Air Force to UAL New Hire

[AirCobra]

Look at the old United scantron form from the 90s. Heavily favored military time. But that's also when the mins were only 300 hours.

That also helped their interns. I think Air Force guys always had the leg up because of all the jet training. In the 80's Air Force pilots from every background still completed T-37 and T-38 training. Naval Aviators may have never flown a jet since you flew all turboprops in training, then perhaps P-3's or C-130's for USMC and USCG.

 

[AirCobra]

That BS heavily favored the least qualified..... as long as they fit a certain profile that the vast majority of pilots don't.

Considering United didn't hire its first black pilot until 1965 and it's first woman pilot until 1973, a different kind of BS was perpetuated for over 30 years. How do you remedy a situation like that? Pretending it never happened is not exactly justice or fairness.

 

[Tripower455]

Considering United didn't hire its first black pilot until 1965 and it's first woman pilot until 1973, a different kind of BS was perpetuated for over 30 years.

Discrimination is wrong, regardless of the reason.

How do you remedy a situation like that? Pretending it never happened is not exactly justice or fairness.

Hiring someone because of their race/sex is just as wrong as not hiring them for the same reason. It simply shouldn't be an issue. The most qualified person should get the job, not the most qualified (insert sex/race here) person. In UALs case, it wasn't even a factor of hiring the most qualified pilots. They were after "minority" pilots, whether they were qualified or not, and in many cases, were not.

The vast majority of people attracted to aviation as a career are white males, so of course there are going to be more white males applying for the jobs.

2 wrongs don't make a right and EQUAL is EQUAL.

Take race/sex out of the '90's UAL hiring equation.

Does 250 ever equal 7000, which, according to one of their VP of flight ops at the time, ( a friend of my dad's), was the number of hours that a white commuter guy was required to have before being considered "qualified" for an interview?

Hiring a person with 250 hours, solely due to their sex or race, when passing up thousands of far more qualified pilots, solely due to their sex/race, is still sexual/racial discrimination.

 

[AlbieF15]

Albie, I was hoping you'd chime in. It is well documented how much I respect your opinion and definitely respect emerald coast.

After helping over 4000 pilots I hoped someone would notice?.

Here though, you argue the merits of a military career, and it sounds pretty amazing. Definitely a worthwhile human experience and career. And service.
I have not said you're "a lesser airline guy"- I said your experience is less qualified than civilians who have actually been doing the job for many years.

It is a NOBLE job, it is a FUN job, and it is LUCRATIVE job. It has some challenges. It demand attention to detail. But it is not so challenging a well motivated and capable pilot cannot assimilate it quickly. Ab Initio programs at KLM and Luftansa has proven you can raise a pilot from the ground up. If Pinnacle and ASA could put a 300 hour guy in the right seat of an RJ, I think a 3000 hour P-3 guy can figure out how to the do the SEAVU 2 into LAX in a 757. The MD11 is not a forgiving airliner. Yet, somehow, I enjoy it immensely. With its light touch in pitch, I could make the case that perhaps guys who had not flown a similarly pitch sensitive plane like a T-45 or T-38 might not be suited for the job. Yet--amazingly--I have a friend from Auburn days who was never military yet flew one safely all over the globe for Gemini. So I think we are all trainable.

The last part makes you sound like general lee, mixed in with the exact weird superiority that we've been talking about- feel good about what you did- it's great- , but you come into the civilian world to make money and maybe it ought to be normal to have done that job before getting the top end job??

Where were you when I was teaching spins in Tomahawks at an FBO in Georgia, or working at a University flight school teaching commercial students for 4.85 an hour? I don't remember seeing you in the DZ in central Florida when I was flying load after load of skydivers in central Florida. You weren't the tow pilot when I was flying gliders on my weekends off, spending every dollar I made as a CFI to learn more about flying something new. Was that you at my annual a couple years ago, helping me repack wheel bearings or rebuild a hydraulic gear actuator on my 1962 Navion? Maybe I could write the ultimate "perfect pilot" syllabus, and have you drop out of SWA for a couple yard so you could pay the "proper" dues before you get to go back to your six figure job?.

How can that even be argued against?

You paid many many dues doing other things than the job you're trying to get.

With all that you've done in your career, why is it offensive to spend a year or two in the right seat somewhere- getting those 121 rules down BEFORE getting the six figure job.

Besides we all know how fedex is about hiring retired military pilots. Had many friends go through your purple nugget hazing- literally having your probation pilots make you coffee- reprimanding pilots in training for not using exact verbiage per manual, then proceeding to use military jargon with no clue how dumb it looks to the civilian who was just reprimanded.

Funny. As an uptight Air Force/F-15 guy, I actually winced the first time I was in training and a guy repeated memory items in a non-verbatim manner during my first 727 recurrent. As I waited for the guy to get whacked, the instructor said "good" even though he DID NOT SAY IT VERBATIM. But since he more or less said the same thing, he got a pass. I later learned this was "normal". So--I cannot say what you friend did or didn't do, but my impression is memory items and perfect verbiage are NOT required at FedEx. Point of fact: At takeoff when the capt gives the FO the plane, the correct verbiage is "you have the airPLANE". I don't' say anything, but when a captain says "you have the airCRAFT a little pucker starts in my anus and runs up to my throat. I stop it before it leaps out of my mouth. I don't correct anyone, but I repeat "I have the airPLANE" because that is what 20 years of programming does to you. That is just a difference in culture. when you have 16 guys in an LFE on the radio, in a comm jam environment, you are taught comm is to be clear, concise, and correct. Maybe it doesn't make a ******************** now (probably doesn't) but it does not wash off just because I am flying boxes instead of missiles through the sky. And coffee--I poured the captain a cup yesterday on my trip, even though I am a 12 year FO. He was the PF, and I was glad to do it. Pouring coffee is the tax FedEx pilots pay to avoid having 5 am van conversations with Aisle Donkeys in the crew van, and IMHO it is a tax worth paying. In a 2 man cockpit, there is no "coffee bitch" anymore. Its just a couple pilots helping each other out as we do our job. We also get to go pee without asking anyone in the back. In short--its the job. If folks want their coffee poured I guess they can fly for a pax carrier.

There's a lot of groupthink over there Albie
You've got a foothold, but that doesn't make for a good safe pilot group. To dans thinking, I'd imagine fedex could use some more civilian backgrounds

What percentage would deem acceptable? I can tell you that since 2002, I have helped about 665 people get hired at FedEx, or about 15% of the crew force. 42%, almost 300, have been from other airlines, corporate, or internal candidates. I do not know what the hiring totals are, but I know my client base at most airlines is pretty darn close to 50/50.

IMHO, the best pilot out there is the one who keeps learning, enjoys the craft and is an ambassador to the profession. My suggestion is that telling anyone--military or civilian, Navy or Air Force, fixed wing or rotary wing--that somehow they aren't "ready" for the big leagues--is a real easy way to get labeled as a dick. Don't be a dick. My favorite MD11 instructor was hired by Flying Tigers at age 23. He is an awesome pilot and superior instructor. Another one of my favorite MD11 role models helped write the employment manual for the F-15 back in the 90s. (3-1 Chapter 4 for your AF types) was a Desert Storm vet, and was a standards LCA on the MD11. Guy is brilliant, and joy to fly with, and knows the MD11 inside/out. What you do next, not where you have been, defines who you are. I strive to always be moving forward. Suggest you do the same. You may admire me--nice. You may appreciate Emerald Coast--super. But I don't admire anyone who knows nothing about my experience, drive, motivation, or capability telling me what I should or should not be able to do based on my background.

What you don't like is arrogance. I get it. What you are missing is you come off just as condescending and arrogant in your own way, and it is no more attractive. The only difference in you and them is nobody makes movies about regional pilots. If the guys you fly with are so awful, you don't need more civilian pilots--you just need a better professional standards program. Be careful, however, when you cart your fellow crew members into a mediated debrief, however, because you might just found out the problem really isn't them.

 

[CRAWDADDY]

Look at the old United scantron form from the 90s. Heavily favored military time. But that's also when the mins were only 300 hours.

United's Scantron back then was something else. I recall they had three multi-engine PIC columns.
Column 1: Heavy military jet or scheduled turbine and then they gave the following examples: B727, C-141, and Be-1900 followed by some helo designation I don't recall.
It got more confusing (in terms of determining the implied values) the further you went down the scale. E.G.: Be-99 cargo and Learjet time went in the same column.
Instructor time wasn't PIC and people didn't know where to put it.

According to the Scantron, no one got extra consideration for their military time over the guy flying for Great Lakes.

No matter what you did, Ms. Stucke would eat your lunch over the application errors, not to mention your C in college physics.

 

[AirCobra]

Discrimination is wrong, regardless of the reason.




Hiring someone because of their race/sex is just as wrong as not hiring them for the same reason. It simply shouldn't be an issue. The most qualified person should get the job, not the most qualified (insert sex/race here) person. In UALs case, it wasn't even a factor of hiring the most qualified pilots. They were after "minority" pilots, whether they were qualified or not, and in many cases, were not.

The vast majority of people attracted to aviation as a career are white males, so of course there are going to be more white males applying for the jobs.

2 wrongs don't make a right and EQUAL is EQUAL.

Take race/sex out of the '90's UAL hiring equation.

Does 250 ever equal 7000, which, according to one of their VP of flight ops at the time, ( a friend of my dad's), was the number of hours that a white commuter guy was required to have before being considered "qualified" for an interview?

Hiring a person with 250 hours, solely due to their sex or race, when passing up thousands of far more qualified pilots, solely due to their sex/race, is still sexual/racial discrimination.

But you didn't really answer the question. What do you do as a company or society to make amends? It is easy for us to sit here an pretend it didn't happen, but don't you think that plenty of other people remember those times, and remember the injustice? I have read a few books like "A-Train" by Tuskegee Airmen and if they wanted to keep flying after WWII or Korea they had to stay in the Air Force. And the WASP's had it worse. They did not even have the option of staying in. What is just for us as a society? I am not saying United did exactly the right thing, but at least they did something. Easy to say what is wrong, much harder to say what is right.

 

[AirCobra]

United's Scantron back then was something else. I recall they had three multi-engine PIC columns.
Column 1: Heavy military jet or scheduled turbine and then they gave the following examples: B727, C-141, and Be-1900 followed by some helo designation I don't recall.
It got more confusing (in terms of determining the implied values) the further you went down the scale. E.G.: Be-99 cargo and Learjet time went in the same column.
Instructor time wasn't PIC and people didn't know where to put it.

According to the Scantron, no one got extra consideration for their military time over the guy flying for Great Lakes.

No matter what you did, Ms. Stucke would eat your lunch over the application errors, not to mention your C in college physics.

I did another application that had "Night PIC not as an instructor". Who the hell logs that exactly, and who the hell cares?

Once I got to the corporate world no one ever asked to see my log book again in an interview, and I never had to worry about where to put FE time or Level D Sim versus FTD again. All they seem to care about is when was the last time you went to Flight Safety for whatever particular aircraft they are flying.

 

[Tripower455]

But you didn't really answer the question. What do you do as a company or society to make amends?

Amends for what? Discrimination was a societal problem, and much of what we're discussing wasn't an issue anymore in the '80's when UAL started their version of discriminatory hiring. No other airline was doing it to the extent that UAL was either.

It is easy for us to sit here an pretend it didn't happen, but don't you think that plenty of other people remember those times, and remember the injustice?

Are you pretending that racial/sexual discrimination never happened, because I am not. In fact, it was alive and well at UAL in the '80s/'90s, long after the rest of the world accepted equal as equal.

Getting hired because of your sex/race, with scant credence given to your actual experience in the field, is, by definition, discrimination.

As I said in my previous post, 2 wrongs don't make a right. The folks getting preferential treatment in the 80s and 90s were not the ones discriminated against 20-30+ years before. Up until the UAL EEOC BS, they had exactly the same opportunities as everyone else. After the EEOC got involved, they had a huge leg up.

For a hair under a decade, I watched every "minority" co worker (most with a fraction of the experience that I and most other white guys had) get interviews and subsequently hired with UAL. The rest of us toiled away year after year to get our 7k for the privilege of an antagonistic interview, for a job we were unlikely to get, because we were white guys.

Even the sim eval was set up to favor the less experienced. A good friend of mine was an intern at UAL, and ran the interview sims, which were done on a Frasca IIRC, not even a real airplane sim. The only thing they asked the interviewee was how much total time they had. The more time you had, the more often the scoring computer would check your progress. Anything not perfect was scored against you. Guys with 10k hours in Boeings were getting worse scores on it than the 300 hour wonders, who were acing it. I wonder why......

I had the opportunity to fly several mock UAL interview rides in a Frasca back in the day, as a friend ran an interview prep school back in the day. I had been a 121 Capt for about 5 years at the time, and there was a huge difference in my score depending on the number of hours he put into the evaluation computer. It was like a bad video game simulation too.....

I have read a few books like "A-Train" by Tuskegee Airmen and if they wanted to keep flying after WWII or Korea they had to stay in the Air Force. And the WASP's had it worse. They did not even have the option of staying in. What is just for us as a society?

By the time we got to the era that we're discussing, with a few glaring exceptions like South Africa etc., society had pretty much accepted that equal was equal. Well, except for UAL, who was still hiring/not hiring pilots based solely on the color of their skin/sex.

I am not saying United did exactly the right thing, but at least they did something.

Yup, they did something, and it was called discriminatory hiring. Whether or not you even got interviewed was based solely on sex/race.

I guess that was "good" discrimination though, as long as the "right" people were being discriminated against.

Easy to say what is wrong, much harder to say what is right.

Not really.....

Hiring the most qualified person for the job, regardless of sex/race/religion/color/sexual orientation etc. is the right thing to do, especially in an unforgiving, technical field like ours.

 

[AirCobra]

Amends for what? Discrimination was a societal problem, and much of what we're discussing wasn't an issue anymore in the '80's when UAL started their version of discriminatory hiring. No other airline was doing it to the extent that UAL was either.



Are you pretending that racial/sexual discrimination never happened, because I am not. In fact, it was alive and well at UAL in the '80s/'90s, long after the rest of the world accepted equal as equal.

Getting hired because of your sex/race, with scant credence given to your actual experience in the field, is, by definition, discrimination.

As I said in my previous post, 2 wrongs don't make a right. The folks getting preferential treatment in the 80s and 90s were not the ones discriminated against 20-30+ years before. Up until the UAL EEOC BS, they had exactly the same opportunities as everyone else. After the EEOC got involved, they had a huge leg up.

For a hair under a decade, I watched every "minority" co worker (most with a fraction of the experience that I and most other white guys had) get interviews and subsequently hired with UAL. The rest of us toiled away year after year to get our 7k for the privilege of an antagonistic interview, for a job we were unlikely to get, because we were white guys.

Even the sim eval was set up to favor the less experienced. A good friend of mine was an intern at UAL, and ran the interview sims, which were done on a Frasca IIRC, not even a real airplane sim. The only thing they asked the interviewee was how much total time they had. The more time you had, the more often the scoring computer would check your progress. Anything not perfect was scored against you. Guys with 10k hours in Boeings were getting worse scores on it than the 300 hour wonders, who were acing it. I wonder why......

I had the opportunity to fly several mock UAL interview rides in a Frasca back in the day, as a friend ran an interview prep school back in the day. I had been a 121 Capt for about 5 years at the time, and there was a huge difference in my score depending on the number of hours he put into the evaluation computer. It was like a bad video game simulation too.....





By the time we got to the era that we're discussing, with a few glaring exceptions like South Africa etc., society had pretty much accepted that equal was equal. Well, except for UAL, who was still hiring/not hiring pilots based solely on the color of their skin/sex.





Yup, they did something, and it was called discriminatory hiring. Whether or not you even got interviewed was based solely on sex/race.

I guess that was "good" discrimination though, as long as the "right" people were being discriminated against.




Not really.....

Hiring the most qualified person for the job, regardless of sex/race/religion/color/sexual orientation etc. is the right thing to do, especially in an unforgiving, technical field like ours.

I think your post pretty much sums up the white male perspective of "it's over lets move on" while ignoring subtle and sometimes not so subtle discrimination that continues to this day. You think it's solved but have you asked any women of African Americans what they thought? There are still many hurdles to overcome and prejudices that need to be changed. It is hardly over with, as you seem to think. If the US is 50% women, 14% African American, and 32% Hispanic, do the demographics at any US air carrier even come close to resembling those demographics? Why not if we are so far along on the road to equality?

 

[AirCobra]

Amends for what? Discrimination was a societal problem, and much of what we're discussing wasn't an issue anymore in the '80's when UAL started their version of discriminatory hiring. No other airline was doing it to the extent that UAL was either.



Are you pretending that racial/sexual discrimination never happened, because I am not. In fact, it was alive and well at UAL in the '80s/'90s, long after the rest of the world accepted equal as equal.

Getting hired because of your sex/race, with scant credence given to your actual experience in the field, is, by definition, discrimination.

As I said in my previous post, 2 wrongs don't make a right. The folks getting preferential treatment in the 80s and 90s were not the ones discriminated against 20-30+ years before. Up until the UAL EEOC BS, they had exactly the same opportunities as everyone else. After the EEOC got involved, they had a huge leg up.

For a hair under a decade, I watched every "minority" co worker (most with a fraction of the experience that I and most other white guys had) get interviews and subsequently hired with UAL. The rest of us toiled away year after year to get our 7k for the privilege of an antagonistic interview, for a job we were unlikely to get, because we were white guys.

Even the sim eval was set up to favor the less experienced. A good friend of mine was an intern at UAL, and ran the interview sims, which were done on a Frasca IIRC, not even a real airplane sim. The only thing they asked the interviewee was how much total time they had. The more time you had, the more often the scoring computer would check your progress. Anything not perfect was scored against you. Guys with 10k hours in Boeings were getting worse scores on it than the 300 hour wonders, who were acing it. I wonder why......

I had the opportunity to fly several mock UAL interview rides in a Frasca back in the day, as a friend ran an interview prep school back in the day. I had been a 121 Capt for about 5 years at the time, and there was a huge difference in my score depending on the number of hours he put into the evaluation computer. It was like a bad video game simulation too.....





By the time we got to the era that we're discussing, with a few glaring exceptions like South Africa etc., society had pretty much accepted that equal was equal. Well, except for UAL, who was still hiring/not hiring pilots based solely on the color of their skin/sex.





Yup, they did something, and it was called discriminatory hiring. Whether or not you even got interviewed was based solely on sex/race.

I guess that was "good" discrimination though, as long as the "right" people were being discriminated against.




Not really.....

Hiring the most qualified person for the job, regardless of sex/race/religion/color/sexual orientation etc. is the right thing to do, especially in an unforgiving, technical field like ours.

Here are the numbers from the United hiring bias lawsuit in the late 80's:

Among the 1,400 pilots hired out of 32,500 applicants, 75 were black or other minorities and 59 were women out of a total of 3,000 minority and female applicants.

75 out of 1400 in a country that is over 35% minority.

59 out of 1400 in a country this is 50% women.


So the 5% of minority applicants that got jobs and the 4% of women applicants that got jobs was some great injustice to you? What was the target 0%?

So roughly for every 40 white male pilots hired United hired 1 minority pilot. Sorry but your perception of scores of 300 hour wonders is not anywhere close to reality.