“What Kinda pilots you got?”
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mky_F8c9tKc (1 minute)

This is a video of a United Airlines pilot walking onto the jet she was going to fly, grabbing the microphone at the front of the passenger compartment and asking the passengers if they wanted to take a vote. Should they take off now or wait 10 minutes for her to change into her cute uniform. Then she started talking about her divorce. When she started talking politics one passenger stood up, grabbed his carry-on luggage and exited the plane saying “You’re scaring me”.

“RoamingRN @roaming_rn
OMG! What is going on with the commercial aviation industry?
Female pilot in plain clothes has complete meltdown pre- flight and rants at passengers.
Would you fly with her as the captain?”
5:24 AM · Apr 8, 2024
https://twitter.com/i/status/1777311562719449562
(1 minute)

What scares me is only 20 passengers realized this pilot was either on drugs or having a psychological break and exited the plane. We need to be situationally aware.

I read an interesting conspiracy theory the other day that our environment loving Ruling Elites want us plebs to fly less and are destroying the airline industry to do it.

*sigh* [Maybe my fingers are fatter than I’m willing to admit.] Did I write that out loud?

That sounds good, when said really fast, and that is the method the FAA has used for a century.

However (you knew that was coming), around 1980, the U.S. airlines realized that with the number of flights increasing and the rate of airline crashes, they would soon have the problem of a major airline crash every week, and that would frighten passengers. The FAA’s method was not good enough.

The airlines worked very hard to solve not just incremental problems as they came up but the systemic problems that allowed for errors in the first place. November of 2001 was the last time that a major U.S. airliner crashed, and only one major U.S. airline passenger fatality has occurred since. This emphasis on error prevention is another thing that improves performance and is an even more tubist program for increasing safety.

“That being said, it is equally appalling that the author then leaps to low resolution thinking by blaming DEI for the United and American maintenance problems without a scintilla of evidence that the people who made the mistakes were unqualified DEI hires.”

There is evidence of where the problem may lie. We have the data point that the airlines changed hiring and promotion methods since their very successful error prevention program succeeded. That is a change, and it is evidence. We have the data point that the management that flew one aircraft manufacturer into the ground is now aiming the other — the one-time more successful — manufacturer into the ground, training new generations how to not run a successful company. That is a change, and it is evidence.

New hires don’t have to be unqualified, they only have to be lesser qualified. If they feel an entitlement, which these kinds of programs have a tendency to generate, then they may not feel a need to be the best worker, as Jester Naybor described. Quality work comes from people who believe in doing their best and are rewarded for it. Mediocre work comes from people who feel otherwise. In my years as an engineer, I have worked with technicians who were eager to do their best, and I worked with technicians who found good hiding places. I want the former type working on the planes that I fly on. The latter person is liable to be the one who makes an error.

Steven Mays: DEI is a symptom that suggests all the quality control programs you describe have gone off the rails. If you are willing to hire people simply based on skin color or sex, it means you are no longer consider it important to set intelligent standards anywhere in your company.

That being said, it is equally appalling that the author then leaps to low resolution thinking by blaming DEI for the United and American maintenance problems without a scintilla of evidence that the people who made the mistakes were unqualified DEI hires. Don’t misunderstand. I think DEI hiring is stupid. But that doesn’t prove that the DEI programs there are responsible for it any more than blaming Boeing for United and American failures.

I spent a career looking at failure data and probabilities of failures in the nuclear industry and rarely found any “one size fits all” causes. The only thing that improves performance is a robust program of identifying failure, examining their causes, and implementing changes to processes to limit the probability of repetition. In the nuclear sector this was known as the comprehensive program called CAP (corrective action program) which required identification, analysis, and evaluation of actions to mitigate the failure as well as testing to ensure the actions were appropriate.

It would be just as easy to blame the Boeing merger with McDonald-Douglas and subsequent “infestation” of MD managers into the Boeing culture for bringing the leaders that caused MD to fail into the Boeing family and diminishing their culture. This too, might have some truth to it, but absent real data and real analysis is just as guilty of low resolution thinking that the author rightly criticized to start.

Sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander.

We fooled ourselves into thinking that elite “experts” and “leaders” can solve practically EVERY problem, and that we don’t have to keep making the effort to deal with those problems at the level of our own lives because we are not sufficiently “qualified” to solve them.

The latter has led ordinary people to believe that they have the right to work in the same job, the same do-the-minimum way, in the same place for a lifetime and have others assure their prosperity … even if the assurance smacks of Underpants Gnome thinking., and they are likely to end up unemployed when some competitor does more than the minimum.

That is how grocery clerks, factory workers, and cubicle dwellers make themselves Part of the Problem … then turn around and decry why their jobs left them, and why they didn’t share in the prosperity derived from free-market economics … never realizing that they expected others to hand them prosperity on a silver platter, for just showing up.

I was a line maintenance mechanic for 16 years in the airlines. I think many of these issues could be chalked up to training of flight crews and maintenance. staff, as well as their in house quality control.

J Fincannon: Fixed. Thank you.

There’s a reason why Scripture tells us in Philippians 4:8 – “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”

We become what we feed our heads, and we’ve been feeding our heads with garbage and poison.

We are in a cycle and a process.

From unions, who have their place, but tend to overreach. To businesses that become mired in “executive” guidance and leave behind their engineering foundation. To government that becomes rotten within that becomes authoritarian and comes to flip the script and sees itself as the owners of the people and not what emanates from the people.

That is the nature of things.

This is our system; this is our process.

What sets the U.S. apart as crazy as things have become?

Just one thing.

Boeing’s situation is emblematic of the decline of the dominance of US hi tech manufacturing.

Out-sourcing is a double edged sword and now the it’s the other edge doing the cutting.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=roger+mcguin+dreamland&atb=v154-1&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D2_KrlcLL9Xg

In the present case, it is the “dreamland” of DEI that would seem to be causing many of our problems, but most people still just want to
ignore reality, push the recline buttons down, and let dreamland come on.

https://genius.com/Roger-mcguinn-dreamland-lyrics

PS — for those with long memories, check out

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=partners+in+crime+by+roger+mcguin+song&t=ftsa&atb=v154-1&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DQn7BFYgggHM

Worse, they triggered an IG investigation when they attempted to submit an amended bid after the deadline, apparently after receiving inside information from then-associate administrator of NASA’s human spaceflight directorate Doug Loverro. (Loverro lost his job over it.)

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-tried-to-amend-lunar-lander-bid-after-guidance-from-nasa-official-raising-concerns-it-received-inside-information/

You might be correct, but the problem with such logic on Boeing’s part is that NASA now has other very viable options, the most competent and serious of which is SpaceX.

Boeing is a private company, but perhaps it has for too long been able to operate like a government agency with no competition.

As for the rest of Robert’s article, an axiom for hiring employees: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

“And I am not anti EV, not at all, the technology has its place and the aesthetics of most of the vehicles is beautiful. But it certainly is not the perfect solution that it is being proposed as being.”

https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/lithium-battery-fire-potential-not-an-april-fool-s-joke