Originally Posted by DaveReidUK
Avoiding the use of "he" or "she" was clearly intended to obscure the gender of the subject.
Yes, this isn't an accident, nor is it to try to avoid confusion. This phenomenon of awkward sentence construction to avoid the use of a gender specific pronoun frequently pops up in NTSB reports when the accident pilot is a woman. Not every time, but I've seen it before in accident reports in which I knew the pilot was a woman.