A curious thing happens after aircraft accidents when, in an apparent effort to find the cause, threads examining the pilot’s demographics begin to mix with training and experience. Perhaps then, it shouldn’t be surprising that after a few recent airline accidents, a common thread of these home-based accident investigators was that the pilots involved were women.
Women and minorities have long faced obstacles in aviation. The nation’s share of pilots who are women is still in the single digits and is eclipsed by other fields that have traditionally been male dominated, including commercial truck drivers. To put it into perspective, there are more male florists than female pilots. The reasons why are complex and interwoven, but culture plays prominently.
According to a report issued by the FAA’s Women in Aviation Advisory Board, culture is one of five primary categories of challenges women face trying to enter the aviation universe. From the report, “Culture change requires effectively addressing gender biases, discrimination, and sexual harassment.”
If you haven’t directly witnessed or been impacted by gender bias, discrimination, or sexual harassment, it can sometimes be hard to identify. The fallout of the accident on approach to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) in Washington, D.C., between American Airlines and a U.S. Army helicopter, and Endeavour Air’s rollover on landing at Toronto Pearson International (YYZ) are two prime examples of all three toxic culture factors.
It quickly came out that a woman was part of the flight crew on the helicopter of the DCA accident. President Trump immediately suggested that DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, were at least partly to blame for the accident. It’s unclear if he was talking about helicopter pilot Capt. Rebecca Lobach, or controller hiring issues that prioritized diversity. Whatever the motivation, the notion that Lobach’s gender somehow impacted the accident became red meat for trolls in the following days.
A similar thread followed the accident in Toronto, where dramatic video shows the CRJ slamming hard and rolling on touchdown. The first officer was a woman, being monitored by a man with more than a decade of experience at the airline. DEI commentary quickly followed, including a video from as far away as Sky News Australia, complete with hundreds of comments about aviation being unsafe because of diversity.
Given our nation’s ongoing culture war, it’s predictable that a pilot’s gender is used to at least partly explain the cause of an accident, but we shouldn’t be immune to the substantial damage such ideas and comments have on both individuals and our industry.
The internet has allowed some of our darkest impulses to flourish, as algorithms present confirming viewpoints, giving the commenter a distorted view of the popularity or receptiveness of his opinions. Crude comments that before would have only been whispered between sympathetic peers are now widely broadcast, further expanding their impact. Don’t give in to these impulses.
Especially in aviation, where clear standards for success are publicly available to all, a pilot’s demographics should have no impact on their opportunities. People against DEI efforts say they lower performance standards, but in aviation that’s virtually impossible. If standards are lowered, it often happens collectively due to market forces, not individually to support one candidate. To those who say otherwise, I would just say to check your confirmation bias at the door and look at what’s happening on a macro scale.
Aviation needs people. We need people learning to fly, we need people to buy airplanes, maintain them, fly them, manage them, and build them. The corporate world and airlines will continue to need a qualified workforce for decades to come. So why are we pushing huge swaths of people away with hateful comments that make them feel unwelcome and unwanted?
Aviation is the safest form of transportation in the world. It’s safer than walking down the street. Our intense focus on each accident, rare as they are, means we nitpick every variable to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Rest assured that gender, race, sexual orientation, and sexual identity aren’t relevant in that analysis. FT
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