Math for Democrats: 30 is less than 19

by philg

“Young Aviation Record-Setters Share Secrets to Success at 2022 NBAA-BACE” (NBAA.org, today):

Barrington Irving, founder and CEO of Flying Classroom, moved with his family from Jamaica to the U.S. and grew up in a rough neighborhood in Miami. In 2010, at age 23, he became the youngest and first African-American to fly solo around the world.

Shaesta Waiz, founder and president of Dreams Soar, came to the United States from Afghanistan with her family and quickly became fascinated with aviation. In 2017 that drove her, at age 30, to become the youngest single-engine pilot at the time to circumnavigate the globe solo.

Unless Mr. Irving had a multi-engine airplane, which a Google search reveals is false (he flew a Columbia/Cessna 400), we are forced to conclude that 30 is less than 23. Folks who remember Matt Guthmiller’s 2014 flight are forced to conclude that 30 is less than 19. (The current record-holder was just 17 years old at the time (August 2022).)

Here’s a problematic paragraph:

“To be honest, I did not resonate with Amelia Earhart,” Waiz said. “Yes, she’s a woman. But she had such a different background than me. When I read Barrington’s story and how he kind of grew up in the ghetto of Miami – a similar background to how I grew up – and I saw that he did it, that was my proof that I could do it, too.”

I hope that she was not saying “I figured that if a Black person could do it then it must be pretty easy”!

In case the article is memory-holed:

19 thoughts on “Math for Democrats: 30 is less than 19”

    • I think they simply meant to write “the youngest single-engine FEMALE pilot”. But the result of sloppiness plus a commitment to social justice = comedy.

  2. Not impressed. Lindbergh was 25. But as a white male pilot he gets very little recognition.

    Göring did give him a medal but Trump never gave him credit as the first America Firster!

  3. They seem to have implicit male/female categories, unlike in chess, where they are explicit (we know that men and women are exactly the same, but there are GMs and WGMs).

    • I used to be a decent chess player (of course not at GM level) but sometimes had lost to strong female players, even when I was at the top of tournament table. There were plenty of women GM who defeated many if not most of their male GM opponents. Vera Menchik and Judit Polgar came to mind, I am sure there were many others.

    • Anon, I guess that I am way too old and recall time before mandatory wokeness and back when women rights were not as advanced as now and there were two genders as reality. I do not feel old, guess I need to be re-educated. Just in case I renounce myself.

    • LSI: Yes, it looks like women were performing better in chess in the dark old days when there were two genders. I see that in many areas.

    • LSI: If you hold onto what used to be considered correct beliefs then you will gradually move to a “far right” position. Bill Clinton, for example, was opposed to 2SLGBTQQIA+ marriage and probably would have been against gender reassignment surgery for teenagers. Instead of making sure that the rich paid their fair share, he cut the capital gains tax rate from 28% to 20% (would have been more rational just to index purported “gains” to inflation!). Had he not evolved, therefore, he would now be considered ‘far right” like that Italian gal.

  4. I don’t think the “National Business Aviation Association” sounds particularly Democratic? How are you laying this at the feet of Dems when it came from what sounds like Jack Donaghy’s favorite private jet club?

    I know you’re turning right wing in your old age but there used to at least be a patina of rigorous thought left over from the MIT days.

    • Ryan: I guess we could assume that it was Republicans who wrote this article that slices and dices the pilot population by race and gender ID. But haven’t the Republicans of late been advocates for gender-neutral and race-neutral laws, gender-neutral and race-neutral hiring by employers, gender-neutral and race-neutral admissions for universities, etc.? Should we also assume that it is Republicans who are running the race-based admissions programs at Harvard? (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._President_and_Fellows_of_Harvard_College )

    • > sounds like Jack Donaghy’s favorite private jet club?

      I miss 30 Rock 😞 … except for the flashbacks triggered by Jack’s 6-sigma-speak I got from having worked at GE.

    • Ryan: That chart would be relevant if the folks who receive money from the NBAA PAC were also authoring articles highlighting pilots by race and gender ID!

    • Ryan: You got me wondering what the political affiliations of the folks who dole out the PAC money (i.e., the lobbyists) might be. The majority of politicians in the U.S. are Democrats and the majority of government workers are Democrats (roughly 95% according to https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/302817-government-workers-shun-trump-give-big-money-to-clinton-campaign/ ). To be a lobbyist you need to have been either a politician or a government worker. So the NBAA PAC could be run by Democrats.
      https://time.com/6078265/biden-tax-hikes-former-democratic-staffers/ :

      Former staffers to nearly two dozen Democratic lawmakers in Congress—including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—are now working as lobbyists for some of the most prominent groups opposing Democrats’ proposed tax increases on corporations and wealthy Americans, according to an analysis of federal disclosure documents.

      … Democrats unified control of government has presented these former staffers with a lucrative opportunity, even if it requires them to buck their party’s policies. “Being a recent former Democratic staffer at any level is a really valuable commodity right now,” says the lobbyist.

      The American Investment Council (AIC), a trade group representing the private equity industry, spent more than $830,000 in the first three months of 2021 lobbying Congress and the White House, in part on this issue. The AIC’s in-house lobbyists working on tax policy include former aides to Reps. Karen Bass of California and Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey. In February, AIC hired Ogilvy Government Relations for lobbying on “legislation affecting the regulation of private equity including tax related issues,” according to federal disclosure documents. Those lobbyists include former aides to Pelosi and New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez. Other external lobbyists working on behalf of AIC include Democratic fundraiser Steve Elmendorf and a former aide to Delaware Sen. Tom Carper.

      [And didn’t that Democrat-run lobbying campaign work? Private equity still gets to pay long-term capital gains rates without actually risking any capital.]

  6. > “To be honest, I did not resonate with Amelia Earhart,” Waiz said.

    Did she mean the original Amelia Earhart who got lost and ran out of gas? Or the modern Amelia Rose Earhart who, at age 31, was smart enough to circumnavigate the globe with a 300,000+ hr MTBF turbine and the full support of Pilatus?

    Either way, Wikipedia says the super-sketchy record for “youngest female pilot to fly solo around the world” now belongs to Zara Rutherford, who survived flying a Rotax-powered “Shark.Aero” ultralight.

    • Anonymous: I did appreciate Zara (see https://flyzolo.com/ ) for showing what a VFR-only pilot can do. Note that her machine is a European ultralight, not what we call “ultralight” in the U.S. We would call that a “light sport”. Until her brother broke her record, she might have been the youngest VFR-only pilot to fly around the world, regardless of gender ID. She could join the NBAA press team, it seems, if she took some DE&I training to become more aware of race. The first page of her site says “Not only am I hoping to reduce the gender gap in Aviation and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), but also to encourage girls and young women to pursue their dreams.” She doesn’t want to reduce the gap in STEM for non-Asian People of Color? Nor does she seem to have considered that girls and young women who reject the dreary desk jobs in STEM may already have pursued and achieved their dreams by finding ways to enjoy housing, health care, food, and smartphone service without poring over a million lines of Java code that do…. nothing.

  7. “Barrington Irving, founder and CEO of Flying Classroom, moved with his family from Jamaica to the U.S. and grew up in a rough neighborhood in Miami. ”

    As a CEO, Mr. Irving probably no longer is forced to live in a “rough neighborhood.” And what made Irving’s old Miami neighborhood “rough” anyway?

    • @SOMBFLIRN: I’m glad to hear that he’s a high achiever. He reminds me in a distant sense of one of my early College roommates, a Jamaican architecture student. I shared a suite with him and three other Black men as the lone white guy. We all shared shower, toilet, microwaves, coffee cups, refrigerators, stereos – occasionally my car – and lots of (mostly) good times together. This particular guy had a great personality, an intact nuclear family, and he was laser focused on success when he wasn’t dressing up in some really sharp clothes for an occasional night out. He looked better than any man has a right to in Ray-Bans and a leather jacket.

      We really *did* live in a rough neighborhood in Newark, NJ – even though it was in the dorms – and he had a culture clash with some of the other Blacks he met there (including my roommate who was a Newark native and had a Glock in his desk drawer, long story, there were two bedrooms in the suite): “They don’t have ROLE MODELS, mon! What do you think they’re gonna DO?” Great guy and a great suitemate.

      For about six months this was the music we woke up to as the first track:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3epH_KNnwYE

      I admit – I know next to nothing about Barrington Irving, but he sounds like a success-oriented man.

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