“Over the next decade, United will train 5,000 pilots who will be guaranteed a job with United, after they complete the requirements of the Aviate program — and our plan is for half of them to be women and people of color,” United CEO Scott Kirby said in a media release.
This is all about their.
https://unitedaviate.com where they are going to internally train pilots up to become pilots. That's not a quick process and I suspect will have a pretty high attrition rate (between not being capable and finding out it's really hard work). Even after popping out a sky-puppy with an ATP rating and getting them on their associated regional airlines and finally to the cockpit of a united airliner will take 5+ years.
There's a tremendous shortage of airline pilots right now due to a bunch of reasons, some corporate mistakes, some inevitable. United alone needs more than 10K pilots the next 10 years and they have to compete with the other airlines to get them. Desperation is driving United (and the other majors) into tapping into what they think is a generally under utilized potential pilot pool. Even if they meet their goals (which I doubt) and it goes perfectly you're likely talking at most 25% of new hires being minority / female.
Delta has dropped its college degree requirement for pilots in their grasp to staff.
