Originally Posted by
derjodel
You are trying to make the whole arument invalid on a premise of "pilot skills don't necesseraly follow normal distribution.
1. How exactly does the
type of distribution make my argument invalid? Plug in whatever you like, it's still the same.
2. Yes, indeed you might have missed the Central Limit Theorem. And because skill is sum of many different factors, the pilot skill is even more likely to be normally distributed.
The question is how bad is the cutoff across the skill axis which is necessary in an emergency? Is your cloud really spherical or is it eccentric?
To become a *commercial* pilot you need ability to take orders, ability to learn, to do CRM, to be methodical etc etc. And a certain ability to fly the plane. And all these factors are tested for. But on the day HAL decides to take a vacation or turn hostile, you suddenly need grace under pressure, a capacity to retain situational awareness, an ability to hand fly the plane in a configuration which has *not* been trained for, a will to find some way to survive. See Sully.. The problem with the aircraft design may be that the designers assume that the pilots have been selected adequately because of the shape of the large distribution, and find out that the distribution of skills necessary in an emergency is actually a bell shaped but much sharper curve with few individuals matching the criteria necessary for survival.
Edmund