Journalist Ashley St. Clair shared some disturbing information about an incident that took place on July 29 in which a United Airlines plane suffered from a hard landing and was nearly totaled.

The info she obtained indicated that the copilot of the plane was a former flight attendant who had been fired from their post and then rehired as part of United Airlines’ DEI program, even though their name appeared on a list of employees who could not return to the company. Moreover, the individual reportedly failed numerous trainings, including the crucial simulator training that pilots must undergo.

St. Clair implied that it’s not the first time something like this had happened and that United has a history of covering up disasters involving DEI hires.

She asked: “Was the #2 at the Denver hiring center also onboarded through DEI? Did she or did she not change fail grades for DEI hires because “it makes the numbers look bad”? Did the instructor who failed this co-pilot ask corporate why they passed him?”

In November, an incident took place in which two private planes collided on a Houston airport runway. Although no one involved was seriously injured, investigators pointed to air traffic controllers as being the responsible parties. This was yet another example of what the New York Times deemed “an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways in the USA.”

As part of its investigation, the paper found that runway incursions had nearly doubled during the period they studied despite major advancements in technology that should have helped reduce the numbers.

DEI hiring is putting lives in jeopardy

Revolver News spoke to several FAA employees and air traffic controllers, many of which asked for anonymity and were only willing to speak off the record. Although the publication found that worsening aviation safety is a complicated matter, there are two main factors that are playing a role. First, they say, is the way that COVID policies affected staffing levels in air traffic control rooms. The second is the way that “aggressive affirmative action policies” that were put in place by the Obama administration have caused a major deterioration in the quality of air traffic controllers, with diversity policies causing a decline in quality that is putting the aviation industry in danger.

They warned: “The aggressive substitution of merit in favor of diversity has led to a so-called competency crisis, jeopardizing not only our ability to generate innovative technology but, in a more dire sense, our ability to simply maintain the proper functioning of various complex systems vital to our existence as a first-world civilization.”

In November, the nonprofit group America First Legal filed a series of complaints with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission seeking a probe into the DEI initiatives used by Southwest, United and American Airlines. They accused Southwest and United of using illegal quota systems to advance their DEI goals and said that hiring practices were a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 given that they are “based on the race or color of the individuals involved.”

Most rational American passengers will tell you that they would like to see the most qualified individual possible flying their plane. Pilots, air traffic controllers and everyone else involved in aviation have the lives of hundreds or even thousands of people in their hands every day, and hiring for these roles should be based on merit and nothing else.

Sources for this article include:

• Revolver.news
• Revolver.news
• HRDive.com

Data from FlightAware.com shows that 2,508 Southwest flights were canceled by about 9 a.m. ET on Wednesday, while another 185 were delayed. Since late last week, several thousand Southwest flights have been canceled—far more than any other carrier—as its chief executive warned that more are on the way this week.

“Here’s why this giant puzzle is taking us several days to solve. Southwest is the largest carrier in the country, not only because of our value and our values, but because we build our flight schedule around communities, not hubs. So, we’re the largest airline in 23 of the top 25 travel markets in the U.S.,” CEO Bob Jordan said in a news release on Tuesday evening. “Cities where large numbers of scheduled flights simultaneously froze as record bitter cold brought challenges for all airlines.”

Jordan continued to say that Southwest’s flight network is “highly complex,” adding that he has spoken with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg “to continue the discussions we’ve been having with the DOT through the holiday.”

Buttigieg said late Tuesday that Southwest’s “system really has completely melted down,” according to his interview with CNN. “I made clear that our department will be holding them accountable for their responsibilities to customers, both to get them through this situation and to make sure that this can’t happen again.”

Buttigieg also told NBC News that amid the bevy of Southwest cancellations, it “has clearly crossed the line from what’s an uncontrollable weather situation to something that is the airline’s direct responsibility.”

“From what I can tell, Southwest is unable to locate even where their own crews are, let alone their own passengers, let alone baggage,” Buttigieg told CNN. He said he spoke with pilots’ and fight attendants’ unions about the fracas.

“While all of the other parts of the aviation system have been moving toward recovery and getting better each day, it’s actually been moving the opposite direction with this airline,” added Buttigieg.

Around the same time, President Joe Biden warned that airlines that have canceled flights this week will face accountability, although he did not elaborate how. Compared with other companies, Southwest has canceled by far the most flights since a massive winter storm and arctic blast swept across the United States late last week and during the Christmas holiday.

Other Details

The Dallas-based carrier, which typically has a large schedule that connects vast swathes of the country, has scrapped more than 12,000 flights since Friday. On Tuesday, it canceled more than two-thirds of its 4,000 scheduled flights, accounting for more than 90 percent of all U.S. airline cancellations, tracking website FlightAware.com data showed.

Southwest told the Reuters news agency it would reimburse customers for travel-related costs and that it had already processed thousands of requests by early Tuesday.

By Tuesday evening, Southwest’s shares were down about 6 percent.

Southwest earns most of its profits flying domestically and relies on a point-to-point service instead of operating out of large hubs. “Southwest is using outdated technology and processes, really from the ’90s, that can’t keep up with the network complexity today,” Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, told Reuters.

Murray said the software, Sky Solver, had been developed in house, and although Southwest’s flight scheduling model was more complex than others, it could still be handled with good software.

“We had aircraft that were available, but the process of matching up those crew members with the aircraft could not be handled by our technology,” Southwest said, adding crew schedulers had to match planes with staff manually which is “extraordinarily difficult.”

Passengers Speak Out

In interviews with several corporate news outlets and in social media posts, Southwest passengers lashed out at the airline.

Amanda Lara-Santos, 38, said that her family had issues when trying to catch a connecting flight with her three children, who were stranded for hours in Nashville.

“They were stranded,” Lara-Santos told NBC. “They were not offered any food vouchers or travel vouchers. Nothing was offered as compensation.”

Another passenger added on Twitter: “I’ve learned my lesson to not fly @SouthwestAir again. Stuck on the east coast, missing 5 days of work just to get home. Merry Christmas.”

Reuters contributed to this report. Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times. Image by Tomás Del Coro via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.