If You're Going My Way, I'll Walk With You: Why?

"Anything you want to do, you can do… anything… and believe it. You can do it. Don’t let people tell you you can’t. Don’t let people tell you you aren’t good enough.
Be good enough."
Gayle Snell, WASP

With the two recent air crashes in the news involving female pilots that have generated vast hostility to female pilots, not only by men, but women, too, including one prominent female columnist who referred to the Delta Airlines pilot as "baby cakes," I've wondered why such hatred?
If the two pilots were men, in particular white men, there would have been no such reaction, just as when not long ago a New Zealand Navy ship captained by a female ran aground there was an eruption of misogyny but when a US Navy aircraft carrier captained by a man collided with a merchant ship and the captain was relieved of command, there was no reaction, as there was not when a male captain got his ship sideways in the Suez Canal and blocked it or another male captain rammed his ship into a bridge in Baltimore. Nor was there when a Bering Air Cessna crashed killing all aboard or when a Jet Rescue Learjet crashed, also killing all aboard. The pilots were male.

Retiring Rear Adm. Wendi Carpenter,Commander,
Navy Warfare Development Command,
surrounded by female Naval aviators & air crewman in 2011.
Carpenter was designated a Naval Aviator in
1979, graduating at the top of her class.

About the same time as the Delta crash, when a general aviation pilot -- a male -- cut in front of another plane in the landing pattern, causing a mid-air collision, and the male pilot crashed, killing himself and his passenger while the female pilot in the other plane landed her damaged aircraft safely, there was no outrage about incompetent male pilots -- nor praise for the female pilot. But had the situation been reversed there would still be furious ranting about incapable female pilots.

Carpenter was assigned
to the Second Fleet
as an expert in air
warfare command
and control.

I don't understand why this is happening now. Female pilots are old news. Notice in the photo to the upper left that Rear Admiral Wendi Carpenter is retiring after a full career as a naval aviator -- in 2011! Fourteen years ago. Fourteen! She began her aviation career almost half a century ago! Notice, if you will, that she is surrounded by female aviators in a photo taken years ago. And back during World War II women were flying those old death trap planes designed and flown before there were even V numbers -- planes with nicknames like one a day in Tampa Bay and the widow maker. I've written a little bit about this in Girl Fliers. So what's the big deal in 2025 about women flying airplanes?

Incidentally, V numbers were developed by Hazel Hasleden around 1950. The "V" stands for "vitesse," meaning "speed" in French. They were introduced after an October 26, 1952 deHavilland Comet crash in Rome that involved what today we would say was Vmu (Slowest speed at which an aircraft can become airborne) / Vr (rotation speed), pitch control, power and the difference between being stall-limited and geometry-limited on takeoff. The official conclusion of the British Bureau of Aircraft Accidents for the crash was that "The accident was due to an error of judgment by the Captain [a man!] in not appreciating the excessive nose-up attitude of the aircraft during the take-off."

If you want to know more about Vmu, read this: MINIMUM UNSTICK SPEED CALCULATION FOR HIGH-SPEED JET TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT . How's your math by the way? You'll need it. If you can understand this monograph, tell me does anything in it relate to the Delta CRJ accident? If so, what and how? If you have no idea, stand down.

A dozen years ago a thorough study of female Army aviation pilots was made, WOMEN IN COMBAT ARMS: A STUDY OF THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR, that stated, "there is a population of female soldiers that have contributed as front line 'trigger pullers' throughout the course of the past 12 years of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan. These women are Army aviators who have served in attack aviation roles, without restriction, since the beginning of major combat operations in the Global War on Terror. This research shows that over a decade of females serving on the front lines alongside their male counterparts, there is no significant stigma or other prohibitive factors that would degrade the effectiveness or lethality of combat arms units in war.

"Performance in combat is the central issue that must guide the debate of women in combat arms. However, as the research indicates, the performance of women in combat is not a problem. Both historically and more recently during the war on terror, anecdotal and statistical input conclude that women can and will continue to perform admirably in combat across a wide variety of jobs.
"A look at the data on aircraft accidents is useful to make an assessment of performance of female pilots. As the data highlights, women are involved in fewer aircraft accidents than all-male crews -- comprising only 3% of incidents. As women comprise roughly 10% of all aviators, the evidence suggests that women may operate aircraft more safely than men. As it pertains to just AH-64 aircraft, 100% of all accidents, both in garrison and in theater, involve all-male crews, at least suggesting that female attack pilots may be even more safe in the performance of flight duties."

In the Navy, where women have been aviators since 1974, 12 percent of pilots are women and they have a comparable safety record to Army female pilots.

Harriet Quimby in her plane.

I truly do not get this hostility to women pilots. All this vicious hysteria, this intense hatred of female pilots makes no sense to me. I could maybe understand it back a hundred years ago when Amelia Earhart set a world altitude record less than a decade after a female duo riding motorcycles from New York to Los Angeles were arrested for wearing pants -- I kid you not. But times have changed. Or I thought they had. For heaven's sake, the second person to fly across the English channel was a woman, Harriet Quimby, back in 1912. She was celebrated as a heroine, men wrote songs about her and women rushed to dress the same way she did when she flew the channel. So what's the big deal now, 113 years later?

When I read some opinion columnist, who knows nothing about the subject, asserting that women are pushed into aviation as DEI hires, that women are incapable of flying airplanes, and gets spittle-spraying fanboys shouting their agreement, I wonder what the motive is. What is the objective these people hope to achieve? What is their end goal? Do they want women banned from aviation? Why? How is the world made better if this is achieved?

Another thing I wonder is why are these neurotic creeps spazzing out like this when they have to know that women are not going to be banned from piloting airplanes, civilian or military. Nothing will result from their hysteria. The accidents will be properly investigated by knowledgeable, responsible people, causes discovered, and actions taken to prevent such causes in the future. Okay, one thing will be achieved by their antics: they will drive a lot of women away from conservatism who were sympathetic to it. Maybe that's the goal, why all this is happening. That this will cause the right to lose elections doesn't matter to them. All that matters is that they drive away women.
(By the way, I mentioned that 12 percent of naval aviators are female. Guess how many naval aviators are black -- 0.013 percent. Look at that group photo above of female aviators. Almost entirely white women. So shouldn't right-wing white men be cheering for them? Yay! Mighty whitey rules the skies! Fat chance. Rightest white men hate white women. Elliot Rodgers is their hero. I don't know where they think white men come from. Maybe they buy into the leftist assertion that men can become pregnant, too. Spare me the details.)

I was taught to fly by men -- my father and grandfather among them -- who certainly did not think women should not be pilots. To me it was not a big deal. It was just part of growing up. They taught me how to ride a bicycle, a horse, a motorbike, how to drive a car, how to fly an airplane. It was all part of a continuum. Among these, why would only flying an airplane be considered something a female could not do? Every male instructor I ever had only wanted to make me the best pilot I could be and never expressed any doubt that I could fly as well as anyone, and gender had nothing to do with it. And, believe you me, none were afraid to kick my ass till I was. And when I finally was, it was a high five and now go fly!

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