On the night of 12 February 2009, Colgan Flight 3407 was on approach to Buffalo, NY, with 49 passengers and crew. Nearing the airport, the aircraft, a Bombardier Q400, experienced a stall. The pilot mistakenly yanked back on the stick, causing the plane to spin in and killing all on board, along with one person on the ground. This flight has a lot to do with what happened over Washington DC on the night of 29 January 2025 between a civilian plane and a U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. And it also has plenty to do with a recent crash of a Delta-Endeavor Air CJR-900 in Toronto.
And in all of these incidents, I blame Feminism for the tragedies.
Over the last few decades, a number of studies have been done about the accident rates of men and women flying aircraft. The studies varied some, but found that between 71-80% of aviation accidents are due to pilot error. For both men and women, the greatest cause of pilot error was mishandling the aircraft, though for women it was twice as high as men.[1] For men, the next reason for accidents was inattention, followed by flawed decisions. Conclusions drawn indicate that the key reason women crash is from mishandling the aircraft, while for men it was mishandling the aircraft closely followed by inattention.[2]
These conclusions are important, but still lack one aspect of research. Indeed, to my knowledge, nobody has done serious research on one crucial aspect of men and woman as pilots.
And that issue is when men and women fly together… as a team.
Men and women behave differently around each other than when with the same sex, and it takes very strong character traits to overcome this. I have observed this phenomenon for decades, as a school teacher, an Army Noncommissioned Officer, and a professional political consultant and lobbyist. While working as a lobbyist, many of the lobbying firms used young, attractive girls, “dressed to the nines” often in short skirts and hose, to work the halls of the legislature. I have even overheard lawmakers and male lobbyists make comments regarding their dress. And this is all to create a distraction to make any legislator more amenable to the lobbying effort.[3]
Men and women can become easily distracted with each other. For that matter, it is well researched that some of the principal places where affairs begin are in close-contact environments, such as the office, the gym, or even at church.[4] In aviation, the cockpit is the office, while crewmembers also spend considerable amount of time around each other when not flying. When I was a young tank commander back in the mid-1980s, a group of us were asked our opinion about women integrated with men in combat units. In the comment section, I wrote that I was sure there were some women out there who could throw a 50-pound shell into the tank gun’s breach. But my main concern was struggling to keep the men and women focused on the mission and out of each other’s sleeping bags.
And this brings me back to Colgan Flight 3407. The pilot was a 47-year old male, and the copilot a 24-year old female. The pilot was married with a family, and there is no available evidence that he and his copilot were intimately involved. However, the transcript in the cockpit demonstrated that the two were not attentive to their instruments, even as the wings collected ice. When the flaps were deployed for landing, the plane slowed significantly and began to stall. The pilot, caught by surprise, mistakenly pulled up on the stick. Tragedy was the result.[5] The NTSB cited “pilot error,” though did admit that the crew were inattentive to their instruments. The cockpit voice recorder documented how the two pilots of Colgan 3407 talked and bantered back and forth about many peripheral issues, and were not adequately tracking changing conditions.
And I suspect this is what happened in that UH-60 Black Hawk, with a 28-year old female at the controls, overseen by a 39-year old male. This does not mean that anything unseemly occurred on that bird, or at any other time. Rather, somewhere along the way the two became unduly familiar to the point that their professionalism suffered, what in the military we call “losing one’s military bearing.” Indeed, there are a group of female pilots who recently did a radio show where they spoke of the commonality of this very problem, with men obviously distracted by the presence of a woman in the cockpit.[6]
There is, or course, an opposite possibility… that the male instructor, aware that the female he was evaluating had worked as a sexual assault response officer (what the military calls “SHARP”),[7] may have overcompensated in the opposite direction, becoming nervous about pointing out her deficiencies due to the overpoliticization within today’s American military.
In either case, men and women flying together creates a distracting environment, and goes a long way to explaining why the Black Hawk was 100 feet outside of its assigned lane of operation in congested airspace. With a man and woman in the cockpit, we put two of the worst foibles together… inattention and aircraft mishandling, a toxic mix of gasoline and fire waiting to explode to disaster.[8] One can only guess how many other tragedies were narrowly avoided in the past under such circumstances.
Regarding the recent crash of the Delta flight in Toronto, again we have a young female flying the plane, with an older male acting as “Pilot in Command (PIC).”[9] That the insanity of DEI may have some influence on this incident is bad enough. But even if the female is sufficiently qualified, putting her in the cockpit with a male pilot is an unnecessary distraction. It would be like me arguing that we need to remove one engine from all multi-engine aircraft to save fuel and protect the environment. People would naturally say I’m crazy to suggest that, as it would be an obvious strike against performance and safety. And yet, we bow to the feminist insanity by going against human nature by placing men and women in close quarters in high-risk environments, also jeopardizing performance and safety.
None of this should imply that any of the crews involved in these incidents are bad people. Rather… they are people, men and women subject to the human foibles of men and women when together… foibles that cannot be trained out of people no matter how hard we try. But because we live in the Feminist utopia where men and women are seen to be interchangeable widgets, nobody will examine the impact of human hormones on human behavior and decision making.
With that said, I will go where nobody wants to go… men and women should never… ever… be in the same operational environment when critical safety is involved, such as piloting commercial or military aircraft. What we desperately need is a change in cockpit culture, and this change should exclude coed piloting. There are enough air accidents already, and we don’t need radical Feminism helping to create more.
We don’t need to compound the problem by going against human nature.
Russ Rodgers has several books published on Amazon.
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[1] For women, the mishandling rate was over 80%; for men, the rate of mishandling plus inattention together was almost 80%.
[2] https://pure.johnshopkins.edu/en/publications/characteristics-of-general-aviation-crashes-involving-mature-male-4; https://upperlimitaviation.edu/reasons-behind-male-and-female-pilot-error/
[3] While how it works with men is obvious, but how does it work on female lawmakers? Such lawmakers view female lobbyists as fellow fighters in the cause of feminism, and hence lean to their efforts.
[4] https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/the-6-most-common-places-where-affairs-start
[5] For a further analysis of the pilot’s surprise, see https://www.flyingmag.com/safety-accident-investigations-aftermath-mystery-colgan-3407/
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUfIltJ1JM8. The show is called “Cockpit & Cocktails.”
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQZl4w52HmY
[8] Some may say, “well, we have had women with men in the cockpit and it didn’t matter,” to which I reply, “how do you know? After all, there doesn’t seem to be any studies on this.”
[9] Delta recently released some basic information, but not the names. I have seen the names, but am awaiting confirmation. https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/delta-plane-crash-toronto-pilot/
This is the most logical analysis that I have read, and I believe you are correct. I will go you one further and advocate for only male pilots. DEI cannot overcome millennia of culture when men did the manly jobs because they were stronger, and built for certain tasks.
How many lives have been sacrificed to prove an impossible point, namely that men and women are equal in abilities.
Thank you for the kind remarks.
Btw, my apologies for mis-naming the aircraft…. it was a CRJ-900… not CJR. My aging eyes failing me once more!