AirBubba: What descriptive language-to "paraphrase" it.... I never found the nerve to state that on Pprune.
I was reluctant to explain what several United pilots had told me.
They had no hang-ups with various 'types' of new-hires, whether their ethnic desription or whether a man or a woman. But with so little experience, and despite so much Extra IOE time required after the sims, it would not have bothered people if most new-hires had somehow made the transition from FE to pilot, i.e. to 737 FO.. (well...at least to the easier job of 727 FO etc). By the way, if these young applicants with almost no experience had decided to work their way up the experience ladder in the normal way, is it not possible that many more of them would have been hired in the normal manner and succesfully transitioned to a United pilot seat, instead of remaining as Flight Engineer?
Had so few young people in these other minority categories wanted, years earlier, to actually become pilots, but years later during this United process, were many then somehow persuaded to try a career which previously had no real attraction for them, in order to meet the murky legalistic agendas of various groups?
The company filled lots of quotas, and I feel sorry for the pilots who had far too little background to adapt to fast, two-person c0ckp1ts and many kinds of changing weather, airport scenarios etc. BUT-their employer United met ITS apparent court-orderd obligations.
Never mind very sudden system malfunctions with little time to decide WHO flies, then WHO identifies which of similarly-titled abnormal procedures to read and somehow do, as they descend into the mountains. The CIVET Arrival at LAX (maybe controller ignorance and/ or lack of jumkpseat observation into that cesspool) bugged the heck out of me after many years of flying, just three runway changes on an FMC with speedbrakes the whole way down {757...}).
Those pilots were sometimes woefully unprepared while at the same time United met some outside private agenda. In a similar realm, this reminds me of the amazingly frank comments of a feminist attorney on the 5:30 NBC new years ago, when she admitted to a reporter that whether young overweight female cadet 'S. F.' made it years ago thru the Citadel military school was not the point.
She stated that the goal was "to break down a male tradition", or "barrier", or almost identical words to that effect. It must have humiliated the young, out of shape Miss S.F. But so what? The ever-so-smug, legalistic, always abrasive (their true goal and joy in life
...) politicized feminist goal was achieved.
So what was accomplished? A young lady was used, exploited, squeezed like a plump lemon, by these outside, "interested" parties, who proved to be indifferent to her actual success, when their true motivations were exposed to the harsh light of day. This film clip is quite true.
Does this sort of callous exploitation of naive young people in the name of a purportedly "noble agenda" apply to aviation?