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.
From friends at SWA, I knew quite soon after the incident that "the person in the left seat was a female". It didn't really matter to me, nor did I find the NTSB language particularly remarkable. Guess I'm just not sure of the whole point. Are you saying that the NTSB is trying to protect a female captain? Does it really matter if it was she or he? Should it really matter? I don't know. Regardless, it wasn't a happy landing and the whole report will be available in time. I try not to get bogged down by sentence construction.
