MICAELA BURROW, Daily Caller
The U.S. Air Force abandoned an experiment aimed at boosting pilot training graduation rates for women and minority pilots after the 2021 initiative failed to achieve the intended results and officers privately warned it could violate anti-discrimination policies, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
As part of the larger military-wide effort to promote diversity in the service’s pilot ranks, the 19th Air Force command near San Antonio, Texas, “clustered” racial minorities and female trainees into one class, dubbed “America’s Class,” to find out if doing so would improve the pilots’ graduation rates. However, not only did the effort fail to boost minority and women candidates’ success rates, but officers involved say they were ordered to engage in potentially unlawful discrimination by excluding white males from the class, documents show.
Unlawful or not, the Air Force’s actions raised red flags for an active-duty pilot instructor who spoke to the DCNF.
“When other priorities, like gender or race, are introduced as a metric of assignment and advancement, the foundations of performance-based competition are sacrificed and the emphasis on safety takes a backseat,” a current Air Force instructor pilot and former trainer for Undergraduate Pilot Training, who spoke on a condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, told the DCNF.
A “significant backlog” of pilot candidates waiting to begin classes offered the 19th Air Force, which conducts pilot training for the entire service at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas, a chance to build a class from scratch, a spokesperson for Air Education and Training Command (AETC) told the DCNF. So, the 19th Air Force “clustered” candidates from “underrepresented groups” into Specialized Undergraduate Pilot Training (SUPT) class 21-15, with the initial intent of roughly mirroring the racial and gender makeup of the U.S.
Class 21-15 was known as “America’s Class,” according to a class patch also embroidered with the motto, “hand picked for excellence.”
The class ended up being comprised of at least 62% underrepresented groups, according to a demographic breakdown of classes from 2020 to 2023 obtained by the DCNF. The DCNF did not include males who chose the “other” option, which includes those who declined to specify their ethnicity, in that calculation.
All other classes for 2020 and 2021 are comprised of one-third or less underrepresented groups, the document shows.
‘Anybody Non-White’
Officers ordered to participate in the creation of class 21-15 expressed concerns that selection criteria amounted to unlawful discrimination, according to a memo obtained by the DCNF.
Source https://dailycaller.com/2023/05/08/air-force-social-experiment-diversity-minority-discrimination/
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