Re:Airbus pilot tries Microsoft Flight Simulator [video]
by thom on Monday August 24, 2020 @04:22AM
(#24258500)
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.
Re:Airbus pilot tries Microsoft Flight Simulator [video]
by netsharc on Monday August 24, 2020 @07:52AM
(#24259741)
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...
Re:Airbus pilot tries Microsoft Flight Simulator [video]
by thom on Monday August 24, 2020 @10:56AM
(#24261275)
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.
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.