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Sexism in the Skies: Spatial Awareness

iWe
@iWe
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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.

Rods and cones:

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?

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Discussion (45)

  • Misthiocracy has never@Misthiocracy
    iWe (View Post):
    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.

    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.

  • Arahant@Arahant
    iWe (View Post):
    Women can differentiate between colors more finely, while men show more sensitivity to fine detail and rapidly moving objects, say researchers.

    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.

  • Percival@Percival

    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.

  • kedavis@kedavis
    iWe (View Post):

    Rods and cones:

    iWe (View Post):

    Women can differentiate between colors more finely, while men show more sensitivity to fine detail and rapidly moving objects, say researchers.

    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.

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