You may have heard of Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who in 2009 managed a successful emergency landing of an Airbus A320 in the Hudson River, saving all 155 passengers. They made a movie. You may also have heard that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” considerations are sometimes trumping training and experience on major airlines these days. As you may imagine, Sullenberger has thoughts.

In an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune, he writes:

In backrooms and dark corners, airline lobbyists, particularly the Regional Airline Association, are scurrying all over Washington, still trying to undo all the hard work that has been done to make air travel the safest form of transportation in human history. They’re doing this for the usual reasons. They want to try to cheapen pilot training and levels of experience for their own financial gain and expedience. They’re trying to do what is easier and cheaper for them, not what is best for passengers or crews, or for their industry.

Once again, it is necessary that those of us who deeply understand that safety really must be the priority are having to refight the same battles that we have had to fight too many times before.

He laments the efforts to “weaken pilot experience requirements” in order to achieve more diversity of pilots. In some cases, half the experience would net the job.

If we were trying to provide more physicians to serve rural areas, would we suggest that the answer would be to cut medical school in half from four years to two years? No! We’d say that would be crazy — because it is crazy.

Indeed, he explains why so much experience is necessary before “paying passengers” are depending on the pilot. This includes lengthy encounters with seasonal weather patterns all over the country.

The way pilots develop the critically important judgment they must have is through effective experience in the real world of operational flying, with its challenges and ambiguities, not in the hand-holding of the sterile training environment and not just in simulated flight.

The lobbyists are also pulling an old debater’s trick, posing a false choice between quantity and quality of flight training and experience. They are trying to convince us that if the quality of training is good enough, then less of it should be required, when in reality, we can and we must have both.

His own experience, and that of his first officer, on the fateful flight in 2009 is what enabled them to safely land the plane in extreme duress. That same experience keeps crews from complacency during uneventful flights. He concludes:

Pilots must have the aptitude and the diligence to strive for excellence and become the best of the best. And we must arm them with the knowledge, skill, experience and judgment necessary to handle whatever challenges they will face.

High levels of pilot training and experience literally make the difference between success and failure, life and death. And in safety-critical domains like aviation, everyone involved must have a deep understanding that “just good enough” — isn’t.

Read the whole thing here.