People need to stop being an embarrassment to the profession. There’s almost not a single person here who wasn’t hired AFTER someone else, often but not always white and male, who was younger, with fewer hours and less or even zero turbine PIC. Even back in the just post-merger hiring we hired 24 and I think 23 YO’s with little to no PIC. It happens. They were usually well connected to my knowledge and the few I know have been solid. Get over it and recognize that if we put pilots exclusively in charge of hiring we would probably start with squadron buds and regional pilots we knew personally.

At the end of the day we now need to hire a whole lot of pilots (in a smaller pool than in the past) and they can’t all come from the same demographic. This is fine. It’s awesome even. But we do all have to meet the same standard and that standard hasn’t gotten weaker and shouldn’t. That’s our most important goal at the end of the day. The rest is just BS political posturing.