re: Meet the dream team that made the plane door that just blew off in the middle of a flight

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Yeah. Scary stuff

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In December of 2022, a Boeing 777 operated by United Airlines took off from Hawaii in heavy rain. About a minute into the flight, the aircraft plummeted towards the ocean. It came just 750 feet from hitting the water at high-speed, which almost certainly would have killed all 280 people on board. In the end, the pilots saved the aircraft by a matter of seconds.

For more than two months, no one heard about this incident. It was as if it had never happened. By the time mainstream news reports began appearing in February, more than two months later, United assured the public that the FAA had been notified and that an investigation would be forthcoming.

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Late last year, we got something of an official answer. It turns out that, according to the NTSB, the captain called for the flaps to be retracted to the 5 degree setting, which is a normal setting for takeoff. But the first officer thought the captain had called for a 15 degree setting, so he selected that one. That misunderstanding caused a major problem because the plane was going far too fast for that flap setting.

To avoid damaging the plane, the captain started to slow the aircraft while he tried to diagnose the problem. Instead of realizing his mistake, the first officer suggested that maybe the instruments were malfunctioning. The two pilots continued to troubleshoot the problem, and in the process they became disoriented as the plane quickly lost altitude. The pilots’ confusion continued until the plane blared an alarm telling them they were about to die if they didn’t apply maximum power and pull up.

Incredibly, both pilots of that flight are still employed by United Airlines. They nearly killed everyone on board through their incompetence, but that’s not disqualifying apparently. Beyond some basic information about their flying experience, we still don’t know much about these two pilots. For example, we know that the first officer has a total of 5,300 hours of flying experience, which is respectable for his position. But at the time of the incident, he only had 120 hours in the Boeing 777. And according to a report by Tucker Carlson last year, which cited an anonymous source at United shortly after this near-catastrophe took place, this first officer was a “new hire” at the airline. Could that lack of experience have played a role? And more to the point, could either of the pilot’s identity have played a role in their hiring — or the airline’s refusal to terminate them after they almost steered a passenger jet into the ocean?

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So a couple of years ago, United decided that 50% of its new pilot recruits are going to be women or people of color. They’re promoting flight attendants to make that happen. Later on in that Vice documentary, it’s suggested that the point of this initiative is to alleviate the pilot shortage.

How’s that going? A few days ago, the conservative commentator Ashley St. Clair posed a few questions to United, based on some information she had received. Here’s what she wrote: “On July 29, a United plane was nearly totaled after a hard landing. Who was flying that aircraft? Was the co-pilot a former flight attendant who was FIRED and then rehired through United’s DEI program despite being on a list to not return to United? Am I correct that this individual failed multiple trainings including simulator training? Am I also correct that United has covered up this DEI disaster and many others?”

United didn’t reply, which you may have noticed is something of a pattern. No one thinks we deserve to know anything about what’s going on in the cockpits of the planes that we’re flying in. You’re just supposed to assume everything’s fine, and that the flight attendants are transforming into master pilots at United’s training academy.

But the more you look into the specifics of United’s diversity initiatives, the less solid that assumption seems to be. It turns out that United partners with several historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, as a way of recruiting pilots. One of the popular statistics-focused accounts on X, which uses the name i/o, noticed that two of the schools that United has decided to team up with — Delaware State and Elizabeth City State University — are, “in the bottom 2% of all undergraduate institutions in the United States.” Elizabeth State, the account noted, “had the distinction in the 1980s of being the only university in which the average SAT math score was lower than that score which would have been produced if a person had guessed ‘B’ on all the multiple choice questions on the test.”

That’s a pretty sobering statistic, especially if you plan on flying United anytime soon. To be fair to United, they don’t just recruit from HBCUs with no standards. As a writer who goes by the pseudonym Peachy Keenan found, United also recruits from an organization called “Sisters of the Skies.” Yes, this is an organization that sends pilots to United Airlines, and their acronym is literally “S.O.S.” At least you can rest assured that they have a sense of humor at United, as your plane is plummeting to the ground. And it gets better

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