Airline pilots’ union loses its bearings

Afraid of flying? It’s time to get scared: wokeism has started making inroads into airline industry big way. Pilots are told to use proper and inoffensive language, and aircraft makers are getting more and more concerned about the so-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies, instead of making their product safe.

The Air Line Pilots Association International (ALPA), the largest pilots’ union globally, is now telling aircraft crews that the word “cockpit” may offend some and they better use other expressions.

What is so offensive about cockpits, the ALPA didn’t say.

A few years ago, Airbus encountered their own round of issues with the do-gooders. When their planes are close to touchdown and their automated systems detect they are going too fast and tell the pilots to retard, meaning they should use whatever braking mechanism they have that is not yet in operation, the politically correct crowd got upset. Nobody told them that the word meant an instruction to decelerate or slow down.

When the Airbus critics howled in disgust, ALPA told them where to take off, and the problem seemed to have been solved.

Not so fast. If there is anything the politically correct can’t stand, it’s defeat. Normal logic be damned.

The criticism by the flying illiterates forced ALPA to issue their own Inclusive Language Reference Guide.

The union has run into major disagreement coming from the ranks of the most experienced fliers. Take your language guide and stuff it you know where was the tenor of pilots’ reaction. When we fly, it’s safety first, not worries about some hyper-sensitive bimbos who would faint if we uttered an impolite four-letter word while handling a critical situation.

Strange timing

The ALPA call is coming at a time when major aircraft builders face huge safety problems.

For example, Boeing has been losing fly-worthiness certifications for their ultra-modern planes left, right and centre, and no DEI initiatives are going to help them.

And yet, it’s precisely these initiatives that can be blamed for many of the problems the famous U.S. aircraft builder has been encountering the last few years. Hiring imbeciles to fill particular quotas won’t make airplanes safer.

Some analysts say another issue Boeing has been encountering has something to do with their merger with McDonnell-Douglas company a couple of decades ago, their then-major industry competitor. It was McDonnell-Douglas at the time who needed to be rescued but, quite shockingly, it would precisely their corporate poohbahs who would take over the reins at Boeing. The corporate culture at Boeing changed swiftly with their arrival, with penny-pinching becoming a major objective, and safety issues taking a back seat.

With these DEI programs getting all kinds of government support, including grants and order preference, Boeing’s fate was doomed.

And now the industry faces a union push for more of such nonsense.

Airline analysts claim that it was precisely the combination of the new bosses’ penny-pinching with politically correct culture that is to blame for the grounding of the 737 Max after two fatal crashes. The focus on DEI initiatives, such as language changes, may have diverted attention from addressing critical safety and operational issues.

ALPA should concentrate on how to make its members’ (the fliers) jobs easier and safer to perform.

Certainly, languages tend to develop and what used to be your normal vernacular and colloquial expression yesterday can be obsolete today and forgotten tomorrow.

Yet, it shouldn’t be coming as art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art). Language development dictated from above have reasons other than pure linguistics. They are politically motivated, set to create chaos, not to improve communications between people.

Ask any airline passenger whether they prefer politically correct language in the cockpit to safe arrival (and on time) at their destination, and the overwhelming reply will be obvious.

Russian fireworks hit the Pacific

Californians are in for a mighty military display: Russian ballistic missiles began splashing into the waters just 300 kilometres off the republic’s shores the other day.

Russia’s military told the Oakland Air Route Traffic Control Centre ((ARTCC) to issue a Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) to tell the many air crews approaching or leaving the airports in the area to watch out.

A minor aside: NOTAM used to be an abbreviation to Notice to Air Men. No longer. Given the number of female captains piloting those huge aircraft these days, it’s logical.

The Oakland ARTCC obviously obeyed, as is their job.

Whether the U.S. powers-that-be in Washington, D.C., noticed any of this development, now, that’s another question altogether. They are busy dealing with the non-existing climate change, yet another World Health Organisation (WHO)-induced panic wave concerning a thus far unknown virus, and, of course, all kinds of pre-election politicking and lawfare aimed at former President Donald J. Trump.

Meanwhile, Russian navy are making sure their presence is obvious to the most coincidental vessel passing by. The idea is to make sure that not even the smallest piece of debris caused by the newest war toys’ impact into Pacific Ocean’s waters falls into unauthorised hands.

The crowd in the White House are preoccupied with people so irresponsible that they want to spend their summer vacations away from their homes. That would involve travel, and increased travel would interfere with their Net Zero CO₂ reduction plans. Who cares that the world is on the brink of World War III, thanks to their own policies that have sparked the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

And the Russians actually do have something important to hide.

Faster than lightning

Military analysts have noticed that the newest Russian missiles are designed and built for speed. Their explosive effectiveness is taken for granted. It’s the speed that allows them to reach their targets before the other side can take any defensive measures. Russian Kinzhal missiles blasted the supposedly safe covers so fast that the West’s (including U.S.) high-ranking officers stationed in Ukraine perished before they knew what hit them.

And now, following the terrorist attack at a rock concert near Moscow that Russian authorities blame on Ukrainian security service the SBU, they retaliated using their newest weapon: a ballistic missile named 3M22 Zirkon. These missiles reach speeds of about 11.000 km per hour (Mach 9), are difficult if not impossible to detect, and they hit two SBU buildings before anybody could sound any kind of alarm.

The SBU buildings were blown up to smithereens, with no survivors reported.

The Russians used the Zirkons on that same day to also hit Poltava, Kremenchug and Odessa.

NATO analysts used to be convinced that these missiles could only be launched from battleships such as Peter the Great (formerly Yuri Andropov), missile-carrying frigates of the Admiral Gorshkov class, or from nuclear-powered Yasen-class submarines.

The latest barrage must have surprised them: they came in from Sevastopol.

The Zirkons fly surrounded by plasma clouds. That’s what makes them virtually invisible to defences.

But it’s their speed that makes them so dangerous. Launched from Sevastopol, the two Zirkons that hit the SBU buildings in Kiev only needed 196 seconds to land on targets 607 kilometres away.

The Zirkons are assembled into batteries eight missiles a piece. Military analysts described their nuclear warheads as 12.5 times as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima in Japan in1945.

The famous American anti-aircraft defence system a.k.a. Patriot’s radio location system can’t reach beyond a 100 kilometres range. Thus, they have only 32 seconds to establish the danger. But, and here’s another catch: the Patriots can achieve speeds up to 1.2 km/second, the Zirkon cruises at more than twice that speed, at 3.1 km/sec. Using all your fingers and toes for calculation, the Patriot crews would be doomed, not even having enough time to find sufficient cover.

Supersonic aircraft? A pile of garbage

Not even the vaunted U.S. F-35 fighter-bomber plane can rise up to this unusual challenge. If it were to be able to take off within about 205 seconds, its pilots would have to be sitting in the cockpit, their aircraft tanks filled to the brim, weapons armed, and starting devices running. And, even so, they would have a dreadful problem taking off, with the Russians taking taxiways and runways out first.

This is what we are facing now, and it is pretty obvious that the missiles now landing off California’s northern coast are at least as mighty as the Zirkons.

U.S. military, concerned as they are with all kinds of wokeism, cancel rules and gender politicking, where recruits can report their sergeants to human rights tribunals for yelling in their faces, are no longer the mightiest armed force in the world.

It’s about time for them to learn this lesson. Even their military-industrial complex’s greediness should have its limits. America’s war against Russia, fought for them by the Ukrainians to the last Ukrainian is testing Russia’s patience, and President Vladimir Putin has said so in his speech on the Red Square, as his country was celebrating the victory over Nazism.

Should the Americans (and their allies) not wake up, the rest of the world will share with them in paying the irredeemable price.