Fox News host Tucker Carlson said United Airlines’ new diversity initiative would eventually kill people.
United – the only major US airline with its own flying school, United Aviate Academy – announced on Tuesday its plan to train 5,000 new pilots by 2030. The airline wants at least half of the pilots to be women and coloreds.
Scott Kirby, CEO of United, explained in an interview with CBS that his company wants to increase the diversity among its pilots because only 7 percent of the pilots in the airline are female and only 13 percent are not white.
On Wednesday’s delivery of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson said, “Security is no longer the airline’s most important issue – it’s identity politics.”
“The way people look there is totally irrelevant. How they perform is all you care about. Once you forget about it, planes tend to crash … If you hire based on irrelevant criteria, it will hire people. eventually kill, and it will, ‘he said. “We really have to fight for the color-blind meritocracy. I mean, our lives depend on meritocracy. “
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Carlson calls United’s initiative ” a combination of a hyper-aggressive corporate human division and a left-wing political action committee … big on moral pronouncements and compulsory social engineering. ‘
In a statement issued on Twitter, United announced: “All the highly qualified candidates we accept into the academy, regardless of race or gender, will meet the standards we have set for admission.”
Carlson, however, said the company was lying.
“We know they’re lying and you know it too,” he said, “because in the airline industry there is only one standard that matters, and that’s not race, and that’s not gender. It’s ability. ‘
In the U.S., 93.7 percent of professional pilots are white and 92.5 percent are men, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Romello Walters – a social media manager for Fly for the Culture, an organization that focuses on the diversification of the air force – told CNN that many toddlers in the city are not exposed to the aviation industry in their schools or communities. . Many also do not have the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to attend a flying academy and become a licensed pilot.
United said it would find applicants through a partnership with the Organization of Black Aviation Professionals, Sisters of the Skies, the Latino Pilots Association and the Professional Asian Pilots Association.
According to Shannon McLoughlin Morrison, assistant director of academia and program assessment at Ohio State University, the aviation industry can help avoid a looming shortage of pilots.
In an article she wrote about the lack of airline diversity, she reported that black and female pilots cite a lack of mentors, access to industry, resources and ‘people like you’ as barriers to entry to and from stay in the aviation industry.
Newsweek contact Fox News for comment.