One thing that interests me about this thread, is that many posters, have admitted to being female, I'd noticed their posts before, but nothing in their names or in the contents of their posts to indicate any gender. As somebody said, statistical likelihood tends to make one assume that they were probably male - an evidently incorrect (and of-course, irrelevant) assumption.
At risk of upsetting Whirly's dictat, I saw a study once on parachute accident rates broken down by gender and experience. Female parachutists with little experience tended proportionately to have far more accidents, and more experienced female parachutists - well, never had any accidents. The lecturer blamed it on the relationship between testosterone (or lack thereof) and circumstance - inexperienced males tended to fight to get a result more than females, experienced females just wanted to get it perfect and didn't try to show off, whilst experienced males were routinely playing silly-******s and injuring themselves. By that argument, we should treat inexperienced female pilots as less safe than inexperienced male pilots, and experienced female pilots as better than experienced male pilots. Not sure I want to go down that path, but it's an interesting thought.
There's a poster over on Rotorheads who certainly wouldn't like that approach considering his response to some of Whirly's more recent posts. Given what a prat hes' made of himself in some of them, I'm almost inclined to suggest it be adopted.
G