Originally Posted by
derjodel
First of all, the picture above is not a scale, it's a distribution where 100 represents the average pilot. There will always, always be pilots who are below average and pilots who are above average. The question is, how below average is the worse commercial pilot currently flying (and how good is the best one on the opposite side).
An equally valid question would be why ability (at anything, not necessarily confined to piloting) should be assumed to follow a normal distribution (normal in the mathematical sense, i.e. symmetrical about the mean/median/mode).
It's perfectly possible that the ability distribution is actually skewed, in other words the peak isn't halfway between the two extremes, so that for example there could be a concentration of pilots towards the upper end of the ability scale.
Or, perish the thought, the lower end.
