Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
If you use "average" in the most commonly used sense meaning the arithmetic mean of a distribution then there is no reason why half of the population should necessarily be "below average".
As i said:
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.
I agree that by that meaning you are correct, a better statement is that if you arrange 101 people by height (or whatever) in a row 50 will be to left of the middle person and 50 to the right.
Would make the joke a bit off though.
The real question on pilots is how to train and test the 'acceptable' not perfect pilot. I sense that a lot of training has devolved into following scripts in a sim. One could make the point that any situation that can be covered by a concise procedure could be automated.
Perhaps training could be changed away from training people to be robots.
An interesting item in the Lion Air report on penultimate flight
The PIC performed three Non-Normal Checklists and none contained the instruction “Plan to land at the nearest suitable airport”.
This suggest rote following of checklists without overall judgment, possibly compounded by company expectations/pressure.
Seems that when that much stuff hits the fan one would want to get down before something else happened.