Going Direct: Aviation’s “Female” Pilot Problem (By Robert Goyer).

Since the accident last week on Southwest Flight 1380, there has been a lot of discussion of the role of the captain, Tammie Jo Shults, who immediately became a public figure after air traffic control recordings of her cool and measured response to the emergency got the attention of observers inside and outside of aviation.

But Shults’ place in the story is not without controversy, not because of the pilot’s actions in the cockpit that day but because of her gender.

To recap and update the events, it was an absolutely uneventful flight for Southwest 1380 when without warning the number one engine on the Boeing 737-700 suffered a catastrophic, uncontained engine failure and the debris the engine cast off broke through the housing and shattered a single window on the side of the fuselage, sucking out of the resultant opening a seat-belted passenger, Jennifer Riordan, a bank executive from Albuquerque, NM. Riordan was pulled back into the plane by fellow passengers but still died of her injuries. The NTSB and FAA are investigating the mishap, and the FAA issued an emergency airworthiness directive yesterday, April 23, calling for the inspection of affected CFM56-7B engines with more than 30,000 cycles, of which there are fewer than a thousand worldwide. Shults and first officer Darren Ellisor did a remarkable job, making all the right calls and maneuvering their 737 for a single-engine landing in Philadelphia. (To read about five things Shults did right, check out our previous story on the emergency response.)

The controversy surrounding Shults wasn’t about the pilot at all but about the way she was being reported on, as a “female pilot.” In an opinion piece in the Washington Post last week, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Beverly Weintraub asked the question, Why, if “Sully” was just a hero, do we label Tammie Jo Shults a “female pilot?”

There are two possible answers, one honest and one troubling. The honest one first: There aren’t enough women flying as commercial pilots in the United States. Among ATPs working for the airlines, just 4.4 percent are women. And this figure hasn't changed appreciably for years, which is true for private flying, as well.

Why is this so? Good question. The answer is surely a complicated one, involving cultural expectations, an often-hostile work environment, and other, less easily quantifiable factors. And lest you doubt the hostile work environment factor, I had a senior captain at a major airline tell me that co-pilots overall were next to worthless and that he laughs when a women “co-pilot” shows up in the right seat. These kinds of dinosaurs are surely less prevalent than when this discussion took place 18 years ago, but they still exist, though I’m sure for the most part they’re less bold about sounding off with their repugnant brand of sexism today.

But that does get us to the second possible reason that it was pointed out that Shults was a “female pilot,” not because there are relatively few female pilots but because Shults’ cool performance flies in the face of some people's low expectations for women who fly. Which is to say, there’s the expectation among some that such performance from a woman is astonishing because, well, you know, women aren’t naturally very good at flying planes and driving cars and such things.

So when observers applaud great work and point out that the feat was accomplished by a woman, they’re unintentionally implying that it’s surprising that a woman can do great things, or even everyday things in a professional manner. The commenters, almost always men, who make such tone-deaf congratulations aren’t intentionally insulting all women but that’s the effect. Such comments have the effect of patronizing, of saying, “atta girl!” The implied message is that they, the men in the room, are in charge of conferring approval upon a lesser form of pilot. It’s the same language as the now-horrifying but once common phrasing of someone being a “credit to their race,” as though the members of any group of people need anyone to provide proof of their value.

In a Facebook post I satirized this patronizing attitude when I congratulated “male co-pilot Darren Ellisor” on his “helping out” and told the “boys” to keep up the good work. See? When you flip the genders on something like this, the tone and the hidden assumptions become immediately clear. The truth is, that Ellisor did do a great job regardless of gender, the same as Captain Shults.

Yesterday a Facebook aviation friend, Shaylyn Marchetti, a CFI, recounted an incident in which she was preparing for a lesson for a student when that student showed up with a friend, and asked if they could go along on the lesson. Marchetti ran a weight & balance, and said, “Sure.”

Before the flight could proceed, a bad mag forced them to return to the ramp. After shutting down and deplaning the CFI was accompanying the group back to the briefing room and one of the passengers, a 20-something year old man, asked her how long she’d been instructing—about two and a half years, she replied. And then the passenger asked if she expected to be doing it for a long time. To this Marchetti replied, “No, actually, I’m heading to the airlines next month.” The passenger then asked, “Oh, so you’re going to be a flight attendant?”

It wasn’t a joke, though it wouldn’t have been funny had it been an attempt at humor.

And it’s not really funny that in 2018 women account for just 4.4 percent of the airline pilots in the most prosperous and technologically advanced nation in the world.

Yet, there’s no getting around the fact that this statistic is inextricably linked to that passenger’s boneheaded question about the destination career of a young pilot who just happened to be a woman.

And there’s no getting around the fact that commenters who feel compelled to label Tammie Jo Shults a “female” pilot never flew with her in her former gig: Flying F/A-18s for the United States Navy as a carrier pilot. No, the correct label for Tammie Jo Shults isn’t “female;” it’s “consummate professional”

Shults’ response to this whole thing has been consistent with her management of the post-accident messaging. In a prepared statement she and Ellisor said "Our hearts are heavy. On behalf of the entire Crew, we appreciate the outpouring of support from the public and our co-workers as we all reflect on one family's profound loss." And Shults and Ellisor have declined public appearances, deciding instead, according to multiple reports, to focus on assisting with the investigation.

https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/going-direct-aviations-female-pilot-problem/#.WuNRQI0h3IU

World's longest penguin dive, of more than half an hour, is recorded.

Record-breaking dive in Antarctic waters emerges after scientists accidentally tagged wrong emperor penguins.

Emperor penguins’ physiology suggests they shouldn’t be able to dive comfortably for longer than eight minutes. Photograph: Paul Nicklen/Getty Images/National Geographic Creative.

Scientists in Antarctica have recorded the world’s longest penguin dive, an astounding 32.2 minutes under the water; a full five minutes longer than the previous record.

Emperor penguins, which live only in Antartica, are the tallest and heaviest penguins in the world, and have the best diving ability. They can dive as much as 500 metres down in some of the world’s harshest and coldest seas.

The record dive emerged after 20 emperor penguins were tagged with satellite transmitters in 2013, to better understand their foraging and diving patterns. The research was conducted by Marine ecologist Dr Kim Goetz from the New Zealand’s National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research, Dr Gerald Kooyman from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Dr Brigitte McDonald from Moss Landing Marine Labratories. Their findings have been published in the Journal of Marine Ecology Progress Series.

Although Goetz and her team were aiming to study the behaviors of breeding penguins, they tagged the wrong birds, tracking 20 non-breeding birds that spent most of the next year hunting in the remote eastern Ross sea; usually a challenging environment for scientists to study animal behavior, due to its distance from human bases.

Goetz and her team discovered that emperor penguins travel and dive further than anyone thought possible; travelling distances between 273km and nearly 9,000km in the study period, and conducting dives that lasted between one and 32.2 minutes.

Before the team’s findings the longest recorded emperor penguin dive was 27.6 minutes, which is “impressive” and mysterious, said Goetz, given emperor penguins’ physiology suggest they should be capable of comfortably diving for periods up to eight minutes; after which they run out of oxygen and their anaerobic system kicks in, placing a significant strain on the body and requiring a longer recovery time.

“What we don’t know at this point is if it’s becoming harder [for them] to find food and they have to dive deeper, or for some reason they are veering off course and they can’t find an ice hole, and if they can’t find an ice hole, they can’t come up to breathe,” said Goetz.

“But if an animal is going deeper and expending itself and using all its oxygen to get down there, it is usually because it is worth it.”

Most of the fitted trackers stayed in place for more than six months, and more than 96,000 dives were recorded between March and the end of 2013.

Penguins dove longer and deeper during the day and twilight than at night, and their dive rate was significantly higher during the day (5.5 dives per hour) and twilight (5.6 dives per hour) than at night (0.4 dives per hour).

Goetz said the next phase would require placing cameras on the birds to record exactly what they were doing under the ice – and what they were hunting for that was worth the effort.

"This study showed that animals go far further than we thought – this has a number of different implications for their survival ... understanding their entire life cycle, especially when birds are not restrained by chick-rearing duties, is critical to predicting how emperor penguins might respond to environmental changes.”.. @EleanorAingeRoy

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/longest-penguin-dive-antarctica-emperor?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+main+NEW+H+categories&utm_term=272759&subid=19413045&CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2