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I remember what air travel was like in the dark and moldy days before social progress. Back then, you could board your plane without being forced to arrive at the airport two hours before flight time and to wade glumly through labyrinthine lines where grumpy, black TSA agents tore through your baggage and you had to raise your hands over your head like a criminal suspect as federal machines scanned your body to see if you’d hidden guns or drugs under your nuts. Planes had extra leg room, didn’t charge for luggage, and you’d get a free meal, even on short flights. All of the “flight attendants” were sexy white girls known as “stewardesses,” and all of the pilots were white men.

But then came progress.

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Last week, air travel was shut down across the United States for about 12 hours starting on Tuesday evening and ending the next morning. As of late Wednesday afternoon, over 1,100 flights had been canceled and more than 9,000 flights delayed. Officials at the Federal Aviation Administration said the meltdown was caused by a “damaged database file” in their NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) communications system but that there was no evidence of a cyber-attack.

According to the Associated Press:

Longtime aviation insiders could not recall an outage of such magnitude caused by a technology failure. Some compared it in scope to the nationwide shutdown of airspace after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Back in the days of stewardesses and free airline meals, “NOTAM” stood for “Notice to Air Men.” But then progress came along and changed it “Notice to Air Missions” lest they offend women and the sexually ambiguous.

On January 5, the week before the mass shutdown that reminded aviators of the outage following the September 11 attacks, a door blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight, necessitating an emergency landing in Portland, Oregon “as startled passengers clutched oxygen masks with a gaping hole in the plane.”

In December, The Wall Street Journal announced that “[t]he Federal Aviation Administration reported 19 serious runway incursions” from January to October of 2023. “Runway incursions” is an antiseptic way of describing what the New York Post bluntly refers to as “instances in which airplanes nearly smashed into one another.”

This past Monday, The Telegraph reported that a Boeing jet with 65 people aboard was “forced to turn back to Sapporo, Japan” after a crack was found in a cockpit window.

As alarming as all this might sound, we can take solace in the fact that airlines are purging their ranks of employees who say “nigger.”

Less than a year after George Floyd’s unfortunate death — I don’t mean it’s unfortunate that he died, I mean it’s a shame how his death was used as an excuse to force myriad inconveniences and outright danger upon we, the unfortunate — Boeing bragged that it had fired 65 employees and disciplined an additional 53 “over racist conduct.” According to Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun, “There is no place for hate within our company, and we will keep expecting the best from everyone in their interactions with one another.”

Boeing, whose quotient of minority employees had already stood at 31% by 2021, vowed to increase their quotient of black employees by 20%, which would make white employees a statistical minority.

In a recent interview, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby vowed that “[w]e have committed that 50% of the classes will be women or people of color. Today, only 19% of our pilots at United Airlines are women or people of color.”

If you’d like to taste a rainbow of vomit in your mouth, check out the promotional video about “Virgin Atlantic’s updated gender identity policy,” in which pioneering punk-rock seamstress Vivienne Westwood trots out a crew of sexually-ambiguous flight attendants to dazzle and beguile us.

Virgin Atlantic’s updated gender identity policy

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is overseen by Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the Affirmatively Anal appointee who did such a wonderful job handling that chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio.

The FAA’s “Diversity and Inclusion” page, which has the cute subhead “Diversity Takes Flight,” asserts that diversity is critical to the aviation industry without bothering to explain why:

Because diversity is so critical, FAA actively supports and engages in a variety of associations, programs, coalitions and initiatives to support and accommodate employees from diverse communities and backgrounds. . . . The mission of the FAA involves securing the skies of a diverse nation. It only makes sense that the workforce responsible for that mission reflects the nation that it serves.

The FAA proudly declares that they cultivate special emotional support groups for homosexuals, Injuns, Hispanics, Asians, blacks, women — pretty much every group except straight white males, unless you have the good fortune to suffer some sort of physical or cognitive disability. In that case, your special needs garner you extra-special attention:

The Secretary of Transportation has set a hiring goal of three (3) percent per fiscal year for individuals with targeted (severe) disabilities. . . . The targeted disabilities are:

• Hearing (total deafness in both ears)


• Vision (Blind)


• Missing Extremities


• Partial Paralysis


• Complete Paralysis, Epilepsy


• Severe intellectual disability


• Psychiatric disability


• Dwarfism

An industry populated with blind, limbless, emotionally unstable dwarfs with low IQs? On second thought, I think I’ll drive instead.

John P. Benison serves — as much as is possible for a man who has been legally blind since birth and has eyes that look as if God squeezed them an inch apart from one another — as the Assistant Administrator for the FAA’s Office of Civil Rights. His official FAA “About” page is a piping-hot bowl of woke alphabet soup that probably sounds profound to dumb people but suggests that his main job is to help hire not the most qualified applicants, but the most socially atypical:

Mr. Benison is responsible for assuring full, affirmative implementation of civil rights, equal opportunity, and diversity precepts within the FAA for over 47,000 employees and recipients of federal assistance. Mr. Benison is the principal advisor to the Administrator concerning civil rights, equal opportunity, and diversity matters. As the FAA Equal Opportunity Officer, Mr. Benison directs the civil rights, equal opportunity, and diversity program consistent with the Department of Transportation Office of Civil Rights, The Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Commission, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Departments of Labor and Justice policies.

Benison’s college alumnus page at George Washington University — which uses the same devastatingly sexy photo as his FAA page — describes him as “a proud, openly gay man and the father of an adopted 8-year-old daughter.” It quotes Benison opining on how he was able to triumph over adversity: “I had a strong support system — my family and at GW — so I never felt like there was anything I couldn’t do.”

Nothing you couldn’t do? How about flying a plane?

Although I could find no specific FAA policy that outright forbids the blind from being airline pilots — as was parodied in an October 2022 headline from the Babylon Bee, “In Major Win for Diversity, Airline Hires Blind Pilot” — I’ve heard rumors that federal authorities, at least currently, aren’t ready to close their eyes and take that bold parachute jump into full-throttle tolerance.

It all reminds me of a cartoon from the early 1990s by the inimitable A. Wyatt Mann: “HIRE THE HANDICAPPED . . . BUT NOT AS NEWSCASTERS.” So if you insist on hiring the blind, at least keep them out of the cockpit.