, of course, but pilot salaries have been stagnant for a long while. Type-certification standards and training burden has increased considerably.
We deal with credentialism in the merchant marine too. Kids can go to a maritime college and dick around for 4 years and come out with a 3rd mate or 3rd assistant engineer’s license at age 23. Or, like me, you can work your way up the hawsepipe, sail 1080 days at sea to be rated Able-Bodied Seaman, then sail another 1080 days at sea to qualify to take the exact same exam the maritime academy kids do and get the license. Only, by then, I’d been sailing for 10 years and had already been coaching new mates fresh out of college when I became one of them.
I hate credentialism. I have an MS in a STEM field and it’s worth less than toilet paper to my ability to run a boat. A college can teach you navigation math to fly a plane or stand a watch, but it can’t give you the experience you need and it can’t pair you with the experienced mentor you need to learn on the job. To that end, I absolutely agree with eliminating the stupid college diploma requirements to be a pilot. Why should a degree in underwater lesbian poetry be a pass to be an airline pilot?
Will Brown · January 10, 2022 at 5:26 pm
The college degree things was a holdover from the times when there were more applicants than jobs, just a screening tool. I don’t think they’ve required it for several years. In the early seventies with all the military pilots on the street looking for work, the saying among airline pilot wanna be’s who weren’t military was, “you need a moonwalk to get an interview”. Times change.
SiG · January 10, 2022 at 7:22 pm
I wonder if it has anything to do with the extreme surge in pilot deaths since the start of ’20. According to our fellow Florida blogger down south, Mike Myles of 90 Miles,
Pilot deaths in 2019 – 1
Pilot deaths in 2020 – 6
Pilot deaths in 2021 – 111 In just the first nine months
https://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2022/01/pilot-deaths-in-age-of-covid19.html
James · January 10, 2022 at 7:43 pm
I think fine not to require a degree although the reasons for such a decision should ensure that pilots are still qualified. As for 9/11, well, those pilots — or auto-pilots — did a damned accurate job of flying. Not easy to fly a large plane precisely into the side of a building. Twice.
Beans · January 11, 2022 at 3:00 am
To me, what this means is that the airlines are looking at what colleges and universities are putting out and saying “Screw this!” and going to an actual learning credentials system, like in the trades.
Seriously, I don’t trust anyone anymore that is coming out of our colleges to be able to write, speak, do math and actual science as well as someone from my generation who just graduated from high school. Am not kidding. My wife had people in her master’s program in the mid 2000’s that could not do things we had learned in junior high and high school.
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