Too many nepo babies and too little state owned movie production in the Gulf?

Also flying modern fighter jets is the kind of fun that's typically very hard to buy with money, so you take the opportunity when available.

The Sultan bin Salman was the first Arab, first Muslim, and first Royal in space, on the NASA Challenger flight before its fateful flight. He was a fighter pilot for the Saudi Air Force with 1000's of flight hours.

A fighter pilot is the modern military equivalent of a medieval knight.

They wouldn't trust a non-family member with weapons that could decapitate the country's kleptocratic monarchy.

In those countries (i.e., middle eastern countries) power and wealth is usually more connected to gov't and the military rather than independent industries. If you are a nepo-baby, your opportunities will tend to be more gov't/military than celebrity or corporate.

What? No way. Yes, a lot of airline pilots were former military, but I know several people who are airline pilots and did not come from "very rich" families.

Flying is not in any way some kind of high-status luxurious job. It can be grueling, with intensive and continuous training, wacky shifts, very strict rules, lots of time away from family, long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. You can lose your career over a minor mistake that snowballed into a incident due to factors out of your control. Minor health issue? Need mental help? Better get those fixed in secret or you probably won't fly again.

In my line of work, a major mistake would bring down an internal website at a big company for a little while. An airline pilot's major mistake would kill himself and a hundred-plus people.

I can't fathom why anyone who is rich would want to be an airline pilot. It's a shit-ton of work, stress, and risk for not much reward. You gotta love to fly in order to stick with it. If the rich want to fly, they just do the training and buy a plane, they don't need to do it for a living!

Very few rich people become commercial pilots. They might get a private pilot license as a hobby but generally pilots are just employees they hire to take them around.

Plenty of working airline pilots come from regular middle-class backgrounds and never served in the military. They take out student loans to pay for training, then work low-paying jobs as flight instructors or something to build up enough flight hours to get hired at a regional airline.

Those who go the ROTC route can totally get a fighter jet assignment if they want it. Once they get selected for a pilot slot, assignment to a particular airframe is primarily based on how they perform in the training pipeline.

I'll spell it out: A lot of air force pilots in these countries end up being rich kids who do it because it's a fun hobby, not motivated soldiers.

Because many of these people see it as a fun hobby, they don't spend much time worrying about potentially being ordered to drop bombs on schools filled with children. It's rather unlikely that their government would order them to do so anyway, compare a list of countries being hit by Iran with a list of countries bombing Iran.

Pilots are not told they are dropping bombs on a school filled with kids. They are told it is a headquarters or storage or bunker or whatever.

It's a "high status" job. Doing the high status jobs correctly isn't always easy.

What does that have to do with anything? They went through training in different times when conflicts were not on their plate. During peace it is a cool job, you know not every air force around the world bombs schools, in fact most don't.

Anybody who ever went through arab countries with eyes opened saw the massive nepotism and corruption at all levels. Army/air force ain't immune to this, in contrary. Do you think ie some general or politician's first son would be treated and pushed up same as common folks?

> Cool job? Being ordered to drop bombs on schools filled with children doesn't seems like a cool job..

That was a launched cruise missile from a ship, targeted by an LLM. Apparently the grounds USED to be a valid military target long ago (a decade? I'm not sure exactly) and now there's a school there.

There are exactly zero places in the world where "fighter jet pilot" is seen as a "working class" profession.

And my whole point was that it's often not a profession, but a hobby.

> In almost all countries, military is seen as a "working class" profession

In western countries that's the case. In autocratic countries it is essential to keep control of the army by placing the equivalent of the royal family in charge.

Also, fighter pilots were historically considered as the successors for cavalry and manned by the nobility, in Arab countries this means the ruling elite

The saying it’s true for officers seems to need greater support since historically officers were always nobility or from the leadership class. Today, in countries that are not full democracies, the leadership wants the military controlled by favorable people and that means family members.

Presumably he means countries with somewhat higher levels of nepotism in the military than the US.

MENA countries (excepting Israel here) are known to suffer from this significantly, and it is a big factor in their militaries historically underperforming.

It is a valid point to bring this up as possible cause or factor, no need to get all defensive about it.

I've lived and worked in the Gulf for half my life, I think I know what "these countries" are like.