I wrote about so many accidents during my 30-plus year aviation journalism career that I can hardly stomach the feeding frenzy of “analysis” following the DCA accident on Wednesday. Least of all President Trump’s distressing press conference not even 12 hours after the accident.
Still, if I learned anything during my career, it’s to keep an open mind against my own conclusions and prejudices. And that applies to DEI. Trump’s claim that it was a factor in the accident is unfounded, but that doesn’t mean facts won’t emerge to the contrary. Hence the open mind.
I learned this by bitter experience. Around 1996, I went to the Navy LSO school in Norfolk for a story I was working on. This followed a controversial accident in which one of the Navy’s first female F-14 fighter pilots, Kara Hultgreen, was killed trying to get aboard a carrier for routine qualifications. Rumors swirled that she was underqualified and that the Navy had relaxed its standards to retain her. Applying my prejudices as an unapologetic 1970s feminist, I assumed this was just misogynistic reactionism from the little boys club. Subsequent revelations showed that while the Navy didn’t really wholesale relax standards, bowing to political pressure, it gave Hultgreen and at least one other female aviator additional shots at repeating training tasks that men weren’t getting. The deck was tilted a bit, so to speak.
The LSOs—landing signal officers—knew this because the people on the inside of any organization almost always know a truth that those of us outside looking in can’t know. Same thing now with claims that this accident occurred because of “DEI hires.”
Unfortunately, this accident represents the perfect storm, occurring as it did when an incoming administration is looking for ways to substantiate its obsessiveness over DEI. Not that DEI efforts haven’t gone off the rails in some ways, but the impact on system safety may be a reach. The fact that the command pilot of the Black Hawk was a woman may give pretext, whether true or not. SecDef Hegseth’s avowed opposition to women in combat may mean this won’t get a fair hearing, but just more political posturing.
Years ago, a friend who was then a training captain at a major airline showed me a video of a pilot totally cratering an NDB approach. It was laughably incompetent for someone with an ATP. The pilot was a woman. His point wasn’t that women were substandard pilots but that the entire community—military, commercial, civil, controllers, mechanics, dispatchers—exists on a bell curve. The far end of the curve is populated by the extraordinarily talented and capable, the other extreme by people who make you wonder how they can tie their shoelaces. The middle of the curve is inhabited by the ordinary freckled-necked masses. You would hope that anyone going into an investigation like this would understand that and remain open minded. I’m not confident that will happen here, but it doesn’t mean the rest of us should fall for the agitprop.
