The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Death by ‘Equality’

Posted on | April 27, 2025 | Comments Off on Death by ‘Equality’

Rebecca Lobach killed 66 innocent people

Captain Becky “did not turn left”:

As they flew south along the Potomac River on the gusty night of Jan. 29, the crew aboard an Army Black Hawk helicopter attempted to execute a common aviation practice. It would play a role in ending their lives.
Shortly after the Black Hawk passed over Washington’s most famous array of cherry trees, an air traffic controller at nearby Ronald Reagan National Airport alerted the crew to a regional passenger jet in its vicinity. The crew acknowledged seeing traffic nearby.
One of the pilots then asked for permission to employ a practice called “visual separation.” That allows a pilot to take control of navigating around other aircraft, rather than relying on the controller for guidance.
“Visual separation approved,” the controller replied.
The request to fly under those rules is granted routinely in airspace overseen by controllers. Most of the time, visual separation is executed without note. But when mishandled, it can also create a deadly risk — one that aviation experts have warned about for years.
On Jan. 29, the Black Hawk crew did not execute visual separation effectively.

(To say the least.)

The pilots either did not detect the specific passenger jet the controller had flagged, or could not pivot to a safer position. Instead, one second before 8:48 p.m., the helicopter slammed into American Airlines Flight 5342, which was carrying 64 people to Washington from Wichita, Kan., killing everyone aboard both aircraft in a fiery explosion that lit the night sky over the river. . . .

(You must read all the way down to the 34th paragraph before the New York Times even mentions the name of the helicopter pilot.)

The crew’s mission was to conduct an annual evaluation of Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, who joined the Army in 2019, to ensure that her helicopter piloting skills were up to par.

(And then, all the way at the very end . . .)

Instead of seeing and avoiding Flight 5342, Captain Lobach continued flying straight at it. . . .
The Black Hawk was 15 seconds away from crossing paths with the jet. Warrant Officer Eaves then turned his attention to Captain Lobach.
He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left, toward the east river bank.
Turning left would have opened up more space between the helicopter and Flight 5342, which was heading for Runway 33 at an altitude of roughly 300 feet.
She did not turn left.

There is a lot left unsaid in the New York Times article which, it should be obvious, is primarily intended to obscure the fact that (a) the crash was caused by pilot error and (b) the pilot was female.

Do not accuse me of saying something I’m not saying, i.e., that this particular crash happened because the pilot was female, or that there is no such thing as a qualified female pilot. Every day, hundreds of successful flights are made by female pilots, including military pilots. Furthermore, if you were to research aircraft crashes in which pilot error was chiefly to blame, no doubt the overwhelming majority of those pilots are male. Perhaps it would be possible to show from such statistics (which I haven’t even bothered to Google, much less to analyze) that female pilots are more prone to catastrophic errors than are male pilots, but the fact remains that most female pilots are never involved in crashes, so that the deadly error committed by Rebecca Lobach cannot be said to reflect badly on female pilots in general. However . . .

All of these caveats, necessary to prevent anyone from misconstruing my argument, do not detract from the issue of public policy involved here, namely the implementation of official quotas under the aegis of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI). We are more than a half-century into this kind of experimental social engineering, and the same thing is true today as it was when the Supreme Court handed down the Bakke decision in 1978 — every attempt to implement what used to be called “affirmative action,” but has since been rebranded as “diversity” or DEI, led to discriminatory quotas, which are unconstitutional.

Some people want to ignore this reality, pretending that you can have a “diversity” policy that somehow doesn’t lead to quotas, but good luck finding a real-life example of such a policy, because I’ve been looking a long time and have never seen one. Quotas lead to favoritism and, regardless of who the intended benificiaries of this favoritism may be, the result is a lowering of standards — or, more to the point, the creation of double-standards, with the quota beneficiaries held to a lower standard.

Does the name Kara Hultgreen ring a bell? Here we are, more than 30 years after Hultgreen was the beneficiary of double standards that resulted in her death, and some people are still in denial about the danger created by these policies. The feminist slogan “the personal is political” serves to explain the problem faced by critics of the DEI agenda, namely that if you criticize the policy, you’re accused to “hating” the intended beneficiaries (as if dying in a crash were some kind of benefit).

Without repeating the entire paragraph of caveats I’ve previously stipulated, permit me to deny hating women, and I especially want to make clear that I do not wish to disparage Rebecca Lobach. It appears that Lobach came from a conservative family. She was homeschooled, and her grandfather is a banker who has contributed thousands of dollars to Republican candidates. She had “more than 450 hours of flight time” since being commissioned in 2019 and had “twice served as platoon leader and as a company executive officer in the 12th Aviation Battalion.” We might further stipulate that the circumstances of that January 29 training mission involved a high degree of difficulty, even for an experienced pilot — flying at night in an urbanized area near a major commercial airport in a situation where a difference in altitude between 150 feet and 200 feet could be the difference between life and death.

All that being said, however, we must ask whether Lobach was the beneficiary of a quota system, intended to guarantee that the Army had a certain number (or percentage) of female Black Hawk pilots.

The appropriate quota? Zero.

Let’s be clear about this: The Army could recruit and train a sufficient number of male pilots to operate every single Black Hawk helicopter in their arsenal without ever needing a single female pilot, and every one of those male pilots would demonstrate a level of proficiency equal or superior to Lobach’s proficiency. There is not a single male Black Hawk pilot in the Army who is less proficient than Lobach was. In fact, I’m about 100% sure that military personnel will back me up when I say that the Army’s problem is not that it has too few helicopter pilots, but rather that the available number of pilot assignments is much smaller than the number of troops who would like to become pilots. There is a competition for those spots, and the number of helicopter assignments available to would-be pilots who are male is reduced because a certain number of those assignments are set aside as a de facto quota for females.

Understand that we are not talking about a hypothetical scenario in which the question is whether (some) women possess the requisite aptitude for helicopter piloting, The question involves some very practical considerations. First, whether the number of women who possess the minimal level of aptitude is equal to the number of similarly qualified men, and second, without regard to aptitude, whether equal numbers of women and men are interested in becoming military helicopter pilots.

Comparatively few young women are even interested in joining the military — women are about 51% of the U.S. population, but only 17.5% of U.S. military personal, indicating that men are nearly five times more likely than women to pursue military careers. And here’s an interesting bit of trivia: After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the percentage of women enlisted in the military actually decreased, while the percentage of women officers continued to increase. In other words, when the prospect of being deployed into an overseas war zone went up, fewer women were willing to volunteer for service, except as officers. The whole project of “women in combat” is about creating career opportunities for female officers, and being a Black Hawk helicopter pilot is a combat-duty assignment. Most pilots are non-coms (153A warrant officers) who come from the enlisted ranks; the reason a commissioned Army officer becomes a pilot is so they can act as commander of an aviation unit, as in the case of Rebecca Lobach, who led a platoon of the 12th Aviation Battalion. As a matter of policy, the relevant point is that among Army officers, the number of men who would choose such an assignment is so much larger than the number of women that the Army could easily fill all its Black Hawk pilot officer berths with men, and there still wouldn’t be enough available slots for every qualified candidate. The only reason that there are any female Black Hawk pilots is because of quotas.

We cannot say with certainty, however, that the Army’s DEI quota policy caused the January 29 crash that killed Rebecca Lobach and two other members of the Black Hawk crew (Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Eave and crew chief Staff Sgt. Ryan O’Hara) as well as 64 people on board American Airlines Flight 5342. It is possible that a similarly qualified male pilot might have made the same mistake that Lobach made. But if there were no female pilots, there would be no crashes caused by female pilots, and we wouldn’t be left to wonder if double standards had something to do with this deadly disaster. Also, we wouldn’t be talking about the interesting (and perhaps relevant) fact that Lobach hadn’t been flying a helicopter much recently because she had spent the previous two years serving as “a military social aide at the White House during the administration of former President Joe Biden.”

Captain Becky at the White House

By the way, if anyone is really interested in this topic, permit me to suggest how you would prove that there the Army has a quota for female helicopter pilots. Trace the number of active-duty female pilots over time. Because we know that females were once excluded from combat duty as a matter of policy, you can locate the point in time at which we went from zero female Black Hawk pilots to one. Beginning with the first such pilot, you could then trace the number as it increased year-by-year, and I’d be willing to wager that in all those years, there has never been a point at which the percentage of female Black Hawk pilots has decreased. In other words, when asked the question, “How many female Black Hawk pilots do we need?” the Army has always answered, “More.” The number of available pilot assignments is always greater than the number of qualified male candidates; therefore the exiting number of assignments held by women becomes the minimum number, and male candidates are thus excluded from a certain number of potential opportunities, because those assignments are set aside as female-only positions.

This was the “tell” about racial quotas at Harvard. They were sued by Asian-American students who alleged that they were the victims of discrimination. As part of the discovery process, Harvard was compelled to supply data about their admissions policy, which showed that every year, 14% of Harvard freshmen were black. The percentage never varied — it was never 12% or 17%, but always 14% — because this number had, in fact, been established as a “goal” or “target,” i.e., a quota. Furthermore, it could be demonstrated that, in terms of their GPAs and test scores, a very large number of Asian applicants were rejected by Harvard who would have been admitted, had they been black. Harvard’s (illegal) quota for black students could only be met by having a double standard.

Something similar has undoubtedly happened with the Army, and the deadly crash involving Rebecca Lobach could be the incident that exposes the extent to which quotas and double standards have eroded the combat effectiveness of our military, to say nothing of how harmful DEI policy has been to male service members by reducing their career opportunities.

Oh, and I almost forgot something: The crash happened on a Wednesday night. Two days later, on a Friday, the Army identified the two male soldiers on the Black Hawk crew but, at the request of Lobach’s family, the Army withheld her identity until that Sunday. Why? So that her family could scrub her entire social media presence. It is futile to speculate what might have been on her Twitter/Facebook/Instagram accounts, but when her family released a statement about her death, it included some interesting phrases:

We are devastated by the loss of our beloved Rebecca. She was a bright star in all our lives. . . .
Rebecca was many things. She was a daughter, sister, partner, and friend.

Whose “partner” was she? Never mind . . .

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)



 

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Category: Feminism, Military

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