When I first got to Africa, there was a surplus of pilots in the world. So many had been trained in recent wars that many had to go to obscure African countries to get jobs.
At the same time a lot of people began to ask why, since there had been black rulers in those countries for years, there were no black PILOTS there?
I had many a drink with the white pilots down there, and they were not the only ones who explained to me why they didn’t have black pilots down there.
They tried to introduce black pilots slowly. They would put an African co-pilot in the cockpit with a white pilot.
And the passengers would walk off the plane.
It was never the WHITE passengers who got off the plane. They were familiar with the concept of pilot and co-pilot, and they knew that African planes involved a certain risk anyway.
The media never reports a plane crashing out in the African bush-country.
No, it was the BLACKS who got off the plane. They were not about to go into the sky with a black man flying the plane.
I STILL have never seen a black man in the cockpit, but it has been a long time since I was out in the bush.
#1 by Anonymous on 12/06/2005 - 5:46 pm
The state airline of the United Arab Emirates recently ran a big ad campaign here and in Europe. The ads were in magazines, on the sides of buses, everywhere.
The point of the ad was to emphasize how their pilots are all blond, blue-eyed white guys from the USA, UK and Australia.