Pushing Woke Standards Over Meritocracy Is Going to Get Us Killed

A recent epidemic of airline near-misses deserves both attention and reflection.

In mid-December, a San Francisco-bound United Airlines Boeing 777-200 airliner, just a little over a minute after taking off from Maui, Hawaii, suddenly dived. It lost more than half its altitude and came within 800 feet of crashing into the Pacific Ocean before pulling up.

About a month later, an American Airlines jet crossed the runway at John F. Kennedy International Airport just as a Delta Air Lines plane was accelerating for takeoff. The two aircraft nearly collided.

Then in February, a FedEx cargo jet at the Austin, Texas, airport missed crashing into a Southwest Airlines airliner by a mere 100 feet.

The same month, an American Airlines Airbus A321 was being towed out of the gate at Los Angeles International Airport and smashed into a bus carrying passengers between terminals, injuring five.

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The Federal Aviation Administration in January canceled all flight departures from the United States for two hours due a computer safety system collapse. {snip}

Something has gone terribly wrong.

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If not corrected, these near-death airline experiences and the near-collapse of the US commercial aviation system presage catastrophes to come.

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America’s security, safety, prosperity and postmodern lifestyles are not our birthright. They are the dividends of centuries of prior hard work, unfettered freedom of speech, disinterested research and a meritocracy.

Tamper with any of that and the system begins to fall apart.

The United States will then resemble the miasma we see in most of the world abroad where ideology suppresses free inquiry, political correctness warps research and tribalism trumps meritocracy.

Many of the major airlines have established racial and gender quotas for government pilot training programs. United Airlines has set quotas to ensure half of its trainees will be minorities or women. Since 2013, the FAA has been lowering standards for air traffic control qualifications to achieve de facto race and gender quotas.

In testimony before Congress, our top military brass has bragged not of their reduction in standards for enlistment, but of their “diversity” hiring, as they purportedly ferret out “white supremacy” and “white rage.”

In sum, our government is playing with our lives as it prefers diversity, equity and inclusion over ensuring the best-qualified employees are hired on the basis of racially and gender-blind competitive tests and experience.

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