The Absurd GOP

[Rev. Rye]

Okay, now I want to know if we keep stats like “plane crashes by race of pilot” and see if that holds up.

Plane crashes are an uncommon enough event that sample size seems to be a problem.

What's worth noting, I'm currently in the process of Googling "black pilots plane crashes." Here's what I'm finding so far (and I'm just counting the ones that actually are confirmed to be black):

• The Tuskegee Airmen from World War II. 
  
• Bessie Coleman, the first black female aviator, and the 1926 crash that killed her.
  
• LeRoy Homer Jr., one of the pilots of United 93; given what happened on that flight, he's probably one of the last people to blame for any loss of life.
  
• Yared Getachew, one of the pilots of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. I actually covered this subject for a Business Ethics term paper, incidentally. It was because of, of all things, a software issue that was supposed to compensate for a shoddy redesign of the Boeing 737. Also, given the name of the airline in question, I suspect it has bugger-all to do with American DEI initiatives, unless Kenyans have had significant discrimination issues in Ethiopia. 
  
  
  Also, that movie where Denzel Washington played a pilot who managed to reduce casualties on a malfunctioning plane by FLYING THE DAMN THING UPSIDE DOWN.

But nothing about recent* plane crashes where the pilot is both A) Black, and B) made errors that caused a crash. I'm not even saying that there aren't any (there's 45,000 commercial flights in the US per day, and with 3.4% of pilots being black, 1530 of them probably have at least one black pilot, it'd be pimp-slapping willing suspension of disbelief if, multiplying all those daily flights over almost 60 years**, NOBODY fucked up), but you'd think it'd be easier to find ANY examples if it were such a problem. I'm not even finding some racist site listing a bunch of plane crashes, all united by the fact that it had at least one pilot with a significant amount of melanin.

* Note: I'm defining "recent" as "after David E. Harris was hired as the first black pilot on a commercial flight in 1964."
** Multiplying all those numbers, the number would be just shy of 34 million flights. That said, between COVID and the fact that there's no way it stayed at a constant 3.4% level for 59 years, it's probably lower; I suspect it's still in the tens of millions, though. Maybe the high single-digit millions. Still not likely that in all those flights, NOBODY fucked up.