airline pilots are raging idiots....

Over the course of the last year, i have had the opportunity to spend a great deal of time with the flight crews of the commercial airlines of the US. Most of these experiences have been pleasant and highly informative; but there has been one consistent depressing and irritating tone: pilots. Contrary to what most people might believe, the men (and 90% of them are men) are for the most part: white, conservative, former military, FoxNews-watching, misogynist bastards. And worse, they are arrogant, self-centered, solipsistic, fascist, rather racist, pinhead peckerwoods who care only and solely about themselves as elitists, while hypocritically demanding they are all about the safety of others. It is painful to experience, and helps one realize why there is a bullet-proofed locked door between them and the world.

These shit for brains, deeply believe they are some god's gift to the planet, while simultaneously dyssing their flight attendants, their peers from other airlines, and the general public. There are, of course, some rare exceptions (as there are a few female pilots and one or two black ones) but for the most part, the members of the airline pilots associations are every bit the reason we have had to endure the Bush/Cheney administration for so damn long. They never apologize for the delays they personally cause (oversleeping, previous night partying (using their carefully negotiated benefit of claiming FAA exempted exhaustion), taking the airplane itself past its safe zones thus requiring FAA ground inspections after legs {and making the next flights cancel} etc. They never apologize for bad landings, because, well, it is really something they had no control over although they spend inordinate amounts of time in the simulators practicing for all conditions. They will not apologize or acknowledge that passengers might perceive the flying of the plane (take off, sudden altitude shifts, and landing) as glaringly unsafe, because the passengers don't know anything about flying.

But pilots will be the first to complain about anything someone outside the airplane does in their daily jobs, because they are magically (and miraculously) experts in all manner of things: religion, education, politics, social relations, driving, dining, packing, music, logistics, etc. How they gain this expertise, one can never know, but experts they are and people better praise them for that. The hypocrisy of this is staggeringly appalling. I can't begin to recount the number of times i have been told this or that by them, regardless that they: possess light-years-less education, are terrifyingly unqualified, and lack even the remotest period of daily experience that this presumed expertise might suggest. If you carefully read the FAA qualifications for becoming a commercial airline pilot, you discover that they need only be 18 years of age, experienced in a variety of aircraft and simulators, have demonstrated skills and attributes to inspectors and instructors at various flight academies, flown diverse planes of increasing size and power. You notice they don't have to pass any basic literacy tests, nor graduate from universities, nor demonstrate skills in any sort of venues outside of flying a plane.

Pilots are: bigots, idiots, fascists, womanizing misogynists, far-right conservatives. They disdain all that are not pilots, as being lesser people than them (though this often includes other pilots of other airlines). Next time you fly off into the blue, remember these are not the friendly skies, but rather the nightmare asshole ones.

***UPDATE: Much is being made about the pilot of the US Airways plane that was ditched into the Hudson River. He is being hailed as a hero for doing his job; thus demonstrating all the more clearly how the general public has enabled these creeps to become giant-headed fucktards. The pilots--yes there were actually two of them who needed to coordinate actions--followed all of the procedures and steps they had been trained to follow in simulator simulations (pilots retrain, on average, two weeks of each year on simulators programmed to create these sorts of emergency situations). If this pilot is a hero for demonstrating his competency for following the script, there can be no wonder how deep into the quagmire of bullshit the Dick-n-Bush administration has taken the connotations of competency. We are fucked.