print-icon
print-icon

Think Twice Before You Fly

Portfolio Armor's Photo
by Portfolio Armor
Monday, Nov 20, 2023 - 0:13
DALL-E's take on an air traffic controller.
interestingly, we didn't ask DALL-E to draw a diverse air traffic controller--it made the controller diverse on its own. 

The Competency Crisis In Aviation Gets Worse

A recurring theme we've covered here has been the impact of affirmative action in aviation, most recently earlier this month ("How COVID And Affirmative Action Gutted Aviation Safety")

Now there's a disturbing post by Jared Taylor shedding more light on how affirmative action has eroded competence in aviation. We've excerpted it below, but before that, a brief update on a topic we've written about here before, hedged investing. 

Limiting Risk Where You Can 

Once you step into a commercial airliner, there's not much you can do to limit your risk--you're safety is in the hands of the pilots and air traffic controllers, as we'll see below. But with investing, you have the capability to define your risk ahead of time, as we've discussed here before. 

The basic idea with our system is you tell it the largest decline you're willing to risk over the next six months, how much you want to invest, and it presents you with a concentrated, hedged portfolio designed to maximize your returns while limiting your risk exactly as you indicated.

For example, this is the portfolio our system created on May 18th for a user looking to invest $3 million while not risking a decline of more than 15% over the next six months.

And here's how it's performed so far: up 9.74%, net of hedging and trading costs, versus up 8.31% for SPY. 

Screen captures via Portfolio Armor.

You can find an interactive version of that chart here. 

Now on to Jared Taylor's post. 

Excerpted via Jared Taylor's post on Unz.com [Emphasis ours]

Think Twice Before You Fly

A “diverse” air traffic controller could kill you.

There hasn’t been a fatal commercial airline accident in the US since 2009. We’re due for one. We’re due for a lot. The New York Times has published the results of its own study that found 300 near-collisions in the most recent year for which there were data.

Over the last 10 years, that number has more than doubled. Incompetent air traffic controllers are a big part of the problem.

Controllers tell pilots which runways to use, when to take off and land, and where to fly. If a controller gets it wrong, he can tell two planes to smash into each other, like a case from New Orleans this summer.

A controller told the green plane coming in from the left to land on the same runway from which the purple plane was about to take off.

The green plane aborted the landing and just avoided crashing into the purple plane.

In July, a controller told an Allegiant Air Flight cruising at 23,000 feet to turn right into the path of another plane.

The pilot had to make such a violent turn than a flight attendant fell and was injured so badly, the pilot had to land so she could get medical treatment. Passengers on board were praying and crying.

A US senator thinks he knows why there is so much incompetence. “Ted Cruz Asks Government Watchdog to Investigate DEI Hiring’s Role in FAA ‘Near-Misses’.”

Yes, DEI. I will explain.

Air traffic controllers work for the FAA, or Federal Aviation Administration, which is part of the Department of Transportation. Too many controllers are white. And so, in 2012, our black president, Barack Obama, ordered our Hispanic transportation secretary, Michael Huerta, to order the FAA to solve that awful problem.

Secretary Huerta ordered a Barrier Analysis Report.

You see, if there aren’t enough blacks or women it is always because of malicious barriers. The very first sentence of the report says that the secretary “made an historic commitment to transform the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) into a more diverse and inclusive workplace that reflects, understands, and relates to the diverse customers we serve.”

When you fly, you never see a controller. Controllers never see you. But they must reflect, understand, and relate.

The racism detectors found what they were looking for. White people – and Asians – were scoring too high on the controller aptitude test, called the AT-SAT. And they were getting better! “More troubling, there is evidence that the percentage of people scoring 85 or higher on the AT-SAT in certain RNO classifications – that means “race and national origin” – has been steadily increasing over the last three years at a higher rate than others.”

White people were pulling ahead!

Here is proof of racism: the percentages of various groups that scored 85 or better out of 100 on the AT-SAT. The previous three years had been grim.

Look at those pesky whites. In 2009, 68 percent scored 85 or better, and in the next years it was 74 percent and then 78 percent. And look at blacks: poking along at 37 percent, 36 percent, and 38 percent. Asians were another disaster; in the previous two years, they had the audacity to score as high as whites.

And, uh oh, women, in red, scored worse than men, in orange. So the AT-SAT was racist and sexist.

Look at the subject tests: dial reading, applied math, angles, air traffic scenarios. These are all spatial-mathematical tests. Men are better at them than women and whites and Asians are much better at them than blacks. So, the barrier analysts did what good barrier analysts do: They declared that “the AT-SAT is a barrier to RNO and gender diversity.”

So, in 2014, the FAA ditched the AT-SAT – which it had used for decades – and told all the people who had scored 85 or better and were waiting for a job offer that they had to take a brand-new test, called the Biographical Assessment.

This was an online personality test of 114 questions. It asked such things as: The number of different high school sports you played. The number of college credit hours you had in art, music, dance, or drama. Whether you had a job in any of the last three years. It was graded pass/fail, according to mysterious, never-acknowledged criteria.

My guess is that if you played a lot of sports and took no art classes, you were more likely to be black, so you passed.

You can read the rest here, or view the full post in video form below. 

 

Note To Our Trading Substack Subscribers:

We have three bullish trades and one bearish trade teed up for today on companies reporting after the close or before the open tomorrow. Our trade alert should be your inbox this afternoon. 

 

If You Want To Stay In Touch

You can scan for optimal hedges for individual securities, find our current top ten names, and create hedged portfolios on our website. You can also follow Portfolio Armor on Twitter here, or become a free subscriber to our trading Substack using the link below (we're using that for our occasional emails now).

Contributor posts published on Zero Hedge do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Zero Hedge, and are not selected, edited or screened by Zero Hedge editors.
0
Loading...