No, they could not, not without a wholesale reworking of the entire FAA. Pilots are trained and certified on individual airplanes; even highly experienced pilots need retraining in order to safely fly a new aircraft. Shoving a bunch of military pilots into 737s is both highly illegal, and would probably result in some plane crashes.
I can’t speak to any material differences between the P-8 and the civilian 737, but legally this still seems problematic. The DoD isn’t required to type certify their aircraft, and it doesn’t look like the P-8 or the C-40 (also a 737) are type certified as a 737, which means their pilots probably can’t legally fly a 737 civilian model. I could be wrong though, the FAA’s website is hard to navigate.
This isn't just a case of paperwork, either. A pilot can't safely operate a completely different type without training. Even if you expedite it, it's likely that resolving the industrial action will take less time.
Just curious, is this just hyperbole or do you have an actual example?
ETA: I mean the "older than humankind itself" part. Like what does that mean in this context?
Then you fight him.
Yeah just have them switch to a completely different type of aircraft without getting trained or checked out at all, this will definitely fix the problem in short order.
I don’t disagree it’s your right to decline a vaccine, but it’s also your employer’s right to mandate it and terminate you if you decline it. I’m unsure why these are controversial points or are heated conversations; this is the natural conclusion of everyone exercising their rights. This isn’t even novel; vaccine requirements have been standard for some time (hepatitis, measles, etc) in schools and workplaces.
I ask because I am genuinely curious as someone willingly vaccinated.
You didn't address AndrewBissell's point. As others have pointed out, there just aren't enough military pilots who are rated today to fly even a small fraction of Southwest's fleet. Further, assigning a large number of active-duty aviators to gain certification to fly 737s would massively disrupt the US's military posture. This is fact, no matter how "creative" the Biden administration may try to be. (And don't even try to bring up federalizing ANG/Reserve pilots. Most of them are already pilots at other airlines!)
I don't believe any significant number of employers genuinely want to terminate employees who don't have it. They are being coerced into doing it by the Biden administration, which has actively proclaimed its desire and intention to do just that. This isn't the natural conclusion of free individuals exercising their rights, this is top-down authoritarianism.
If "public support is robust", then why are they actively suppressing news about the cause of this issue? Regardless of what you or I think, it sure seems like whoever is doing these things thinks that we're a hair's breadth away from large-scale rebellion and they don't dare let anyone know why this action was really done or how successful it has been.
> so far those actions have been adjudicated as lawful
This feels more like a dismissive dunk than an attempt at understanding, compassion, or logical argument. It says, we have the power to force you to do it, nobody cares what you think, so shut up and do as you're told or we're going to smash you and nobody will care. The only "rights" being exercised here are the self-proclaimed "rights" of the elite to jam any policy they want down everyone's throat and destroy them using aggressive force if they object or resist.
I am also willingly vaccinated. But I see that these vaccines are clearly much less effective than we were told and have more significant side-effects than anyone is willing to admit. I am against mandating them for anyone who doesn't decide they want one without coercion, and I am becoming increasingly appalled at how many of my fellow citizens are embracing authoritarian measures.
If the argument is “mandates are wrong”, we’ve had them for over 150 years. If the argument is it’s not safe, its FDA approved and has been administered over a billion times.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/vaccine-mandates-in-s...
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/guides-pubs/downlo...
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...
EDIT: @LurkingPenguin: While this is a good point, the data shows that vaccination protects against an intense infection resulting in the need of ICU and ventilation care (protection having been infected by COVID and recovering from previously does not).
For example, individuals who have had a laboratory-confirmed measles infection or can otherwise prove immunity do not need to be vaccinated against measles according to the CDC[1].
Over 44 million Americans have already had a laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and the science indicates that people who have recovered from infection have significant protection not inferior and perhaps superior to vaccine-based immunity[2].
The vast majority of people who have had a laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection in the US can prove it as easily as people who have been vaccinated can prove they were vaccinated.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/faqs.html
[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/09/covid-origins-gain-of-fu...
Their analysis is incredibly shallow, for example comparing Portugal or Iceland (high vaccination rate, mostly open, lots of COVID cases) to Vietnam (low vaccination rate, completely locked down at the time the analysis was done, not many COVID cases). You can't make any inference about the vaccine / caseload relationship when you ignore the fact that one country is completely open and the other had such a strict lockdown that people were struggling to get food.
A discussion published in the European Journal of Epidemiology. It doesn't just look at those two countries; its statistical analysis covers 68 countries and 2947 US counties. You don't think that if the vaccine were effective at preventing spread, there should be at least some evidence of this effect when comparing vaccination rate and spread across different regions?
Even in a largely vaccinated population, if you do widespread community testing you will find a lot of asymptomatic cases. If you don't do widespread community testing you won't. So you can have wildly different caseloads in two highly-vaccinated populations, yet no meaningful medical difference in the outcomes (since, as we know, vaccination is an effective prevention against serious illness and death).
When I look at the pfizer 6 month study (not peer reviewed) I do not see that.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v...
When I look at Scotlands data I do not see that.
https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/9475/21-09-29-covid1...
Same with the UK.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Same with Israel
https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general
Every dataset I look says the opposite so I would love to see the peer reviewed study that takes into account all potential confounding factors that led you to your conclusion.
Could you please share a meaningful study that comes to this conclusion and does not ignore all potential confounding factors? (I don't mean it in a confrontational way; I'm genuinely curious since I only managed to find heavily confounded data)
The results of the other article I linked, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7, showing that vaccination does not reduce viral load, supports this notion.
Can you provide some references regarding the side effect profiles of these vaccines being any worse than a typical vaccine? Genuinely interested, as from casual observation it doesn't seem to be the case.
The associated talk is here: https://rumble.com/vnbv86-winning-the-war-against-therapeuti...
VAERS data is public. They even provide machine-parsable format.
> “Many of these types of claims that we hear are actually a misrepresentation of the VAERS data,” Vasudevan said.
> The pace of reporting has picked up: In North Carolina alone, roughly 70,000 reports have come in related to the COVID vaccines — more than triple the total back in May, when CBS 17 explained what the database does — and does not — tell you.
> “It is reasonable to expect that reports on VAERS increase whenever there is a new vaccine on the market,” Vasudevan said. “And that’s definitely what we are seeing with COVID.”
> What the system makes perfectly clear: It does not establish a cause-and-effect relationship between any vaccine and those side effects. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explicitly says the reports “may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information.”
> Among the reported side effects of the COVID vaccines in North Carolina: Yawning, fractures, a foot deformity, and wisdom tooth removal.
> She estimates that 85 percent of the reports on VAERS are “either completely unrelated to vaccinations, or about events that pose little to no concern.”
https://www.cbs17.com/community/health/coronavirus/fact-chec...
And I agree, the USA should probably have better reporting systems!
Some other countries do, some of them have much better data quality than VAERS, and genuine analysis of them still agrees that the vaccines have a good safety profile. To just select a few English-language systems:
UK: https://coronavirus-yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk
Australia: https://www.ncirs.org.au/our-work/ausvaxsafety
Canada: https://cps.ca/impact
Some more background from McGill University: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking...
Southwest’s fleet is all 737s; is this really a different type from the C-40?
A fairly high percentage of airline pilots are also part time pilots in the National Guard or Reserves, so they may be simultaneously rated for a certain airliner type as well as a military aircraft. But that doesn't really help for this situation.
There's 91 P-8s [2] in USN service, but still not really enough to make up the shortfall. 165 737NGs delivered in military configurations worldwide, according to [3].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_C-40_Clipper
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_fleet#Curre...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_United_States_m...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_Next_Generation#Ord...
For practical purposes employers can't afford to pay near 50% more for the least reasonable employees, the government isn't incentivized to do so to make it easier not to vaccinate when this is really a poor substitute insofar as public health, and only the minority of employees can afford this.
In effect the end result of a practical testing alternative is to pretend we are giving them a choice while in fact giving them little choice.
These tests could be made available at scale and cheaply, as is the case in many European countries, but we have chosen not to do that. This is a mistake we can fix, but it's agonizing how late we are - I was pushing my congresspeople to unblock it in January or February.
Correction, as was the case in many European countries. Freely available tests in e.g. Germany ended today, as the cost of a vaccine shot is cheaper than that of a rapid test while tests need to be repeated every 24h.
I and a lot of others don't accept any reasonable chance that you are going to kill me or my family members at work today.
Even the best of choices at this juncture will leave you at some risk even if you are young healthy and hale and far less risk if you choose to vaccinate. Describing it as a weak patch to bad health just belies reality.
For many who make up much of the dead the best route to safety lies in both they and people like you choosing to vaccinate so you don't infect and kill them. I have bad asthma. I cannot just "do some sports" and eat some leafy greens to ameliorate that risk. Worse my wife has an autoimmune disorder that requires her to take immuno suppressive medication. The best data so far suggests that if she were to get infected despite vaccination her chance of mortality would be on the order of 1 in 8 with some cardiovascular or lung damage being likely inevitable because she wont know to stop taking the weekly meds that stomp on her immune system until the virus already has a foothold.
She is hardly alone. There are millions of people like her in addition to 54 million 65+. People who by and large can't afford to live in a bubble. It just impossible for a large portion of the population to isolate. I have little choice but to do an in person job that might expose me to someone who thinks like yourself and have their sniffles scar my lungs that don't work that great to start with or end my wife's life whereas if we could get people like yourself to understand the unmitigatable risk others face we could drastically reduce that risk by taking a risk that in the scheme of things is no riskier than driving to work this morning and just getting a shot.
Not as brutal as Reagan breaking the ATC union, but supporting a common carrier in a time of crisis. I don’t believe a federal case has been heard yet where the vaccine mandate or terminating those refusing it has been found unlawful.