pba_target - this is a really difficult issue and there is no easy answer, but I personally am not into quotas. I now am a senior training captain flying Airbuses (long story, but that's for another day). We have all the same arguments about recruitment. My company wanted to get a higher percentage of women (industry average is 5% - we wanted to raise that to 12%). Why not 50/50 you may ask? The answer is that there are not enough women sufficiently interested in flying and who have the aptitude to do that. Before you all jump down my throat, this is a way harder problem to deal with than you may imagine. Our female pilots are great - no issues whatsoever with that. There were, however, way less of them available to recruit than of their male equivalents. Why? There are a whole host of reasons and the same would apply to pilots from black/Caribbean backgrounds - these groups of people (particularly young men interestingly) often just do not get to the point that they can apply. The reasons really are nothing to do with flying but rather to do with culture. Many young black men fall out the education system way earlier than their female equivalents. There are a whole host of reasons - single parent families, peer pressure to join gangs, lack of father figures (way more likely to be from single parent homes) etc. With women, I think probably more men naturally want to do the job, but also many women are not made aware of these opportunities in childhood when so many ambitions are formed. These are generalisations, but if these folks were there to recruit we would have gobbled them up - they just do not get to that stage. Also, many women do not want to work weird hours due to family commitments (women are way more likely to be the main carer for children than men are). Sadly, despite having a lot of women pilots now, we only have a handful of female training captains. Again, that is to do with women being off having children at the critical times of life when people are racing up the career ladder. I used to knock all this stuff and felt women should just stop whinging and just 'be in it to win it' - that was very much the attitude when I was in the RAF! I am ashamed of that attitude now, as I now recognise with a dwindling population we must facilitate women being able to have careers and have children - we need the next generation.
Regarding some part of the population being better at flying, we are not really talking differences between black people and white people, but educated people are more likely to succeed at it than those who are not. For the reasons above, some demographic groups simply never get to the stage where they reach higher education in large numbers and therefore form part of the future flying gene pool. The reasons for this are largely societal and are very difficult to tackle. Nonetheless, the answer cannot be to lower standards of recruitment to accommodate that, but to rather increase educational standards to get these 'forgotten' groups available for selection. That is way easier said than done, frankly.