Originally Posted by
compressor stall
No, I remember seeing it in a report some time ago and there was a discussion here about it too.
It annoyed me then and continues to annoy me now.
Looks like it was first raised by Centaurus in October last year with regards to AO-2016-075
Final – 14 October 2016; some 18 months after the practice was first introduced.
I'm quite traditional in my approach to the English language, particularly written English. That is in part a product of my experience as a staff officer in the military; on arriving at my HQ posting there were two books on my desk - the JSP (AS) 101 Manual of Service Writing and Fowler's Modern English Usage - and my SO1 emphasised the ABC of effective writng; Accuracy, Brevity and Clarity. That said, I understand that English usage is fluid and, for traditionalists, annoyingly so at times.
In the report mentioned in this thread, "they" is used as a non-gender singular pronoun nearly 30 times. On every occasion it is preceded by its antecedent, "the pilot", and generally quite closely preceded by it; on average only 15 words separate the antecedent and the pronoun although the worst case is 43 words. The antecedent and the pronoun never fall in different paragraphs (so I can't see how the report can be said to be "referring to "the pilot" and in the next paragraph referring to the pilot as "they.""); at worst the antecedent and the pronoun are separated by a sentence.
In short, given the constraints associated with non-gender singular pronouns, the author has taken all reasonable measures to ensure that the document is understandable. You may not agree with the style and word choices but that doesn't make the document abstruse.