Female pilot accident rates

"NoPoliticsHere" wrote in message
om...
(Rick Durden) wrote in message
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There is very little data available on the subject, largely because
there are so few women who are pilots (about 6% of all pilots, a lower
proportion than that of professional pilots).

Which goes along with my observation that women are involved in more
than 6% of accidents, at least the ones that make the news.

Which, as has been pointed out here, is hardly a scientific method, and
furthermore, many involved accidents where the pilot gender was irrelevant.

But since you're into accidents in the news:

Crash report criticises Air Algerie and 737 captain
Kieran Daly, London (27Oct04, 12:20 GMT, 677 words)
Algerian investigators have strongly criticised the captain of the Air
Algerie Boeing 737-200 that crashed fatally in March last year and
recommended changes to the airline's safety and training processes.

All but one of the 102 occupants of the 21-year-old aircraft died when the
crew failed to control it after suffering the loss of the left-hand Pratt &
Whitney JT8D-17A engine immediately after take-off from Tamanrasset in
Algeria.

In their final report on the 6 March 2003 accident, the investigators say
the aircraft reached only about 400ft before descending, crashing violently
and catching fire.

The captain took control of the aircraft from the first officer after the
engine failure, probably unnecessarily, but then failed to raise the
landing-gear and tried to maintain an excessive rate of climb while the
speed bled away, leading to loss of control of the aircraft.

As the probable cause, the report states: "The accident resulted from the
loss of an engine during a critical phase of flight, from the failure to
raise the landing-gear after the engine failure, and from the taking of
control by the captain before he had completely identified the nature of the
failure."

It describes a poor preparation for the flight which was carried out by the
first officer alone, because the captain was late arriving, and saw the
checklist being curtailed due to the involvement of the cabin chief in the
cockpit.

The report says: "This lack of rigour in the preparation for the flight was
also noted during taxiing with non-observation of the 'sterile cockpit'
regime.

"More generally, at no moment on the cockpit voice recorder is there a
dialogue or briefing related to the possibility of a problem during
take-off, as recommended by Air Algerie's procedures."

The aircraft eventually took off at 150kt but immediately after the first
officer requested the landing gear to be raised, the first stage of the high
pressure turbine in the left hand engine suffered a major failure which
rapidly led to its uncontained destruction.

Eight seconds later the captain, aged 48 and with nearly 11,000 flying
hours, took control for reasons that the investigators say are not clear,
but did not follow the procedure for doing so, and then neither raised the
gear nor asked for it to be raised.

The first officer, a 44 year-old woman with more than 5,000 hours, again
suggested raising the gear and reported the emergency by radio but then
played no obvious role. Several seconds after the left engine failure there
was a "significant", unexplained, power reduction on the right engine which
markedly reduced the aircraft's performance.

The report says: "At all events the absence of co-ordination between the
pilots at the time of the transfer of control led the commander to manage an
emergency which he had not had time to analyse completely."

The captain then maintained the same rate of climb but the speed decreased
toward the stall and the aircraft lost altitude, generating a ground
proximity warning system (GPWS) 'don't sink' alert 6s before the aircraft
crashed.

Contributory factors to the accident included the aircraft's near-maximum
weight at a 'hot and high' airport.

The investigators describe a weak system at the airline for providing
feedback to crews from other incidents and accidents: although there was a
system of published bulletins all the case studies covered were from other
airlines and "no event reported by a crew of Air Algerie was analysed in
writing".

They make three sets of recommendations: first that Air Algerie and other
Algerian airlines ensure that their crew resource management (CRM) training
effectively trains crews concerning the procedure for transferring and
sharing control of the aircraft, and that Algeria's Direction de l'Aviation
Civile et de la Meteorologie (DACM) puts in place an operation to oversee
the process.

Secondly, that the DACM ensures that Air Algerie and other airlines put in
place a flight safety programme which provides feedback from in-service
experience and the systematic analysis of flight data.

Finally, they recommend that the Algerian transport minister establishes a
permanent body for investigating civil aviation "incidents and accidents".

Source: Air Transport Intelligence news

So we had a male captain who showed up late, failed to ensure a proper
pre-flight, failed to brief, pre-emptively took control without knowing the
problem, ignored the female S/O suggestion about raising the gear, and
mismanaged the recovery.

But it's an accident that involved a woman pilot.