The whole point behind my personal title was that I couldn't hover and talk for a long time. Also, why do your own sex down by saying, "No man can do that"? Of course they can - there are plenty of male helicopter pilots. :confused:

Cheers

Whirls

Yeah, but speaking personally, I sometimes turn the radio down, so I can concentrate on flying the helicopter with the precision I intend.... (but then people do occasionally say that I don't seem to be listening, even when I'm just standing there!)

Because they know I am pulling their leg.

It's required to train to land after a loss of tail rotor control, while flying helicopters. I think that's in case someone pulls your leg while you're flying one, and they won't stop....

http://www.rebornbabiesuk.com/images...ey_ROFLMAO.gif

Cheers

Whirls

So dont you make the same assumptions? For example, Whirly you assume most men are sexist, and your assumptions is probably correct, but not all are.

You assumed earlier that I certainly was sexist when I pointed out that we are different but you suggested based on my comment you would rest your case. However my post was not sexist.

Most assumptions we make are based on experience. The things we do as a pilot are a very good examples of tempering assumptions with experience and a little academic know how.

Women should definitely not be chained to the kitchen sink.

How on earth could they reach the lawnmower if that were so?

Whirls, stop all this silliness and just pop along and make us all a cup of tea, there's a love.

No I don't. Most men, in my experience, are completely egalitarian; it's just the few old dinosaurs. I have consistently said throughout, "the minority".

Can you not see why I could construe that comment to be sexist? You didn't use the word, "different"; you said, "Are not equal".

ShyT, ha ha very funny .... yeah, when you've finished putting up the shelves and putting some oil in my car.

Cheers

Whirls

On your bike.....ooops, sorry. Put that on the list, too. ;)

I can! As a helicopter instructor, I'm ambidextrous on all the controls, so I hold the cyclic in my left hand, and I can let go of the collective for long enough to write. Jeez...doesn't everyone know that? Nah, they don't.... any more than they all know what it's like to be a woman pilot in the predominantly male world of aviation! After all, why would you> so let me help to enlightoen you....

My old friend Whirlygig is quite correct in most of what she says...and for those of you who don't know me, since I haven't been here for months, we're NOT the same person. So, I'm sorry, but there are TWO female helicopter pilots in the world who have encountered discrimination! Maybe no others; how would I know. And, in my case, not that often, not from everyone, and after a lot of years in aviation, it doesn't bother me....that much. But that doesn't make it right. And it also doesn't mean you should be questioning whether it's ever happened to Whirls, and demanding that she accept it. Why the hell should she? IO540, I thought better of you, I really did. And don't ask me to say exactly which of five pages of posts I'm responding to - I just read the lot all at once, and I'm replying to my general impressions. If you don't like that - well, I'm quite used to not being liked; I've been on PPRuNe a long time.

However, I'm a bit busy these days, so now I'll just go away again and leave you to your discussion, but hey, I did enjoy it, and it's nice to see so many familiar faces still around. ;)

Bye for now,

Whirly - the original one, and don't forget that!

Well, girls and boys, I have just realised that here is an irresistable thread for me to set you all to rights, and share with you a few entertaining and relative moments!

First of all, whirlybird, whirlygig, and fernytickles, there are still major difficulties that account for a shortage of female aspriants in aviation. To whit, as pointed out by 10540, women don't have the MONEY and they don't have the TIME! If a woman fancies a career of any sort, it all too often implies that starting a family must be deferred. Or altogether, forgotten, like by my Aunt Laura who was a single lady, a physician, and vice president of the American Medical Association in 1900!

I had 4 children while still young and beautiful, and looked after them and my spouse, who decided to swap me for a younger model when he was 48. I decided to do something reckless, had my ears pierced, and went for a ride in a glider.

Now after l,200 hours of power, PPL, IR and seaplane rating , being Tugmaster, Instructor at a gliding club, a triple diamond holder with 1,800 hours in gliders and representing Great Britain in the Women's European Championships in the Soviet Union -( that dates me, doesn't it?) I cannot deny that gender as well as family have kept me from a lucrative career in aviation. You don't get rich being a flying instructor, even in the USA.

Men do not have to choose between having children or becoming pilots, they can do both because they have the money and the time. But there is a downside. The working partner is expected to fund the raising of children. And women live longer.

* * * *

I shall leave you with a little story. Flying a Supercub 150 towplane, pulling up a Kl3 glider, I realised the truly terrible performance was due to the fact that the K13 airbrakes were open. As speed decayed, we staggered to 300' and rather than signal by wagging the rudder (as prescribed) I chickened out and dumped the glider.
The gliding instructor and student safely landed the K13 in a handy field.

When writing the report, I managed to avoid mentioning gender throughout. Would never have heard the end of it, because Tuggie, Instructor, and Student Pilot were all women.

Now, alas, due to age and decay, I am reduced to flying only with a safety pilot.....
and yakking on PPruNe, like all the other old forts....

We may not all be included in the term Fraternity, or Band of Brothers, but we are certainly all Kindred Spirits. And the best of us do look after each other.

Well said. It leaves me with the question of counterspirits in our realm.

-) sexism - as already discussed exhaustively
-) big ego's, most frequently found in new instructors
-) pilots wanting to show off how clever/great/able they are
-) ....?

Could you explain how?

I see a fair number of women airline pilots. I am sure there would have been straight discrimination decades ago, and widespread too, but that is then and now we are in 2011.

Aviation is not a lucrative career. Sure you can make 50k or even 100k after some years but that is just a well paid steady job which can be used to pay for a house in the country, a horse, a 4x4, maybe 2 kids in private schooling, but what have you got to show for all that in the end? Sod all. Just a load of stress, and writing cheques all the time. Been there, done that. And I see it all the time where I live (Sussex). You haven't missed anything, and IMHO had a much more interesting life than as an airline pilot. You did well to get rid of your husband nice and early, too.

That is true only for an exceptionally successful yet shrewd and well organised businessman, and they are very rare. The only people I know who have both are retired businessmen who sold up businesses for some millions, allowing them to retire with plenty of money and time. They are not exactly common, and all are in their 60s, having basically knackered themselves. I don't think their life expectancy is all that great.

Below that level of success, men face a sharp money v. time tradeoff.

Also great many male pilots give up flying once the "sprogs" start dropping. The wife implements a clampdown on "dangerous activities incompatible with a family man", and the bank balance takes care of the rest.

That's why I'm delighted to have grey hair, hang around with other pilot who I either know, or at least think, have grey hair, and take flying instruction from instructors with grey hair. Item 1 above is well settled already, and item 2 is either settled, or truely worth watching!

I recognize the reality that new pilots have to gain experience somewhere, but I'm not sure that teaching newer pilots is the best place for it. As has been previously said here, it creates a heritage of inexperience. But it's a necessary system, and my complaining about it won't help anyone.

In keeping with my original theme here, I do like to draw in those new instructors, as I would any pilot, when I have the opportunity, but I have bumped into a few egos!

As for the showing off, that takes care of itself over time (if you survive). I have learned a lot of what not to do - too much of that, first hand. Hopefully, our sharing it here, over time, will help other pilots avoid those mistakes themselves. The trick is to see the swiss cheese holes lining up in time to stop it, before you fall through.

But, am I drifting from my own drift on this thread? I've kinda lost track! Another few pages, and we should have every problem in aviation worked out!

Oh, I don't know.... Mine encouraged me to put the optional kiddy seat in the back of the 150! (or borrow the 182 RG)

Aequalis, that is where equal comes from and means identical or the same as, just as we use the term in maths. As i thought we had agreed girls and boys are not equal, but if you prefer, yes we are different.

Whirls it is good to see you posting; the debate is really interesting, and i hope your concerns stay in the minority.

For me i would rather treasure our differences, rather than dwell on our similarities, for i think in some respects we are more similiar than we give credit.

Equality promotes equal rights; it requires that where there are no differences they are not artficially created, but if it fails to recognise our inequality then its just as devisive as discrimination.

I love this thread!
 

It totally sums up the pilot zoo that is pprune. Monsieur Joe 90 Dar starts off with a great post about how we should remember that we're all part of a big club.

7 pages in we're all squabbling, about sexism ?

I took some chums flying the other day and we discussed the "culture" of ppls. It's a funny old thing. To fly you need some dosh and so are generally quite successful in your life. Successful people are usually used to getting their own way, all of the time. So you have a whole bunch of people who get their own way most of the time, together in a group where, by definition, not everybody can get their own way. It's not suprising pprune is 40% flame wars!

The wonderful counter balance that if you mess up you pay the ultimate price just stokes those fires a little stronger.

Great post Dar, great flame war everyone. Never let it be said PPrune can't find something to argue about! Even when the opening line is "we all decided to join the same club" it's not suprising somebody responds with "No I didn't!"

I think you will find the "flame wars" in this case were kicked off by 1 or 2 people.

It's a pity.

But yes, getting pilots to work together is like herding cats. It's quite a problem for volunteer organisations in GA. Most of the volunteers have big egos. This is how US AOPA is so successful: they have normal full-time paid execs at the top.

Whirlygig

Might I suggest that you now read this whole thread from start to finish and see how you are actually coming across? It is quite unbelievable.

For the record, 'aviator' is a gender-neutral term.

Wikipedia has a 'List of Aviators', which has both kinds of aviators in it.

In my Oxford Dictionary, an aviator is 'a pilot'. An aviatrix is 'a female pilot'.

The online Merriam-Webster has aviatrix as 'a woman who is an aviator', coined around 1910.

So if you want to go out on a limb and convey the sense of 'Actual women! Actually flying!', go ahead and use 'aviatrix' and 'aviatrices'. My guess is that the newspapers invented the words for exactly those headlines.

It is foolish to think you can determnine the meaning of modern English words by reference to what Greeks and Romans were supposedly saying thousands of years ago. A television is not a telescope. Phugoid oscillations have nothing to do with law enforcement.

And surely all those thousands of years ago, aviation was for birds, not people. I did a year of history at school, so I must be an expert!;)

This whole discussion seems ridiculous to me. Admittedly I'm one of the more junior members of the aviation community, at the age of 27, but I have never seen even a hint of sexism in any of my 500+ hours around airfields and in airplanes. I'm an engineer, and I can say the same about my workplace too; the younger generation seem entirely blind to peoples sex in the professional environment, and at least in my office, the female engineers seem to get preferential, rather than negative, treatment from the older generation.

Indeed, in aviation I have only ever met one person who was immediately rude, arrogant, and presumptive; and that was a female instructor at our club. Oddly enough, I haven't judged all women pilots based on her.

Well said that man.

What has it come to when a female pilot is asked by someone if her husband minds her flying and the immediate assumption is one of sexism. Many people ask me if my wife minds if I fly and I have never taken that as a sexist comment about my gender.....:ugh:

which is on the long term just as negative - but I do have observed this same phenomenon at other places.

Sounds like banking. The way women get treated has everything to do with lawsuit avoidance, and nothing to do with gender equality.

IO540

Now I'm going to go off on yet another tangent. I really have to take issue with that comment as it is a very sweeping and inaccurate generalisation.

Of the over 4000 volunteers who run AirVenture, I think you'd fine only a tiny percentage of them have big egos. Obviously it is high time you made the visit to Oshkosh and joined in the fun here - then you could see for yourself what a fantastic community spirit there is and how much fun it is to volunteer with a great bunch of people.

Give it a rest, girls.

I like what Pompey Paul said earlier. You need dosh to fly, so need to have been successful to acquire the dosh, put all these middle aged egos together in a committee, and there you have a flying club! ....and regular backstabbing, gossip, conspiracy, toys thrown out of the pram. walking off in a huff....and that's just the boys!

I remember the scene in the film "The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming!"
where all the men are fighting each other as to who will command the "Glocester Island" volunteers - all armed with a variety of hoes, rakes, shotguns, deer rifles, against a Russian Sub in the harbour armed with a very large piece of ordinance....

And in despair, the Deputy Sheriff tears his hair and says

"Why can't everybody just get along?"

(because we actually enjoy slagging each other off!)

That's not the UK though, is it?

Also, who is at the very top?

I had some thoughts, and some sleep, and came back....

Firstly, that word "fraternity". I think you'd all agree that the main purpose of writing is communication. Well, when I saw the title of this thread I just assumed it was another thread along the lines of a few others we've had in the past like how to get the wife interested in flying. Frternity means brotherhood. It's male-orientated by definition. It has those connotations. So I'm sorry, Pilot DAR, and I love the sentiments, but as a writer I've got to tell you that Community would have been far better.

Secondly, as to the sentiments expressed in that first post. Well, I'd love it if they were all true, and I've met some lovely people in aviation. But I've also met some downright sods too. Just like the rest of the world in fact. Maybe take off your rose-coloured spectacles. On second thoughts, don't - until someone else does it for you. Why be as old and cynical as I am.

Next, Whirls' comment that sexism seems to exist mainly in fixed-wing aviation. Well, Whirls my friend, if that's your experience, who am I to argue with it? But I wonder if it isn't that it's commonest among the general public, less so in private aviation, and almost non-existent in commercial aviation. Which could explain why I get mistaken for the tea lady when doing helicopter trial lessons, ignored and then apologised to when flying to a fly-in with a male passenger, but treated with the utmost respect in the commercial flying world. And when I went to interview Kirsty Moore, first female Red Arrows pilot, for an article, and sat in on one of their briefings, I was impressed by the fact that she was treated no differently from anyone else. I shouldn't have to be impressed, but I was, because it's still so rare. The forces are super-professional - and non-sexist. So are younger men, which could explain my GA versus commercial flying experience...but I don't know. But anyway, actually all any of us women want is to be treated 'normally' - not better, not worse, not the same, not differently, just normally. That's what I originally liked about the BWPA - that's how it was; I was just a pilot, not a woman pilot, not great, not awful, not a minority, not anything to write home about, but just someone who could merge into the background. It's the reason I'm still a member. It would be nice if they didn't need to exist, but well...they seem to provide something for nearly 400 women. Got to be a reason. Don't tell me we just like paying subs for the fun of it.

Finally, Mary Meagher, things have changed. Women no longer have to choose between career and family. The reasons for the minority of women in aviation are more somplicated and subtle than that. Let me leave you with a conversation I had just a few years ago with a 16 year old pilot, an Air Cadets high flyer, who soloed in minimum hours and for whom a great future in aviation was predicted...

Me: Why are there so few girls in the air cadets.
Her: Well, it's a boy thing isn't it?
Me: But why?
Her (shrugging): Just is.

Well, now I know...

When I first flew in the RAF the married guys got more pay!
When off duty on the Cornish beaches my single mates would join me in surfing the big waves. But one by one they vanished as girl friends became wives. Later in BOAC the first topic of conversation once climbing with autopilot engaged was... "Are you on your first or second divorce? How did you hide your money? How come you escaped and are still single?... Watch out for the 'A' stewardess she's a man eater!"
Later on the Classic 747 all the stewards were gay, and all the stewardesses were feminists or married, or both. But by then I had indeed married and was in the process of divorce... which cost me dear both in money and mental health. Not surprising then that my opinion of women was of a dangerous alien species, that can be functional or decorative but never both. But then the first women pilots appeared on the 747 and my opinion of women had to change. For the first time ever I had breakfast in N York with a female pilot and we talked aviation nonstop without the slightest patronization or hidden agenda from her. Amazingly for me here was a person with the true ability and passion for flying that I had associated only with men. Not only that but she was attractive and fun to be with. This pilot and others like her have pretty well demolished my earlier misogyny, but I am a bit worried about the modern trend for young female airline pilots to show a hint of cleavage within their uniform.
There should be a notice on the flight deck door: "Please leave your emotional & sexual baggage outside" ;)

vee-tail-1

That goes for the oversized watches & too tight trousers the women have had to endure for all these years too.....:E

IO-540

I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. :confused:

Whirly:

This has also changed. The ATC Squadron that my daughter attends has a growing number of female cadets. The senior cadet is female, too.

Assuming they are doing it innocently (which I of course doubt) they are prob99 copying the High Street, where waists and boobs hanging out is de rigueur nowadays, regarldess of how much material is exposed :)

I like the rest of your early-years portrait, starting with the surfing scene :ok:

Reminded me of Big Wednesday. (there's a fabulous pic for the gurls here :) ).

Only saying that if you have 4000 volunteers, you are not going to have a volunteer at the top running the whole thing. It will be a full time paid executive, who is recruited, and fired if necessary. Otherwise you will have mayhem.
Big watches are entirely optional :)

Can men join the BWPA? And if not, why not?

Might start up the BMPA! ;)

Article in latest Pilot magazine talks about the "helpful aviation community". Perhaps, if the OP had used that phrase instead of "fraternity", this thread could have covered that much more interesting issue as was probably intended.

Yes, men can join the BWPA, and some do.
(Looks like I'm back on PPPuNe forums...sigh)

Welcome back Whirlybird, long time no see!

SD

Good to see you back, Whirly! :D

Hello Whirlybird, nice to make your acquaintance! Don't you just love the way these threads get sidetracked....and get more interesting as well!

I'm happy to agree that times have changed for women in the western world. Since Lillienthal and Orville and Wilbur cast off the surly bonds we have been recognised as equal partners in aviation, if we want to be (think of Harriet Quimby), or if we are badly needed - having the skills needed to deliver Lancasters etc from the factory to the forward bases in WWII.

But possibly the key to the scarcity of our sex in this peculiar pursuit does lie in your conversation with the talented air cadet. Why would a girl want to grow up to be a bus driver, after all? The men who end up in the pointy end seem to make a terrible hash of their family relationships, and many end up with a rather jaundiced view of women.

We have quite an active junior section in our gliding club,about 20 boys and girls from 13 to l7. One girl is quite serious, solo at 16, works very very hard. Three boys have soloed at 16. But the differences I observe in the teenage students are the same that appear in adult beginners: females suffer from underconfidence, males from overconfidence. Result of conditioning since birth?

I'm just waiting for someone to quote John Grey (Men are from Mars...) on this horribly drifted thread, which started off with a bloke being thoughtful and saying thank you and then was hijacked by some people with an axe to grind.

The attitudes of some of the female posters here are unbelievable, I work in a female oriented environment, where there is no gender advantage and am used to working in equal partnerships.

I have to say that if confronted by some of the attitudes here, I would find it totally tiresome and would not accept such whinging - I know the women I work with would not take it, either.

As for conditioning, Mary do you mind me asking (respectfully) what knowledge you have in the area of psychology? Confidence is not built by conditioning (in the traditional sense), as the purpose is to train someone to react in a certain way to a certain stimulus. Of course, confidence in the new ability may develop as a consequence.

Having said that, personality and motivation equally have a part to play, as does culture.

I would say that younger men typically (but not always) display more bravado and younger women typically (but not always) tend to be a little more cautious, but that is a different set of labels to confident/under confident.

The women I work with are highly confident professionals, built on years of professional development.

Final 3 Greens, I would say, respectfully, that you're splitting hairs. Mary was using the term conditioning as it is generally used in everyday conversation. That seemed obvious to me, and by the way, I do happen to have a degree in psychology. My personal experience as an instructor is the same as Mary's - men think they'll be able to fly helicopters easily even when they're pretty hopeless; women think they can't do it even when they obviously can. And my personal observations throughout a life which, while not as long as Mary's, has been going on a while, is that little boys tend to get told they're really, really good at things, while little girls tend to be told they can't do things because they're not big enough/strong enough/ clever enough/whatever. You don't need a degree in anything to deduce that the latter might possibly lead to the former in later life. And yes, I'm making a generalisation, and there are exceptions. And yes, I do think that things are changing in the modern world. And finally, I haven't noticed any whinging on this thread, merely some discussion and a little thread drift. Why do you have a problem with that? And why should I take any notice of it if you do?