If you love merit-based systems, love it when the best players play, you might’ve subconsciously pumped your fist as you headed into the weekend. Or, if you’re a frequent flier, you might’ve breathed an audible sigh of relief.

On Friday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced a mandatory new operations specification from the Federal Aviation Administration requiring all commercial airlines to formally commit to merit-based hiring for their pilots. Failure to do so will subject carriers to federal investigation.

Finally, a transportation secretary who’s not transfixed by the “racism” of our roadways, a guy who’s more interested in airline passenger safety than renaming “cockpit” to “flight deck.”

“When families board their aircraft,” said Duffy, “they should fly with confidence knowing the pilot behind the controls is the best of the best. The American people don’t care what their pilot looks like or their gender — they just care that they are [the] most qualified man or woman for the job.”

Think of it this way: When a kid on your son’s travel team cracks the starting lineup not because he’s hitting the cover off the ball but because his parents are in tight with the coach, the team might be able to hide him. After all, he’s one of nine in a baseball lineup. On your daughter’s basketball team, though, that “inclusive” starter is one of five, so she’s a bit harder to hide. But there’s no hiding an unqualified pilot. That guy, or gal, is one of one. And the stakes aren’t a ballgame, nor does the box score count strikeouts or RBIs or rebounds or assists. The box score of every flight piloted by a DEI hire is counted in people’s lives.

Once in a while, we’re reminded that these are real people, not abstractions. Such was the case last week when we saw a young American Olympian figure skater, Maxim Naumov, take to the ice in Milan with a couple of empty seats in his cheering section. His parents, Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova, were World Figure Skating Champions in 1994. They were also among the 67 people killed 13 months ago when an Army Black Hawk collided with an American Airlines passenger jet over the Potomac, wiping out everyone aboard both aircraft.

Our mainstream media worked overtime to avoid telling the whole truth about that midair disaster, chalking it up to some nebulous failure to communicate. But here’s the inconvenient part: A female pilot was at the controls of the Black Hawk, and she repeatedly ignored instructions from the air traffic controller.

Indeed, if you think we’ve been dodging DEI bullets regarding airline travel these past 20 years or so, you’re wrong. Dead wrong. We’ve taken plenty of slugs, center mass. A recent column by former White House lawyer Daniel Huff does the postmortem, shares the receipts, and delivers a devastating indictment of our nation’s deadly dalliance with diversity: “I analyzed every US commercial flight crash with onboard fatalities attributed to pilot error since 2000,” he writes. “Women and minorities represent less than 10% of pilots, yet were factors in four out of eight crashes.”

According to Huff, “Exhibit A” is the 2019 Atlas Air crash at Trinity Bay, Texas:

The National Transportation Safety Board determined the cause to be “the inappropriate response by the first officer,” Conrad Aska, a black pilot at the controls. A check airman (an experienced pilot who oversees quality and safety) described his “piloting performance as among the worst he had ever seen.” When faced with an unexpected situation in the simulator, Aska would “get extremely flustered and could not respond appropriately.” NTSB found Aska panicked after accidentally initiating a go-around procedure and flew the plane into the ground.

Before that, there was the Colgan Air crash in Buffalo in 2009. As Huff reports, “The male captain stalled the aircraft, but the female first officer, who’d never flown in icy conditions, made it worse. ‘She inappropriately retracted the flaps,’ cited by NTSB as a cause of the crash, which killed 50.”

But it’s not just commercial aviation. DEI has infected military aviation as well. Remember the Navy’s first female F-14 pilot? Her name was Kara Hultgreen, and she crashed and died in 1994. As Huff writes: “Officials declared it a ‘gender-neutral accident,’ citing engine failure. Her training commander insisted, ‘We have one standard, and everyone has to meet that.’ These were lies. A whistleblower leaked the true records five months later: pilot error. Hultgreen had four ‘downs,’ safety violations that would have washed out any male pilot.”

Translation: DEI killed Kara Hultgreen.

And on and on it goes. The most disturbing part is the naked attempts to cover up the incompetence. As a friend of mine, a retired commercial pilot, tells it, “This cover-up has occurred within the ivory tower of the airline industry. The training failures that would never be accepted for normal trainees are being pushed through. ‘Just keep training them. Get them through, whatever it takes.’”

For you air travelers, do with this what you will: My friend also noted that United is “the worst” when it comes to DEI. And sure enough, he’s right.

Change is coming, though. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford puts it this way: “It is a bare minimum expectation for airlines to hire the most qualified individual when making someone responsible for hundreds of lives at a time. Someone’s race, sex, or creed, has nothing to do with their ability to fly and land aircraft safely.”