The Latino Pilots Association will host the first-ever Latin Aerospace Industry Expo Sept. 15, 2023, at the Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center in Kissimmee, Florida.
The event, which kicks off on the first day of National Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15-Oct. 15), features more than 46,000 square feet of exhibit hall space, as well as several rooms for breakout sessions and presentations, according to officials.
Learn more at LatinoPilot.org
“Founded in 2015, the Latino Pilots Association is a nonprofit organization committed to empower, support, and mentor the underrepresented in our communities and in aviation.” Under-representation is the jingo of woke false victimization, usually rent-seekers looking for special treatment due to supposed injustice. Poppycock. I’d bet that the vast majority of pilots in Latin America are Latin Americans, where commercial aviation is nearly as old as in North America. They have succeeded there despite aviation facilities and nav-aids that would challenge many pilots from North America. Read “Night Flight” from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, describing his experiences from the late 1920s as a mail pilot and director of the Aeroposta Argentina airline, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He describes the courage of his Latin American colleagues. (St. Ex married married Consuelo Suncin of El Salvadore.) The largest ethnic group in the US remains descendants from Germany, including my family. Yet there is no German-American pilots association, or Italian-American, French-American, or Swedish-American, like Charles Lindbergh. German-American engineers had a profound impact on US aircraft industry beginning in the 1930s, and following WWII, when many were brought to the US under Operation Paperclip and chose to stay. But they were proud Americans, not German-Americans. The difference in the past was that these people were true immigrants – they adopted the American language of English, our culture, and they obeyed our laws, especially immigration. By dividing our nation into hyphenated Americans one achieves the opposite of the supposed reason this particular group exists, to reduce “underrepresentation” of pilots of Latin American descent. Just be a good stick and a good American and you will achieve success in aviation.