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Sexism in the Skies: Spatial Awareness
The last two commercial airline disasters had a woman in control of an aircraft, making critical errors. Both were beneficiaries of DEI policies that leapfrogged them ahead of more qualified candidates on the basis of their sex. In the first collision, the Blackhawk pilot did not remain spatially aware of her rotorcraft’s surroundings, and flew right into the path of the descending CRJ. And in the second collision, the rookie pilot, who may have been confused by the blowing snow, failed to flare her aircraft, and she slammed it into the ground. That everyone lived was a miracle, plain and simple.
This did not have to happen. Indeed, it should not have happened. It is a fact that men and women are different. And one of the basic physiological differences is that men have better spatial awareness for moving objects than women, while women have better color awareness than men. More than that (and highly relevant for the DCA Disaster): Men have an advantage over women in night vision due to the physical structure of the eye.
Women can differentiate between colors more finely, while men show more sensitivity to fine detail and rapidly moving objects, say researchers.
Why the gender difference on vision? The reason, researchers say, rests in differences between the visual centers of each gender. Men have 25% higher levels than women of testosterone receptors in their visual cortexes, where images are processed. As a result, their visual systems are better able than those of women to perceive changes in brightness across space, such as recognizing faces or reading letters from an eye chart.
In short, by and large, men are going to be more proficient at certain jobs, and women more proficient at other jobs. Piloting an aircraft requires excellent spatial awareness, and men are, by and large (there are exceptions, of course), better suited for piloting than are women.
Women are about 5% of the commercial pilots in the world. I see no reason why anyone should use DEI-like policies to boost this number: I’d reckon no more (and probably less) than 5% of women pilots are equipped to be as capable at hand-flying an aircraft as the men are.
On this basis, don’t we think that proficiency exams must tighten up, and refuse to make allowances when a person – any person – lacks the ability to do the job?
Published in General
According to speed and altitude data that was released by flightradar24, the plane was at the correct airspeed and groundspeed for landing, suggesting that there was no need to flare. The vertical descent speed was correct right up until the last five seconds, at which point the plane suddenly dropped very quickly. This tends to suggest that the plane was hit by a sudden downdraft. Of course, we won’t know more until flight data recorder information is released.
My father’s true passion was art. That was what he started majoring in at college before he went into the military. A few years back, I was speaking with my mother, and somehow the subject came up. She said something on the order of, he might have done better if he weren’t partially color blind.
I said, “What?!”
She shrugged and picked up a three-ring binder from her desk, “He would have called this teal binder blue, and could not have told the difference between it and this blue binder.”
It was the first I had heard of his having any level of color blindness.
Yes, men and women are different. Not only are men more likely to have some form of color blindness, since they only have one X-chromosome, but women can even be tetrachromatic (due to having two X-chromosomes).
And, as you say, men have other compensations due to their variant biology.
It isn’t particularly satisfying to say “it’s early yet,” but it’s early yet. Too early to dump it all on the pilots. The helicopter was operating short one crew chief. That is doable, but not ideal. If the aircraft is one short, the one present would be sitting in the right rear position because that’s the direction that the pilot would have the most problem checking personally, at it means looking across the crew space and the view is restricted. The CRJ was approaching from the left.
The ATC is reliant on the aircraft maintaining proper altitude. It isn’t clear that was being done, though the airliner seems to have been at the correct altitude.
The Toronto plane came down hard right at the end. A flare might have helped. It might have been a failure with the landing gear. We’ll find out.
Peachy Keenan, at her substack, raises an intriguing possibility: Are Mixed Gender Cockpits Low Trust Workplaces.
I couldn’t find a clip, but there’s an episode of Married With Children where Al is rapidly flipping through channels on the TV, and Peggy is asking “What was that? What was that?”
Then Al calmly gives a detailed list of all the shows he flipped through: A “Bewitched” with one of the Darrens rather than the other, etc.
Vision is really fascinating:
The entire article is well worth reading.
Another way to put this: “Up until the last 5 seconds, the plane was on the right glide path.”
Other than those 5 seconds, the flight was fine. The actual descent rate at touchdown was something like 17 ft/s, when the ideal touchdown is closer to 3-5 ft/second.
It is absolutely certain that the helicopter was not at the correct altitude. The chopper’s altimeter was off—way off. Pilot read 300 feet, instructor saw 400, but the real number? 278 feet—well above the 200-foot ceiling. The Chopper was being flown by a woman.
We know it landed short of the target, did not flare, and landed hard.
Flightradar 24 shows a big variation in vertical speed on final with the last vertical speed recorded at touchdown as -1024 ft/sec possibly showing an unstable approach and resulting heavy landing.
The ideal landing rate for a Bombardier CRJ900 is generally around 300 to 400 feet per minute (fpm) for a smooth and safe landing under normal conditions.
However, pilots aim to land at the lower end of that range to ensure passenger comfort. Anything higher than 500 fpm might be considered a bit rough, especially if it’s not intentional (such as for a short field or an emergency landing).
I cannot believe I haven’t heard that yet. That is a very big deal.
Supposedly, they were coming down at twice the speed you are supposed to. For comparison, it was 50% faster than the speed that naval jets land on aircraft carriers, which is insane.
I have a black winter coat. I was getting my haircut at the girls salon. I forget why we got on this topic but they could see that it had a little bit of green in it. The coat is black, which I generally hate to wear, but I looked at it and I’ll be damned. It has a little bit of green in it and that’s why I like it.
I don’t know if she was the helicopter pilot but, they waited how many days before they released her name and cleaned up her social media. She was a lesbian, of course. As long as they don’t make a great big public deal out of it I don’t care about gay people. It’s the government and the Democrats that are making a big deal out of it. It’s wasting money and endangering lives.
This is all news to me, Rufus, do you have a link?
I could look it up, but I heard them talking about it on Fox News.
It was a male voice talking to ATC and acknowledging visual contact with the (wrong) plane.
Correct: ATC tapes have male voice from accident flight, meaning that the First Officer, the newly-qualified woman, was Pilot in Command.
Ultimately responsible, maybe. If it was a check flight, the certified pilot would be responsible since she was not certified yet.
A “training flight” does not mean that the pilot undergoing the “training” is uncertified. Pilots with thousands of hours take training flights. The pilot in command had over 500 hours. It was likely a checkride.
The female pilot served as a White House military social aide in the Biden Administration. I have no idea how much flying time she may have had while in that role. She may well have just been trying to get flight hours in.
Statistical differences in populations uncovered by scientific studies are very different than individual differences. If there is a significant overlap between the two populations, then it is difficult to draw conclusions about any individual and her abilities. That is, on average men are better at spatial reasoning, but that doesn’t mean that all men are better than all women. Those with the most superior spatial skills may be all men, and those with the worst may be all women (although in many attributes, men are over-represented at both ends of the curve), but if 90% of men and women fall somewhere in the middle of the curve, then it is likely it is that there are many individual women who have above average skills comparable with a large population of men. What is the percentage overlap here? I don’t know. The OP implies 5%, but I’ll have to do some digging.
I do not want DEI hiring in commercial airlines (or anywhere for that matter). If these two accidents were caused by under-qualified individuals, I would like to know it. But I think conservatives weaken our case when we automatically point the finger at DEI before we know the details.
I wish I could remember which of the many pilot reviews I saw concerning the DCA crash. This was a helicopter pilot (IIRC, ran a helicopter company).
DCA is in what’s called a Class B airspace, denoting the area around the very busiest airports. This pilot said personally, he would never send a pilot with only 500 hours into a Class B airspace.
The argument is considerably strengthened by the fact that in both cases, the identity, training and background of the women pilots was withheld, delayed, and scrubbed. Those who put them in control of their aircraft are acting like they have something to hide.
For example, I read maps like a girl. lol
I am not a pilot, and I have very little knowledge or understanding about several issues which have been raised by several participants in this discussion. I am, however, a retired teacher who taught for more than four decades, so I saw intimately the effects of Affirmative Action on a school district in which I worked. What this said to me was simple. All hiring should be based as much as possible on pragmatic criteria which in turn is based on proven, reproducible, and concrete results, not such things as sex, sexual orientation, race, religion, or political beliefs.
The mere fact that the sex or sexual orientation of the two pilots involved in the described accidents were female proves that making hiring choices which may or may not have been based on these criteria creates questions about the legitimacy of a particular person’s having that position. That should never be an issue. Anyone in a position of responsibiity to do a particular job should be hired based on one simple criterium, that they are the best qualified person to perform those tasks who has applied for that position. The reasons for the hiring should never be in question.
I had colleagues when teaching who were black. Many of them were superb teachers. One in particular went on to be hired as an administrator, a job for which he was totally qualified. However, I heard it said of him that he only got the job because he was black. On the other hand, I worked under several black administrators whose positions were totally due to their color. They were, in a word, incompetent, or, at very least far less competent than others who were interviewed for the position. So long and this kind of nonsense is allowed to be continued every member of a minority group who attains any position will always have the appropriateness of their hiring questioned, and those not hired due to their being a member of the “white male majority” will question whether the person hired was, in fact, better qualified than they themselves.
No matter the outcomes of the investigations into the crashes as it will be published, there will remain serious questions about the qualifications of the two pilots which may well not be frankly examined since that would be politically incorrect. This needs to end.
My thought throughout this is that it is stupid to mix genders at busy airports.
One airport for one sex and a different airport for the other sex.
It is time to keep helicopters and airplanes separate.
Metaphor Alert.
Well, of course.
Helicopters don’t actually fly.
They are so ugly that the earth repels them.
ALL aircraft flare upon landing. This increases both lift and drag to both arrest the descent rate and reduce airspeed for a gentle landing. It also raises the nose so the main wheels touch down first. If you don’t flare you get a very hard landing every time.
There is of course the possibility of wind shear as well, meaning the wind direction changes. Planes land into the wind as much as possible, so a significant change near the ground may reduce the plane’s airspeed close to a stall which may suddenly increase the descent rate. In this case it looks like the right landing gear broke off, causing the right wing to dig into the ground. The left wing was still producing lift, hence the rightward rotation of the fuselage which broke the right wing which thankfully departed the aircraft as it was full of fuel and caught fire.
Here is an analysis by a highly accomplished female pilot. Her summation:
Her analysis of the Delta culture is quite damning.
I note that her points do not support (or attack) the OP. It is a very interesting perspective.
Yes, it is.
Delta has said this:
We’ll find out.
A problem with DEI is one can never assume meritocracy factored in with the assignment. This harms women and others. Either they will be placed where they don’t belong or their merit will be in doubt.
There are a lot of wrongs here. Even if the helo had been at 200ft, having a jet pass over you at 300-350 ft would be bad. ATC’s info wasn’t clear enough for the helo to identify the correct jet, that corridor shouldn’t have been active when landing flights were overflying it, and helo instrumentation might have been off. A lot of people suffered a horrifying death.
I gathered she had been qualified but out of cockpit for a while, but had gotten refresher hours after leaving WH, and now was being recertified