It’s not that women can’t fly airplanes.  I’m sure many can fly better than men.  But like the joke that women can’t drive cars, the assumption comes from somewhere, and it’s for a reason.  Men and women are different and have different priorities in how they live life.  Remember the experiment when NASCAR tried to make a driver out of Danica Patrick to satisfy some woke perception about the world?  She was a good driver, but there is a reason that more women aren’t in NASCAR.  There is a reason that girls play with Barbie dolls and boys play with cars and army men.  They are wired differently, and Danica never cracked into the championship column for sustained periods.  These days, she is an excellent conservative podcaster.  But even though NASCAR tried to make her into a star by following some ridiculous woke agenda, it was never successful. And she didn’t create a glass ceiling in NASCAR where suddenly there were a bunch of women driving in the sport.  We don’t have women quarterbacks for similar reasons.  The NFL has tried to find a role for women in the rough and tumble-NFL for all the wrong reasons.  But it has never worked out, and fans of football would never put up with it, including many women.  The attempts on most employment frontiers to defy biology and insist that there was no difference between men and women regarding social roles have been a disaster, and people aren’t happy with it.  So why would Delta make a decision to staff one of their airline divisions with mostly, if not all, women?  What evidence do they have that such a thing would work under any conditions? 

We should always seek to hire the best people for our positions, especially positions as important as flying airplanes.  We want pilots flying planes who have wanted to be pilots since they were fetuses, not going from an Easy Bake Oven and buying dresses for prom to flying people around in airplanes if you can provide a choice for yourself. Now we know from people close to the situation that the Delta pilot who crashed the plane in Toronto was Kendal Swanson, a 26-year-old without much experience.  Delta has been reluctant to release the names of the crew in that plane that day when a hard landing in Toronto busted the landing gear, shearing off a wing and sending the airplane over on its back in a flaming mess.  Luckily, nobody on the flight was killed.  They had a rough ride, but they made it to Toronto anyway, which says a lot about the planes’ safety.  The flight, operated by Endeavor Air (a Delta subsidiary), flipped upside down during a landing attempt at Toronto Pearson International Airport amid snowy conditions and strong winds. All 80 people on board survived, with 21 injured. Social media and some news outlets have linked the 26-year-old pilot named Kendal Swanson to the incident, alleging she was the first officer (co-pilot) to fly the plane. She reportedly joined Endeavor Air in January 2024, completed training in April, and received her Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) certification on January 9, 2025. Claims suggest she had around 1,500 flight hours—meeting the federal minimum for an ATP—but her relative inexperience has sparked debate, with some speculating she struggled with the challenging landing conditions.  Delta and Endeavor have not officially confirmed her identity or role. Delta has stated that the pilots were experienced, with the captain hired in 2007 and the first officer exceeding federal flight experience requirements. The captain, said to be named James Henneman, was reportedly handling communications while the first officer flew the aircraft, though this remains unverified by the airline. Delta has also pushed back against what it calls “false and misleading” social media claims, insisting both pilots were fully qualified and that no training failures occurred.

So here we have a case where Delta, as an airline, got caught trying to put a square peg in a round hole and create job fulfillment for people who should not be flying people around due to her lack of experience.  The passengers were made to do a social experiment to fulfill some DEI worldview, which made that flight much more dangerous than it needed to be.  They dug in and denied the reports when they were caught, hoping they could contain the story.  But the flying public needs to know how many pilots are out there who are just like this young girl, Kendal Swanson.  It’s not just because Kendal is a woman. This has been a problem worldwide, and airlines are trying to make pilots out of people who have not spent all their lives as pilots.  In the United States, we have had a good military program where post-retirement pilots could make a pretty good living flying for airlines after they spent decades flying planes in the military.  And countries that don’t have the kind of military that we do struggle to find pilots for their airlines because they don’t have cultures that produce many pilots.  They go from Uber drivers to airline pilots because manufacturers try to make the planes as easy to fly as possible.  So, it’s hard enough to satisfy the market need under optimal conditions.  Putting 26-year-old girls in the cockpit to tell the world that the employer hired females becomes a big problem.  And that Endeavor Airlines themselves were seeking to hire women over men because they wanted it to be known that they were putting women in planes purely over gender politics. 

I always tell people that airplane pilots are the best examples of stress management.  When flying in a plane and bouncing around in turbulence, you don’t want a panicky pilot who shows panic on the intercom.  You want an incredible, calm voice even when the world is burning around you.  And that level of stress management comes from experience.  Inexperienced people panic, and as passengers on airplanes, we never want to hear panic in the voice of the person flying us around.  We like when we leave the plane to see an older man sitting in the seat that looks like he has landed on aircraft carriers in bumpy seas thousands of times.  Not a kid that looks like they are in a hurry to cash in a Target gift card.  And crashes like this, even though Delta has tried to cover it up, come when we lower the standards of employment to satisfy some ridiculous DEI political movement.  The result is many of the crashes of airplanes that we have been seeing, and they are happening now because, under Joe Biden, DEI was a priority.  They were undoubtedly mistakes, but now that there is pressure from an economy wanting to thrive under Trump, people are flying and doing things again.  The airlines weren’t prepared for it, and they are putting people like Kendal Swanson in the cockpits of their planes when, in truth, she probably needs another ten years of hard flying to qualify to fly other passengers.  And that hiring policy is blowing up in their face, and they tried to hide it. 

Rich Hoffman

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