Originally Posted by
MurphyWasRight
Heard tell that ex President Bush was very upset when told that about half of american students were below average in math.
There is a spectrum of skills and abilities in every field. The hard part can be drawing a distinction between 'below average' and incompetent.
One other datapoint is that something like 70 percent of drivers consider themselves above average.
While I don't know the stats for pilots, any professional pilots reading this thread consider themselves below average?
Of course mathematicians get upset with generic use of the term average (mean of them) but that is a different thread somewhere in a forum far far away.
Assuming normal distribution 75% of all flights have at least one below average pilot in the cockpit.
"Average" is relative - correct? Take US military service . . . there is an "average" soldier, and then, perhaps, an "average" Navy SEAL, or US Army Delta Force. Or, if you will, military of any country and, then, Canada's Joint Task Force 2; Denmark's Jaeger Corps; or Britain's Special Air Service . . .
The average of an elite group will always be above the average of a larger group. Indeed, the larger group may include those that shouldn't be in the armed forces at all. The more elite groups will all be more than competent - and each elite group will statistically have an average, below average, and above average.
My point was, and is, that commercial airline pilots should be an above-average group to begin with. Leaving the "below average" pilot not far off from the above average pilot - any one of which is highly capable individually. For many reasons - that is not how the profession has evolved. Low wages? Poor treatment? Perhaps the airlines themselves are to blame as well for degrading the profession?
I digress.