Female Pilot Heroically Lands with Full Engine Failure: Vindication of Diversity

Meet Tammie Jo Shults, shown here with a passenger yesterday in Philadelphia. No, she is not a flight attendant. She is the Southwest pilot who was the captain during yesterday’s tragic and deadly flight. A veteran Navy jet pilot, she is described by passengers as having “nerves of steel.”

What does research say about gender differences among experienced pilots? Susan Baker et al., "Characteristics of General Aviation Crashes Involving Mature Male and Female Pilots," Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine (2001) reports this summary:

 Methods: 144 female pilots were compared to 287 male pilots, all of whom were pilots during an aviation crash.

Results: Male Pilots: Mechanical failure, gear up landings, improper IFR approaches, and collisions with wires or poles were more common for men than women.

Female Pilots: Loss of control on landing/takeoff was more common in crashes of female pilots. Mishandling aircraft kinetics was the most common error of pilots of both genders and was noted more often in female pilots’ crashes (81% vs. 48%).

Males’ crashes were more likely to involve flawed decisions (29% vs. 19% of females' crashes) or inattention (32% vs. 19%).

Older pilots made fewer errors: among males age 55-63, 26% of crashes has no pilot error compared with only 7% at age 40-49.

 Editorial Comment: When FDR integrated blacks into the military, there was fierce pushback by people who believed that these service members would be inferior to whites.

When West Point admitted its first female class in 1976, there was strong pushback. Women were stereotyped in several denigrating ways—too weak, too timid, too interested in finding a husband, and so on.

When President Clinton initiated the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” directive to prohibit military discharges on grounds of homosexuality, some people pushed back with the stereotype that these service members would be blackmailed or engage in predatory behaviors in private quarters.

And just recently—not once, but twice— President Trump has pandered to the same ugly stereotypes about transgender service people, depriving the U.S. of a fully representative population in our nation’s military.

Thankfully, an experienced female pilot with nerves of steel was at the controls yesterday. Thankfully, too, diversity was vindicated over stereotypes.