Ben Fried

I’m not at all shy about blaming DEI where appropriate, and it often is appropriate. But I see no DEI angle on this jet crash. The female pilot was not flying the plane. The captain was a 55 year old man. Trying to blame the girl for the crash is absurd and baseless. Yes she seemed frantic and terrified in the radio call but I would be to, and so would you. And even if she’d been cool as a cucumber, there isn’t the slightest reason to think it would have made any difference at all. I’ll fully admit that I wouldn’t get in a plane if the copilot was a 20 year old girl. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is no evidence that she was personally at fault. And for the record, becoming a pilot at 20 is pretty impressive. She had her shit together a lot more than I did at that age. I’ll say that at least. I don’t think airlines or private charter companies should be making any specific effort at all to be “inclusive” of women or whatever, but it’s still admirable for a kid to have a goal like that and pursue it. I don’t see any reason to mock her, as some have done. Some of the comments about that audio recording have been callous to an unhuman degree. None of you would have the stoicism in that situation that you demand from this girl. And again, there’s no reason to think stoicism would have magically kept the plane from falling out of the sky. Besides, she actually did seem pretty calm in that recording until the last few seconds, relative to the circumstance she was in. I don’t want my pilot to panic but I also don’t want them to be completely indifferent to the prospect of a fatal crash, as some commenters here apparently expect.