Black Airline Pilots Offer A Career Flight Path For Youths -- Programs Aim To Boost More Blacks Into Cockpit

ATLANTA - As a kid growing up in southwest Georgia, Clovis Jones Jr. learned how airplanes work by watching crop-dusters buzz farm fields.

"I'd see the control surfaces on them move and then watch how it made the plane turn or climb," he recalled. "Wherever there was a crop-duster working, I'd pedal my bicycle over to watch."

Today Jones does more than watch. He's an MD-11 jumbo jet captain for Federal Express Corp.

He's also black, which makes him a rarity. Nearly three decades after the first black aviator was hired by a U.S. airline, African-Americans make up just under 1 percent of the 71,000 commercial pilots in the United States.

By contrast, airlines began hiring women 21 years ago, and there are about three times as many female pilots as blacks now flying professionally.

Jones is among several dozen aviators in Atlanta this week for the annual meeting of the Organization of Black Airline Pilots, a group dedicated to boosting the tiny percentage of blacks in the cockpit.

"The primary way of doing that is to educate the youth that aviation is an option," said Perry Jones, president of the group and a New York-based captain for Delta Air Lines.

"Many black youth see flying as something they could never achieve or afford," he said. "They can achieve it, but they have to be exposed to it and then be willing to sacrifice in terms of schooling and a long-term focus."

Success stories like that of Clovis Jones, 47, who doggedly pursued his dream through years of military training and occasional hostility from white aviators, provide ample inspiration.

"We have a chance to be extraordinary role models," said Brian Settles, a former Eastern Airlines pilot who now flies for Atlanta-based Private Jet. "For some inexplicable reason, when pilots talk, people think they should be listened to."

But OBAP's 180 members go beyond the bully pulpit in encouraging youths to look skyward.

OBAP co-sponsors the Aviation Career Education program with the Federal Aviation Administration. The program exposes teens to various aviation jobs during weeklong camps around the country and includes a half-hour orientation flight in a small plane.

This year, 239 youths are taking part in the program. OBAP also is sending seven teens to a two-week flight program at the Negro Airmen's Institute at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. By the end of that program, the youths will have had a chance to solo.

OBAP leaders believe institutional change also is needed if the number of blacks trained and hired is ever to grow significantly. For instance, they are pushing to have a degree-granting aviation program created at a historically black college.

"Seventy percent of black doctors and lawyers graduate from historically black institutions," said Perry Jones. "That says something about the effect a flight program would have."

He noted that during World War II, the government briefly established a flight academy for black airmen at Tuskegee.

"It's interesting that there were more than 900 pilots trained during wartime, and yet in 1993 we have a total of (only) 700 or so," he said.

The group also maintains lists of prospective airline recruits and prods airline managements to be more aggressive about hiring blacks who meet all qualifications.

United Airlines, with 201 black pilots, has by the far the highest percentage among major passenger carriers, with USAir a distant second.

United also leads in the number of women. Both distinctions stem from a 1976 court settlement that required the Chicago-based carrier to make aggressive efforts to hire minority and female pilots.

A more recent court case involved USAir and allegations that pilots there got preferential hiring treatment for friends or relatives, to the detriment of black applicants. Two black applicants who filed the suit got back pay in a 1991 settlement and now fly for the carrier.

While those cases eroded some barriers, some OBAP members said airline managements still fall back too quickly on the excuse that there aren't enough qualified applicants when explaining low numbers.

Airlines must be highly selective to assure that qualified and team-oriented aviators are hired, black pilots said, but they also should accept cultural diversity among equally qualified applicants.

"It's easy to eliminate someone during the interview process," said Mical Bruce, who flew fighters in the Air Force before taking a job as a co-pilot with United. "It takes a bigger person to say, `Well, this person is obviously from a different background from me, but when it comes to performing in the cockpit he can do the job.' "

OBAP members said that, once hired, they generally encounter few workplace problems these days that relate to race.

"Once you're a pilot, there's no black or white," said Perry Jones. "The cockpit won't allow that."

Ozzie Ross, 42, an Atlanta native who went through OBAP's ACE program as a teenager and now is a USAir co-pilot, said he's grateful to be part of the "new breed" whose paths were paved by black pilots of the 1960s and 1970s.

"You won't find any African-American pilots who are nonchalant about what we do," Ross said.