As we write, Air Canada is shutting down all flights in preparation for a strike by its stewardesses flight attendants, or a lockout of its stewardesses flight attendants, which could begin tomorrow (Saturday) unless there is a last-minute intervention by the government of Canuckistan.
Oddly overlooked in the boiler-plate list of demands by CUPE, the union representing the FAs, is any mention of more DEI. Perhaps AC is already "woke" enough. And of course it's not an American airline, most of which are suffering from too much DEI.
If you're about to fly with Delta (see "Further viewing", below) or any other US airline which has wokeness built into its mission statement and hiring practices, consider this little ditty.
Walt suggests you take seriously the problems posed by too much DEI. United Airlines has vowed that 50% of its future pilot hires will be women and people (of other genders?) of colour by 2030. American and Southwest have pledged similar DEI commitments, and Delta is already regretting theirs.
The point of the song is not about hate or toxic masculinity or white supremacy, but about how the woke goals affect airline standards, pilot competency, and aviation safety. Will qualified candidates be passed over in the name of diversity?
Can DEI hiring and meritocracy coexist at 30,000 feet? Give this some thought before booking your next flight.
And if you decide (or are forced) to fly anyway, Walt hopes you won't hear the pilot say, "Hello dere! Dis is Captain Latisha!"
Yesterday, Canada's Transportation Safety Board released its preliminary report into the crash (call it "collision with terrain" if you like) of Delta Airlines flight 4819 on landing at Toronto's Pearson International Airport (YYZ). If you missed our initial post on this story, click here to read it and see the video.
The TSB report, boiled down to one sentence, says that the Bombardier CRJ900, experienced a hard "pancake" landing. A warning system on the flight sent an alert indicating a high rate of descent less than three seconds before the plane touched down.
Less than a second before touchdown, the plane's rate of descent was 1110 feet per minute.
The flight manual defines a hard landing as a "landing at a vertical descent rate greater than 600 ft/min when the aircraft's gross weight is less than or equal to [maximum landing weight]." Flight 4819 (operated by Delta Air Lines subsidiary Endeavor Air) weighed less than its maximum allowable take-off weight at the time of the crash.
The report also says that less than a second before landing, the angle of the plane's aircraft, known as the pitch attitude, was 1 degree. The flight operations manual states pitch attitude at touchdown should be between 3 and 8 degrees.
In today's video, Dan Millican -- the same experienced pilot who appears in the earlier video -- analyses the TSB report and draws some inescapable conclusions as to the role played by DEI First Officer who was flying the plane. We've added a summary of the report below the video window.
In a news release yesterday, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada said, "It is too early to draw conclusions as to the causes of this accident. A full investigation report, which will include the TSB's analysis into why the accident happened and the Board's findings, will be released in due course.
Delta 4819 took off from Minneapolis (MSP) with 76 passengers, two flight crew members and two cabin crew members. The names of the pilots have been scrubbed from the Internet. in the wake of Delta's denial that they were DEI hires.
All we know is that the Captain was male, hired by Mesaba Airlines (forerunner of Endeavor Air) in 2007, and that the First Officer was female, hired by Endeavor in 2024. Delta says stories that she had failed training events are false.
According to the TSB, the FO was in control of the plane when it crashed. At 1400 EST, winds were gusting to 35 knots in the area. After the flight crew received clearance to land at Runway 23 at YYZ, they flew the approach at 149 knots, "given the reported wind gusts."
Around 2.6 seconds before touchdown, a "sink rate" alert sounded, "indicating a high rate of descent," the report said. The alert came from the plane's enhanced ground proximity warning system.
At the time the alert sounded, the plane's airspeed was 136 knots. Less than a second before touchdown, the aircraft's indicated airspeed was 134 knots and its ground speed was 111 knots.
Around 1412, the right main landing gear touched the runway. The report continues: "At touchdown, the following occurred: the side-stay that is attached to the right [main landing gear] fractured, the landing gear folded into the retracted position, the wing root fractured between the fuselage and the landing gear, and the wing detached from the fuselage, releasing a cloud of jet fuel, which caught fire. The exact sequence of these events is still to be determined by further examination of the fracture surfaces."
The plane then began to slide along the runway, eventually going off the right side into a snow-covered grass area, coming to rest on Runway 15L, near the intersection with Runway 23.
Meanwhile, the right wing became fully detached from the plane and slid around 215 feet further along Runway 23.
Once the aircraft came to a stop, an evacuation began. There were 21 people injured among the 80 on board, with two people reported to have serious injuries.
John Gradek, an operations and integrated aviation management professor at McGill University, told the media the plane had "a hard, flat landing", sometimes called a "pancake landing". He said the plane's descent rate was "significantly higher than you would expect to have in a given landing area.... It was, by all classifications, a hard landing. The nose only being up 1 degree is also not typical, he added, and can result in a flat landing that puts stress on the aircraft, he said.
Less than three weeks after the horrific mid-air collision at DCA (Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport), Delta Connection flight 4819 -- a Bombardier CRJ900 operated by Endeavor Air, a subsidiary of Delta Airlines -- crashed on landing at YYZ (Pearson International Airport in Toronto), overturning and winding up upside down on the runway.
As we reported in the DCA story, there was a lot of speculation by people right up to President Trump that DEI -- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion -- was a contributing factor to the tragic accident. People said that either the air traffic controllers or the pilots of the military helicopter, or both, were (possibly) DEI hires, not competent to perform their assigned duties.
The same conclusions were jumped to in the aftermath of the crash of 4819, with people demanding to know who the pilots were and their qualifications and experience. In this video, which has received over 2.8 million views since it was posted eight days ago, Taking Off analyst Dan Millican reveals the identities of the pilots and details their qualifications. And he offers his best guess as to which of them -- the male or the female -- had the controls as the plane crashed and burned.
Miraculously, everyone on board Delta 4819 survived. Mr Millican points out that this was by the grace of God, not the actions of the "heroic pilots", as the plane would have been uncontrollable a second or two after crashing. And his guess as to who was in control is just that, a guess. Suspicions will be confirmed... or not... once the relevant inquiries have been held and their reports released.
Still... one has to wonder about the safety of American skies when people with minimal qualifications, if any, are hired on the basis of race, gender or other politically-determined criteria. Don't be fooled, people. Wokeism can kill!
