Caused by DEI hires? Vaxxidents? Sabotage? Does the Gov't want to take care of us? Or does the Gov't want to kill us, scare us, and ground us, indefinitely, as non-traveling serfs?
Thank you for saying this out loud. Obviously if the phase out of travel for serfs is not falling into line due to mass die offs then it's time to put a little fear in everybody of travel. What better way than a lot of airline incidents and accidents?
I retired from a major airline three years ago after 25 years there; before that I flew for 5 years in what was then called a commuter airline. I'm also a woman, the only one in my 1996 new-hire class of 20, and had more flight time (>6,000 hours) than all but one pilot in my class. Over the years I flew with several female captains and with two exceptions they were as good as or better than the men with whom I flew. One of those female captains is the best pilot I've ever flown with, period. Even the two exceptions weren't as bad as some of the men, several of whom were so appalling that they were eventually asked to remove themselves from company property. Of those men, two were white and one was black.
My company would have loved to hire more women, but it didn't lower standards to do it and consequently women were never more than about 5-8% of the pilot group. At no time did the company relax operational or maintenance standards in ways that could affect safety, and despite the way the flight schedules cut into safety margins, the training center itself took safety, standardization, and procedures very seriously. Last week I asked a captain friend who's still resisting retirement whether things are going to the dogs because of DIE policies, and he reports anecdotally that none of the recent hires he flies with have been problematic.
Things fall off airplanes all the time. They blow tires all the time. Captains steer into the grass all the time. Crews make mistakes all the time, and sometimes the mistakes result in broken FARs. You just don't hear about it all the time, so the assumption is that nothing ever goes wrong. These days accidents rarely happen, but incident-level events happen all. the. time. Right now people are focused on the DIE and ESG ideas, which are admittedly dangerous and stupid. But the things reported in the news lately are *usual.* They're undesirable, but they're usual, even within a single airline. In fact, given the number of aircraft in United's fleet, five events in a week is low--and I guarantee there were a lot more that didn't make the news.
Take a look at Aviation Safety Network's website for incidents and accidents: There are a lot of incidents (vs. accidents) for major US airlines. From their report, the United 737 at IAH was turning from the runway to the taxiway and over-shot the taxiway with the left main gear. It was going 20 knots (23 mph), which is fast for that 90º turn, and the gear likely got stuck in the soft ground and that caused the collapse. From the photos the taxiway and runway were wet, and the weather at the time was 1.5 miles in mist. Airplanes skid easily on wet surfaces during turns; if the 20 knots is accurate then he slid off the taxiway. Was the captain a DIE hire? It's unlikely, since it takes years to get to the left seat. Maybe he's ex-military. Those guys commonly suck for years because ex-military pilots are often relatively low time.
There's almost no information available about the "erupts in flames" 737 except that the engine surged. It might not even have been shut down; the procedure for a compressor stall is to reduce power, not shut down the engine. And flames shooting out the back of the engine don't necessarily mean that the engine itself was on fire. In that case it probably meant the engine ate something; bubble wrap was mentioned in a few articles I saw. A tire fell off? My company once had a 747 drop a main wheel on a Churchill Downs barn. As for the hydraulic issue, transport category aircraft have three separate and nearly-equal hydraulic systems, any one of which can operate the flight controls and all or most of the gear and brakes. And journalists notoriously get nearly everything about aviation wrong: A diversion and precautionary landing for a hydraulic issue that the crew and company didn't want to deal with in Mexico (using contract maintenance and introducing a language barrier), isn't the same thing as an "emergency" for a hydraulic failure. And for crews, it's not a hydraulic emergency until you're down to just one of the three systems. The 737 Max door plug incident is now a criminal investigation that it would be very hard to link to DIE policies, since related issues at Boeing have existed since at least the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes.
In short, the answer to the survey is "none of the above." It's airline SOP.
PILOTS DIED - Air Canada (55 yo Anand Acharya), Delta (58 yo Geoffrey Brock) and Delta (41 yo Michael O'Leary) - three young pilots have died suddenly in past 3 weeks
Thank you for saying this out loud. Obviously if the phase out of travel for serfs is not falling into line due to mass die offs then it's time to put a little fear in everybody of travel. What better way than a lot of airline incidents and accidents?
I retired from a major airline three years ago after 25 years there; before that I flew for 5 years in what was then called a commuter airline. I'm also a woman, the only one in my 1996 new-hire class of 20, and had more flight time (>6,000 hours) than all but one pilot in my class. Over the years I flew with several female captains and with two exceptions they were as good as or better than the men with whom I flew. One of those female captains is the best pilot I've ever flown with, period. Even the two exceptions weren't as bad as some of the men, several of whom were so appalling that they were eventually asked to remove themselves from company property. Of those men, two were white and one was black.
My company would have loved to hire more women, but it didn't lower standards to do it and consequently women were never more than about 5-8% of the pilot group. At no time did the company relax operational or maintenance standards in ways that could affect safety, and despite the way the flight schedules cut into safety margins, the training center itself took safety, standardization, and procedures very seriously. Last week I asked a captain friend who's still resisting retirement whether things are going to the dogs because of DIE policies, and he reports anecdotally that none of the recent hires he flies with have been problematic.
Things fall off airplanes all the time. They blow tires all the time. Captains steer into the grass all the time. Crews make mistakes all the time, and sometimes the mistakes result in broken FARs. You just don't hear about it all the time, so the assumption is that nothing ever goes wrong. These days accidents rarely happen, but incident-level events happen all. the. time. Right now people are focused on the DIE and ESG ideas, which are admittedly dangerous and stupid. But the things reported in the news lately are *usual.* They're undesirable, but they're usual, even within a single airline. In fact, given the number of aircraft in United's fleet, five events in a week is low--and I guarantee there were a lot more that didn't make the news.
Take a look at Aviation Safety Network's website for incidents and accidents: There are a lot of incidents (vs. accidents) for major US airlines. From their report, the United 737 at IAH was turning from the runway to the taxiway and over-shot the taxiway with the left main gear. It was going 20 knots (23 mph), which is fast for that 90º turn, and the gear likely got stuck in the soft ground and that caused the collapse. From the photos the taxiway and runway were wet, and the weather at the time was 1.5 miles in mist. Airplanes skid easily on wet surfaces during turns; if the 20 knots is accurate then he slid off the taxiway. Was the captain a DIE hire? It's unlikely, since it takes years to get to the left seat. Maybe he's ex-military. Those guys commonly suck for years because ex-military pilots are often relatively low time.
There's almost no information available about the "erupts in flames" 737 except that the engine surged. It might not even have been shut down; the procedure for a compressor stall is to reduce power, not shut down the engine. And flames shooting out the back of the engine don't necessarily mean that the engine itself was on fire. In that case it probably meant the engine ate something; bubble wrap was mentioned in a few articles I saw. A tire fell off? My company once had a 747 drop a main wheel on a Churchill Downs barn. As for the hydraulic issue, transport category aircraft have three separate and nearly-equal hydraulic systems, any one of which can operate the flight controls and all or most of the gear and brakes. And journalists notoriously get nearly everything about aviation wrong: A diversion and precautionary landing for a hydraulic issue that the crew and company didn't want to deal with in Mexico (using contract maintenance and introducing a language barrier), isn't the same thing as an "emergency" for a hydraulic failure. And for crews, it's not a hydraulic emergency until you're down to just one of the three systems. The 737 Max door plug incident is now a criminal investigation that it would be very hard to link to DIE policies, since related issues at Boeing have existed since at least the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes.
In short, the answer to the survey is "none of the above." It's airline SOP.
Very astute observation. Thank you for your perspective and insight. If they are trying to scare us off from flying they are doing a good job
PILOTS DIED - Air Canada (55 yo Anand Acharya), Delta (58 yo Geoffrey Brock) and Delta (41 yo Michael O'Leary) - three young pilots have died suddenly in past 3 weeks
https://makismd.substack.com/p/pilots-died-air-canada-55-yo-anand?