Totally different issue, with different arguments.

The "advantage of birth" is really the "advantage of hard work and success" that puts one in a position to provide good things to your children. Not much different than hiring your kids to work in the family business, or leaving them an inheritance.

Helping your kids out is as American as apple pie.

Affirmative action is the GOVERNMENT telling you who to hire, supposedly to right wrongs committed hundreds of years ago by dead people (in the case of women, we're going back to long before recorded history )

Now there IS a reasonable argument that because of the high safety sensitivity in the airline industry that pilot hiring should be done on merit only without any outside factors considered. But the only practical way to do that would be to nationalize the 121 pilot force and make us all federal employees...the airlines would then rent us from the fed at a consistent rate, effectively taking pilot compensation out of the competitive equation. There's a lot of merit to this...given the adverse safety impact of pilot career instability and poverty, this would let the pilots worry about flying and being safe and let managers worry about competition and cost -cutting. We would have to give up the very top of the pay scale...no $200K+ pax pilots, but you would more than make up for that by getting paid a reasonable rate early in your career.

Disclaimer: I have no family connections in the airlines.