The Friendly Skies

Officials at United Airlines have announced they will enforce a quota to make at least half of the five thousand pilots they plan to hire in the next few years be women or non-white men. Since this was a public announcement, one can assume it was done for reasons of marketing, but one has to wonder what sort of marketing. Different customers may want different things from an airline, but  it is likely that almost all of them would want the flights to be safe, and the flight crews to be competent. Indeed if asked, customers probably would say they would like an airline to have the most competent pilots it can get. 

Yet the people at United are saying explicitly that that is not what they plan to be providing. If a company is hiring 5000 people from a large pool of possible candidates who meet some set of minimum requirements and selects 2500 of them based on some characteristic not related to or corelated with competence, only by rare coincidence will all those 2500 people be among the 5000 most competent of the candidates. That is not an opinion but rather a simple mathematical fact. 

Probably as a result of criticism, the officials have said that every new pilot will have to meet the company’s standards, but that is nearly meaningless in this context. It in no way changes the fact that the selections will be made based on things other than maximum competence. (And in practice it is common for outfits with quotas to meet to adjust their standards to be able to meet them.)

There is nothing preventing women or non-white men from becoming pilots now. Many have. The opportunities are there for people who are good enough, and plenty of women and non-white men are.  It is interesting that the bosses at United do not seem to think so.  It is also interesting to wonder how customers will feel about knowing United’s pilots will be picked for some things other than being able to fly the plane well. They may feel they are not being treated in the friendliest of ways.