Trump Admin Targets DEI: Airlines Must Now Prove Merit in Pilot Selection

Those of us who have spent a lot of time flying the friendly skies are and have been concerned with safety. In my many years of near-constant air travel, I experienced many times when a flight was delayed to replace some widget or another; some people complained, but most took the attitude I did, that if we are seated inside an aluminum tube that is going to climb up 35,000 feet and fly at 300 miles per hour, we want that thing to be perfect when it takes off.

Here's the other thing: We want the crew to be perfect, too. We don't want a diversity hire at the yoke of that airplane; we want the best pilot money can buy, regardless of skin tone or plumbing. Now, the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are taking steps to ensure that we get just that.

The Federal Aviation Administration is ordering airlines to certify their merit-based hiring practices as part of the Trump administration's ongoing campaign against DEI programs.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the new policy on Friday, saying airlines that don't formally commit to merit-based hiring will be subject to FAA investigation. President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to cancel DEI hiring programs early on in his return to the White House.
"When families board their aircraft, they should fly with confidence knowing the pilot behind the controls is the best of the best. The American people don’t care what their pilot looks like or their gender—they just care that they are most qualified man or woman for the job," Duffy said in a statement.
"Safety drives everything we do, and this commonsense measure will increase transparency between passengers and airlines," he added.

Is it not painfully obvious that this is precisely how these things should work? The pilot of an airliner has enormous responsibilities. Not only does he or she have the controls of an airplane costing millions of dollars, but he or she also holds the lives of as many as several hundred people in his or her hands - literally. The airlines and the passengers place a lot of trust in these people, and it's a sad state of affairs that the federal government literally has to coerce the airlines to demonstrate that they are hiring, not to fill quotas, not to celebrate diversity, but to find the very best, most capable, most reliable people to fill these chairs. Hiring aircrew should be solely on merit, not skin tone, not plumbing, not religion, not anything else - just by how good they are at wrangling that airplane through the sky.

So, this is the right move by Secretary Duffy, the Trump administration, and the FAA.

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There's nothing more unsettling than being 35,000 feet in the air and having doubts about the airplane or its crew. I once was required to fly from Detroit to Shanghai in a Boeing 747 that was so old it still had ashtrays, and I was beyond relieved when the bird landed, even if I was in Communist China. (I left China safely as well, but only had to fly to Japan.) This move from the Trump administration and the FAA should have all air travelers feeling just a little more confident about who's at the controls.

Editor’s Note: Democrats are fanning the flames and raising the rhetoric by comparing ICE to the Gestapo, fascists, and secret police.

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