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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

I assume it's not so much that, and more that it's another industry with a sub-optimal diversity record.

Geez, you seem to have a hard-on for this "more diversity!" issue.

Does it matter much for piloting? It's quite a mechanical job. I'd argue diversity matters more if you have a team of movie writers (how many movies have terrible female/minority characters because of the diversity problems?) or UX designers, but I don't think your race or gender matters much when piloting a plane...

Of course there is probably currently an excess of white male pilots, but that seems cultural and a socio-economic problem, if you fix the culture (e.g. if little girls also get asked equally as often as little boys if they'd like to be a pilot (instead of a nurse; or if the same percentage of black folks can afford pilot school as white folks), shouldn't this problem fix itself?

Personally I'd cheer on a pilot scholarship for disadvantaged groups, because it'd be nice to see them having some sort of advantage in reaching their dreams after hundreds of years of disadvantages, but I don't think having more black or female pilots would change the job, since, as I said, it's quite a mechanical job. Whereas having a woman or minority in a movie writing crew would probably make a better story due to a more diverse perspective.

These sorts of scholarships increasingly do exist, and I’m confused that you both acknowledge the problem and insult me for raising it. I also think it’s unbelievably patronising if you think the only benefit of diversity is better movie scripts. I support equal rights for mediocre scriptwriters too.

You seem keen on finding the ways people are insulting you. Those 2 examples aren't great, but I don't mean I only care about those fields.

Different voices in the boardroom? I'd say a good thing. Different voices in the cockpit? What the hell difference is that going to make, will the plane fly better due to diversity? The pilots are presumably trained to fly the planes as optimally as they can, and their gender or race shouldn't make a difference to the way they operate these machines...

Diversity is as much about opportunity as it is the economic output at the end. If the most profitable company in the world refused to hire women or black people, we’d still know that was wrong, I hope. But also in this case we almost certainly are promoting mediocre talent, who merely have access to the funds to train. Industry bodies themselves have warned of this, I’m not actually on some one man crusade about it. Believe it or not (despite spending some time writing software for airports) I don’t really care much about aviation, I just thought this was an opportunity for us all to uncover some implicit biases we might be walking round with. But alas, there is now lots of testosterone flying around and it seems unproductive.

I appreciate the downvotes, but there is a reason that most people in this job (that costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds to train for) sound reassuringly like a middle class man. I am not trying to make anyone feel bad for noticing the pattern, and certainly not for enjoying planes or computer games, but given that the UK government, industry groups like IATA, and several airlines all admit the issue, let's all take a deep breath.

A wide diversity of humans can and have learned to speak the pilot/ATC dialect and cadence; and, English is the generally accepted lingua franca for flight.

I am not sure how class enters the equation, although it seems to me likely that travelers would prefer to hear neither George Plimpton nor an East-End eelmonger over the intercom.

There are probably thousands of people who would be better pilots than the current average, who have no hope of ever qualifying because of either the cost, or the traditional hiring/training patterns of airlines. Maybe that doesn't bother you as a passenger, but it does seem to bother the airlines themselves, who keep introducing programs to address the issue which everyone here clearly knows better than them about.

Because all the pilots on Ethiopian Air are British middle class white people, right?

My point isn’t that planes are racist, as I suspect you know. All I’m saying is the reason most pilots on UK airlines sound the same is because they are the same. Whenever there’s an occupation where we might have a clear cut image of what those people look or sound like (lawyers, doctors, journalists) that’s some small indication that there’s probably a diversity issue at play. You can argue it doesn’t matter, and look, I even said “sub-optimal” up there, I wasn’t trying to call anyone evil. And while race and gender are issues I was also just as much thinking about working class kids’ access to these career paths because of the enormous debts they might have to run up. I share this viewpoint with such radical leftist organisations as the British Airline Pilots’ Association.

I don't know about the UK, but in the USA, many pilots come from the military.

In the USA, if you want to learn to fly for free, rather than with "enormous debts", it's simple.

All you do is go thru the US Air Force Academy. They take black, white, male, female. They will train you for "free". Yes it requires a service commitment but it's by-and-large a meritocracy.

In the USA you're not entitled to pilot training merely for the sake of "diversity". Pay your dues, earn your way.

I had a cousin who did it. He flew jets for the US Air Force for years. He then became a commercial pilot.

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