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 New York City’s 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 just 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.
These near and actual accidents come amid a general landscape of aviation chaos.
After Christmas, Southwest Airlines simply canceled 71 percent of its flights. It blamed staff shortages due to storms. The airline seemed incapable of ensuring enough of their pilots, attendants, crews, and airport staff could get to work.
The Federal Aviation Administration in January canceled all flight departures from the United States for two hours due a computer safety system collapse. Thousands of additional flights were canceled, many for over 24 hours.
Something has gone terribly wrong.
Either the Department of Transportation and its Secretary Pete Buttigieg, or the head of the FAA, or the quality of either ground crews, pilots, or air traffic controllers – or all combined – are putting American travelers at mortal risk.
If not corrected, these near-death airline experiences and the near collapse of the U.S. commercial aviation system presage catastrophes to come.
Similar problems are plaguing the U.S. military.
On July 21, 2021 the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley assured the country that “The Afghan security forces have the capacity and capabilities needed to fight and defend their country.”
Those forces utterly collapsed in a matter of hours less than a month later.
On the eve of the war in Ukraine, the Pentagon wrongly warned Congress that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours of a general Russian invasion.
This month, the Defense Department officials apparently allowed a series of surveillance balloons to enter U.S. airspace. President Joe Biden claims he was advised by the military not to shoot down a Chinese survival balloon craft as it crossed with impunity much of the United States.
In the aftermath, Pentagon spokespeople gave incomplete, mutually contradictory, and absurd explanations for these serial violations of U.S. airspace, most likely perpetrated by the Chinese communist government.
The Pentagon likewise disputes details of recruitment shortfalls. But the military brass concedes that many branches of the military are still between a third to a quarter short of their recruitment goals – despite the military steadily lowering standards for enlistment. It denies that the new woke military culture has alienated future recruits, although polls suggest otherwise.
The same shortfall is true of U.S. weapon arsenals. Between cuts in the defense budget, poor procurement planning, incompetent administration, and massive arms shipments to Ukraine, the military suffers dangerously low inventories of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, artillery shells, rockets, missiles, and mines.
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 quotes 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.
Keep it up, and there are going to be a lot more Afghanistan-style surrenders, Chinese surveillance craft in our skies, and airline nightmares.
Or, are these all distractions from the death rate from convid injections?
Vaccidental deaths?
Rimshot! 🥁
(OK; that was a good one. 😵💫)
Distraction from Covid failures, investigations of the Biden Mafioso, the FBi, CIA, Etc.
Add in the balloon fiasco, Palestine, Ohio….and more..
If I am correct, when Gov. De””Whine{” and the incompetent APA gentleman drank water
from the tap while visiting a home in Palestine, Oho, did they state where the water came from?
I did not see/hear anything on this. Water from a well or a home filtering system perhaps?
i have the opposite opinion. You may even rage in response to me and the 10 others clicking thumbs up may as well.
While I abhor the bioweapon that killed so many around here starting in 2020 (pre vaccine) as well as the vaccines, mandates, lockdowns and masks,I suspect the “.deep state” is happy many people only seem to focus their ire on vaccines and not on the rest of what they are doing to us. Which is broad, deep, devious, complicated and harmful in so many ways other than vaccination.
I can’t disagree with you, but my personal experience is of friends and relatives being damaged by the vaccine and acquaintances dying from it, two this week and another who’s cancer has suddenly exploded around his body two weeks after it.
I think the people in government, the majority in powerful positions are homosexuals. A person who has a corrupted and perverted mind cannot make good decisions!
Obama filled the federal government with homosexuals. Obama knew he could control them because Obama is one of them.
The world is being deceived and led away from God after two thousand years of following God’s directions.
This is another sign of the coming end of world predicted by the Bible..
Diversity in all areas of life is the antithesis of merit
But a meritocracy will still see ethnic diversity. The idea that no blacks or women will make the grade is racist.
Meanwhile, we continue to fish military aircraft out of the ocean because of unqualified diversity pilots – mostly women.
Maybe it is a plot to create a very racist idea that only white men are competent? If only affirmative action hires are used, everyone will be suspect.
Is there proof that most naval air accidents happen to women pilots?
Leftists are the bigoted, thuggish, lying, treasonous, self-aggrandizing, racist, pedophilic thieves of our lives, our liberties, our freedoms, our vote and our country.
Excellent, rock-solid analysis.
Diversity and Equality are the downfall of a nation as outlined in “Into The Cannibals Pot” describing the collapse of South Africa.
Say what you want, but this diversity BS has gotten to the point that I despise blacks. They are not only the biggest racist’s out there, but according to every testing measurement the most ignorant. Their culture breeds crime and welfare. Now, I have black friends. I don’t mean black friends in passing. I mean a few guys that have come to my home, gone to the gym together. etc. So, I feel bad saying that, and of course I wouldn’t express that to them. Although two of my black friends are conservatives and hate Democrats. So, they actually agree with me.
I also absolutely hate white liberals, maybe even more than liberal blacks. These are the virtue signaling idiots who’ve allowed this to happen slowly over decades. Of course, diversity only comes after these feeble minded whites already secured positions of authority and supervision for themselves and their families.
I’ve had managers and supervisors (black) who literally couldn’t speak proper English. And wrote a report the same way they spoke Ebonics.
I’m so disgusted with the way America has turned out.
My few black friends are westernkind, like me. They love this nation and are grateful, as I am, for its blessings. My black gynecologist helped me through the births of 5 children. He became a doctor before affirmative action and was simply the most talented and best in his field – adored by all his white patients and the catholic nuns who trusted him. His work screamed MERIT. All the labor and delivery nurses would go to no one else. His race was of no importance to me because I am westernkind.
Like you, I have come to hate the huge black subculture of screaming, ugly music, crime, entitlement and victimhood. Blacks who are westernkind (like Sowell, Thomas, etc.) do not lose their blackness, even though a huge cohort of their ethnic brethren accuses them not “being black”. The fact that there is so much anti-white hatred among blacks and criticism by blacks against their kind for “acting white” is damning.
Someone here coined a new word: postjudice. Good word.
Diversity is just liberal speak for anti white racial preference.
Yes. It is more than preference, though. It is just anti-white. It is hatred.
It’s not fun watching a country fall apart. It makes one want to weep. It also makes me think twice before getting on an airplane and asking to see the pilot before I do.
Race based hires instead of highest qualifications.
But we will all be equally inferior and equally miserable, comrade!
In fairness to Blacks, before the New Deal got ahold of them they had low divorce rates and were mostly solid citizens. The white liberals dumbed them down and broke up their homes and are now doing the same thing to the white race. That said, the Blacks have lower IQs. How much of that is racial and how much is due to lowering their educational standards is a question. In any case, lowering standards is the only way the can shoehorn low IQ minorities into these jobs. The only solution is meritocracy and real education for everyone, and not the dumbed down communist variety the globalist and international bankers favor.
The IQ thing is a fact, but it has been made too important. There are plenty of super smart people whose intelligence is wasted, black brown white red and yellow.
Character and natural aptitude are more important. We need to return to the dignity of work and recognize the fundamental importance of all labor – skilled and unskilled.
I have been reading the Old Grimm’s Fairy Tales. This one speaks to the point:
https://fairytalez.com/eves-various-children/
Ron, it was not the New Deal’s fault or democrat’s or anyone else’s fault.
Blacks are the agents of their own destruction. Their culture reinforces much of that destruction. None of it is the fault of anyone but blacks themselves. We must stop thinking of blacks as having no agency. It is the racism of low expectations.
It wasn’t really FDR’s New Deal in the 30’s but rather LBJ’s Great Society in the 60’s.
America needs meritocracy, not diversity, inclusion and equity. These are just weapons the leftists are using to destroy America so they can redesign and reconstitute America in the pattern of communist bloc countries. In the past, immigrants were expected to fend for themselves with the help of family members who were able to help or sometimes the aid of churches. There was some selection of who could immigrate to America based on merits and possible contribution to the country. Now the left uses immigration to further its own anti-democratic goals and incentivize illegal migration to increase it, and provide welfare and support as a bribe to buy votes from new migrants. All the talk about equity, diversity and inclusion is simply a smoke screen to conceal the basically dsetructive nature of their agenda. We see that in the self-serving behavior of leaders like Joe Biden and the Clintons, plus the political elites in Congress, including many Republicans as well as a large share of Democrats.
Equity=Communism. Diversity=Racism
Last night, after watching the section on the near airline disaster, the one where the diversity hire black pilot couldn’t figure out how to get out of the dive, I told my wife we are never getting on a plane again.
I know many folks at church who routinely fly back and forth to the midwest to visit family. I figure we will lose one of those families at some point, either coming or going.
These accidents and near misses will result in more than one tragedy.
Oh yeah, don’t hire a black doctor newly out of med school. Don’t hire a black lawyer newly out of law school..
Affirmative action is a plague. We see it daily in the Biden administration.
What did you watch? I would like to see it.
How is the spy balloon most likely from China? They said it was theirs and were mad that it was shot down. Is there some other kind of evidence you were looking for before you can be sure?