Opinion: The real threats to air safety

Before the bodies had even been pulled from the Potomac, Trump was already ranting about “DEI” policies maybe being responsible for the crash of a US Army Black Hawk helicopter into American Airlines Flight 5342 in January – as well as former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, former transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, the Federal Aviation Administration, the helicopter pilot, and basically everyone and everything he didn’t like that day.

(Oh, yes, and when he was asked whether he would visit the crash site, his response was to be his usual charming self and ask if the reporter expected him to go swimming. Truly, this was the day Donald Trump became President of the United States.)

Now, for those of us who haven’t been gradually pickling our brains in outrage tweets for the past year or two, “DEI” stands for “diversity, equity and inclusion”, and refers generally to policies designed to reduce discrimination in the workplace and make sure people who are qualified for a position aren’t unfairly excluded because of circumstances like race, gender, sexuality, or disability.

One might be forgiven for thinking that allowing more people from different backgrounds to work a wider variety of jobs would enhance a given organisation’s overall performance – and there have been studies that showed exactly that – but for people like Trump and his cronies, who consider it an affront to the natural order of things when there is a single job not held by a white guy, DEI (read: women and minorities having jobs) is, of course, the root cause of everything from a plane crash to a stubbed toe.

Seeing as we’re here – and unlike the president, not mortally allergic to facts – let’s have some figures, shall we? According to the FAA, as of 2022, in the US, more than 90 per cent of commercial airline pilots were white men. 3. 4 per cent were Black, 2. 2 per cent Asian, 0. 5 per cent Hispanic or Latino, and 4. 6 per cent were women.

Even if you’re the type to consider a single non-white and/or female pilot as one too many, you must admit that the American aviation industry ain’t exactly “It’s A Small World” – and even if it was, what exactly is the harm in deciding to broaden one’s hiring pool to include the roughly 70 per cent of Americans who do not happen to be white men?

“But,” I hear already the cries, “surely hiring should be based on merit! If the white men are the best people for the job, then they should be the people to get it!”

Well, first, you don’t know that white men are the best people for the job until you’ve looked at all possible candidates, who may well be just as or more qualified and who deserve the chance to be considered on a level playing field.

But secondly, let’s discuss one very “meritorious” (read: rich, white and male) person whom the president, in his dubious wisdom, has chosen to give increasingly alarming amounts of power to, shall we? Before Trump was even inaugurated, Elon Musk, the world’s richest internet troll and CEO of SpaceX, was already engaging in a pressure campaign to oust the head of the FAA, Mike Whitaker, for having the temerity to demand SpaceX obey safety regulations.

This would be the same SpaceX, by the way, whose junk falling on the Indian Ocean has been forcing Qantas to delay flights to Johannesburg, and whose “rapid unscheduled disassembly” (read: fiery explosion) of a Starship spacecraft earlier in January caused a spectacular light show over the Caribbean that also, incidentally, played merry hell with myriad commercial flights in the region that quite understandably didn’t want to get knocked out of the sky by rocket debris.

Anyway, Mike Whitaker went out the door when Trump was inaugurated – so, at the time of the worst US aviation disaster since 2001, the country’s aviation safety regulator was leaderless (incidentally, Trump also fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration and gutted the Aviation Security Advisory Committee).

But never fear, America! Musk, who hates the FAA and the very idea of “safety regulations”, and his team of 19-to-25-year-old lickspittles whose main qualifications are “know a bit about computers” and “are willing to do whatever Elon says, no matter how wildly illegal or irresponsible”, are going in to “upgrade” the FAA’s air traffic control systems, thus bringing their exciting Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” ethos to the very carefully tested and iterated infrastructure that keeps planes from crashing into stuff.

So, while the president and his enablers rant and fulminate about diversity policies making aviation less safe, dangerously unqualified people are set to trigger a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of everything that does make aviation safe.

And as hard as Trump tries to pretend otherwise (and he will try), the first time another American air tragedy happens as a direct result of Musk’s meddling (and it will happen), the real people to blame will be as plain as a fireball in the sky – and they won’t have been “DEI hires”.