ANOTHER pilot in the British Royal Air Force responds below to the two previous posts, here and here, on Flt. Lt. Kirsty Stewart, the first woman to join the elite Red Arrows aerobatics team. Stewart was reassigned recently due to stress.

The pilot, who prefers to remain anonymous, writes:

I do not usually contribute to these sorts of discussions online but feel that I must take issue with both your post on Kirsty and the contributions by Mr McCulloch.

First of all I am a current serving RAF tornado pilot who was instructed by Kirsty through advanced jet training and served on an adjacent squadron on the Tornado.

I will start with the Daily Mail, I am not concerned with its political leanings, just with the terrible standards of journalism it contains. It seems to have no real interest in the facts, merely finding the most sensational story. I do not wish to delve into the private life of one of my colleagues on this forum but I can assure you that the issues are far more complex (aren’t they always) than the article makes out.

You also suggest that somehow Kirsty getting into the Red Arrows cost a huge amount of public dollars (pounds). I fail to see how she cost any more than a man, and also that she has prevented two men from getting into the team. This is not true, she achieved her place on merit and her leaving the team has had no effect on the recruiting of new team members, the reduction to 7 aircraft has been achieved through normal postings in addition to the fact that two of the team members died.

Onto the contributions by Mr McCulloch, I do not know his background but I would guess he is a retired Cold War-era fighter jock. He seems to suggest that admitting to stress/PTSD is a failing and that we should just mourn our friends and move on, just ‘man up’ as you would say. I am pleased to say that, given the current conflict that both our nations are involved in, that is no longer the case. Our forces are now very good at dealing with this issue and many people, male and female have come to realise that these issues need to be talked about and dealt with and that the high pressure environment of a fast jet cockpit is no place for someone who is not functioning at 100 percent. I could take issue with some of his other points but will save that for another day.

To be honest though I don’t think any of my previous points are that important, you were after all just using Kirsty’s story to illustrate a point, that you don’t think women should be fighter pilots (she is not and never was a ‘fighter pilot’ but never mind) or indeed do any high pressure job. First, to state my position on the whole housewife thing: my wife is a stay at home mum to our three girls, she loves being a housewife and has no desire to return to work, I think that this is probably the best and easiest (but not only) way to bring up children. I also think that the role of the housewife is not held in nearly high enough regard in our society and that this is something that needs addressing. This does not, of course mean that I think all women should be housewives, many cannot afford that luxury after all, and many choose not to have a family and pursue a career instead. I also think that a workplace without women would be a poorer one. Many people think that jet pilots need to be rushing about full of testosterone and aggression, actually, nothing could be further from the truth, a good pilot needs to be able to keep a cool head, think well under pressure and make good decisions based on sound judgement and knowledge, in many ways women are better at this than men. I think the main reason there are not more female pilots is down to gender stereotyping. I suppose my question to you would be: do you really think that all women should be housewives? No female doctors, no female government ministers? If that did happen I think our world would be a poorer place for it. As a father to three girls I would want them to have the opportunity to achieve whatever they want in life, and hopefully the example of my wife will have shown them that staying at home to look after your family is just as valuable as flying jets.

I hope I have made some sense and, if any of my colleagues have been rude it is only because they are, rightly, annoyed at one of their friends being kicked whilst she was down, both by inaccurate press articles and fairly vitriolic web posts. Thats what you get with freedom of speech though.

Laura writes:

Thank you for writing.

Let me take your points one by one.

1. The Daily Mail article was superficial and misleading.

Most journalism is superficial. The best we can hope for is extended analysis and consideration elsewhere. That’s why I take comments, some of them very long and substantial, to augment the story.

However, I’m not sure what you expected the Daily Mail to do. You say the story is more complicated but that it would be a violation of Miss Stewart’s privacy to go into the details. I think The Daily Mail would have been remiss in not publishing anything about it, given that she occupies a visible public position, but if it had gone further than the official statements, might it not have violated her privacy?

If it is untrue that she was reassigned due to stress, perhaps the RAF might tell the public otherwise. Truthfully though, I’m not sure what you found objectionable in the Dail Mail piece. It was hardly critical. Also, weren’t there many favorable pieces about Miss Stewart when she first joined the Red Arrows? Did you object to them as well because Miss Stewart was being singled out as a woman?

2. Miss Stewart did not cost the public extra money.

I assumed that there was cost involved in reducing the flying team for the year and the change of plans. But perhaps not. I also assumed that this reassignment might represent a permanent redirection for Miss Stewart and the RAF might not benefit from her costly training to the degree it would with the average male pilot.

But, we don’t know what Miss Stewart’s future will bring. So my point regarding Miss Stewart alone may have been wrong.

Male pilots drop out and are reassigned too. However, most go on to use that training in some professional capacity. The fact is, women are more likely in highly demanding and stressful jobs to drop out, scale back or retire altogether.

The public expense I was referring to was not just for the RAF but for society at large. There is only so much money to train pilots, and society loses when pilots don’t use their training over the long term, given that training is a limited and valuable resource. Women have a much higher drop out rate than men in all highly-demanding professions. Of course, not all women drop out or scale back to raise children, but many of them do. That’s why we should  think in terms of possible wasted expenditure.

You say Miss Stewart did not cause any man to lose out. But are you saying no man would have wanted her position and her training? That can’t be. So she did indeed replace a man. When I referred to two men losing out, I was referring to the pilot who would have flown a plane this season if there was the traditional nine-plane formation. But that is a relatively trivial objection.

In giving this position to a woman over a man, however, and recognizing that as good, we deny that  men should in any way be favored. By giving preference to men for lucrative and demanding jobs, society recognizes that men are responsible, even now, for supporting women and children. Even today, with all the changes wrought by feminism, men contribute a much larger share to the family budget, either via taxes or direct support.

3. Women make good military pilots. It is unfair to discourage women from flying.

First, I believe I referred to Miss Stewart as a “pilot of fighter jets.” If I also mistakenly referred to her as a “fighter pilot,” that was incorrect. I will make note of that in the previous entry.

You write:

Many people think that jet pilots need to be rushing about full of testosterone and aggression, actually, nothing could be further from the truth, a good pilot needs to be able to keep a cool head, think well under pressure and make good decisions based on sound judgement and knowledge, in many ways women are better at this than men.

I don’t think of jet pilots as impulsive and overtly aggressive. I think of them as cool, deliberate, highly-controlled, capable of integrating technical details, extremely coordinated, and mechanically-inclined.

It’s true that men are more impulsive and inclined to risky, dangerous behavior than women. Women are more obedient, law-abiding, and self-controlled. (See this discussion of the differences between male and female drivers that points to some of these differences.)

Men, however, have quicker hair-trigger reflexes and they excel in spatial-visualizing skills. Men are more mechanically inclined than women. And, as Simon Baron-Cohen writes in his book, The Essential Difference, which looks at many studies of the male and female brain, men possess more “systematizing” minds. He classifies men as “systematizing” and women as “empathizing.” (These are broad generalizations, not meant to suggest that women are not to some degree systematizers and men are not empathizers.)

The spatial and gross motor skills of males are related to their systematizing abilities:

If you are asked to throw objects at a target, such as playing darts, men are more accurate in such throwing accuracy …. Equally if people are asked to judge which of two moving objects is traveling faster, on average men are more accurate. They are also better at estimating when an object moving toward them will hit them. In one study, the object could only be seen, not heard, and the task was to say when the object would arrive. In a related study, judging object velocity from sound alone also revealed a male advantage. This must be systematizing par excellence. Presumably the systematizer is analysing the auditory input in terms of how it corelates with speed.

While women do have more self-control than men (see Baron-Cohen), and that is evident in the statistics on crime, and they do take fewer dangerous risks, it is not true that in emergency situations,  women are in general cooler and more calm. Again, men do have quicker reflexes, but also there is something more that is related to their aggressive and protective tendencies when it comes to emergencies. To assert that men are no better in tense emergencies goes against many thousands of years of sex differentiation, with men overwhelmingly assigned to jobs that are high-risk and stressful. In flying, there is a very small margin of error in an emergency.

Finally, there is the very important issue of group morale. The presence of women in combat-related groups (and I consider the aerobatic team combat-related because of the use of military jets and its institutional setting) disrupts male bonding, creates the potential for tension created by male/female relationships and inhibits men from being men in a climate of Political Correctness, which makes the possibility of sexual harrassment a constant. Also men in general have a reluctance to subordinate themselves to women in command. Men have a strong tendency to dominate in male/female relations and women have an orientation toward submissiveness in relation to strong men.

These natural biological differences contribute to the essence of male and female. However, masculinity and femininity are not purely biological. They are spiritual as well. There is something intensely masculine, in a spiritual sense, about the male military pilot. He is protector, warrior, and sacrificial victim. When we say women can do this every bit as much as men, we are saying that it’s not important to bring out those spiritual essences in men. We then reduce maleness to a mechanical, bioliogical reality.

4. It’s wrong to expect all women to be housewives.

Do I believe all women should be housewives? Of course not.

Do I believe no women should be pilots or doctors or highly-trained scientists? No, I do not.

However, I do believe motherhood, wifehood and jobs that involve traditional womanly qualities should be the ideal. Women who depart from this ideal, instead of being celebrated and held up as models for all, should be considered anomalies. As it is, women who occupy these highly demanding careers are incessantly trumpeted in the press. We rarely hear just how much it costs in their personal lives and just how much it costs our culture when the brightest and best are diverted from motherhood.

Motherhood is the dumbed-down institution considered an unworthy past-time (except as a beautiful hobby) for bright women. That’s the result of materialist philosophies that have devalued the human being.

When flying fighter jets or working in laboratories or handling law briefs are all considered a better use of a woman’s time than forming human beings in their most significant developmental periods, what can this signify but a suicidal inclination and a devaluation of the human?

Right now, home, marriage, procreation, the intellectual, physical and moral upbringing of children  all constitute a beautiful hobby, one of many possible individual choices. This trivialization of womanliness can’t help but bring about what we see: declining fertility, broken marriages, unpleasant homes, a loss of civility, and the general commercialization of womanhood.

Achievement and masculine success are the ideals for women. Many women choose otherwise and a far greater number make some uneasy compromise with this model, but all women are still affected in some way by it, a major reason for our low birth rate.

“Social life is a compromise between freedom and order,” said Michael Levin, author of Freedom and Feminism. 

Your daughters may very well wish to be full-time mothers someday, but, assuming no major cultural changes, they may face considerable hardship in attaining this goal. It is much harder for men to support a family, given the competition from women workers, and there is much more cultural pressure on women to do other things. Even so, regardless of what happens to them personally, they will inhabit a cultural setting that is characterized by profound social dysfunction, alienation and a loss of identity. Many people once found meaning and purpose in being a man or a woman and that meaning is no longer there. One woman pilot is merely symbolic of this overall change.

Laura adds:

As far as your point that it is no longer shameful for a pilot to admit to trauma and stress, is it true that in the past there was no recognition of the need for military personnel to get relief from highly stressful conditions?

                                      — Comments —

A male reader writes:

What these male pilots forget is that without their mothers, they wouldn’t be around today doing what they are doing.

Laura writes:

And many people who would have been around aren’t around because femininity is despised. It’s impossible to gauge the effects of the never-born.

A woman gains no money and no prestige in creating and sustaining life.

It’s well and good to talk about the desire of women to fill certain occupations, but their interests cannot easily be disentangled from the economic and social incentives.

Alissa writes:

You wrote:

Women who depart from this ideal, instead of being celebrated and held up as models for all, should be considered anomalies.

But you see that is the focus of the liberal experiment: the anomalies. In liberalism the exception to the rule should become the rule. Does it that matter that the great majority does this or does that or is near the average? No. If they looked at a normal distribution curve, they would gloss over one standard deviation of the mean (68% of the data) as well as two standard deviations of the mean (95% of the data). Instead, they would observe exceptional individuals, those that are three, or even four, standard deviations of the mean. It’s hard for them to internalize generalizations because everyone is supposedly a special snowflake.

Henry McCulloch writes:

Referring to me, RAF pilot says:

Onto the contributions by Mr McCulloch, I do not know his background but I would guess he is a retired Cold War-era fighter jock. He seems to suggest that admitting to stress/PTSD is a failing and that we should just mourn our friends and move on, just ‘man up’ as you would say. I am pleased to say that, given the current conflict that both our nations are involved in, that is no longer the case. Our forces are now very good at dealing with this issue and many people, male and female have come to realise that these issues need to be talked about and dealt with and that the high pressure environment of a fast jet cockpit is no place for someone who is not functioning at 100 percent. I could take issue with some of his other points but will save that for another day.

Indeed I am a Cold War-era fighter jock (1980s-1990s) although, as I flew F-16s until 1995, my active flying outlasted the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact and so, I suppose, the Cold War. RAF pilot doesn’t actually say so, but he implies we Cold War-era fighter jocks are insensitive dinosaurs – today’s enlightened armed forces are better off without us.

I wonder what RAF pilot thinks of the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm Sea Harrier pilots and his own RAF’s Harrier pilots who flew vastly outnumbered and fought with great distinction over the Falklands in 1982? They most certainly are Cold War-era fighter jocks (well, Sea Harrier pilots are fighter jocks; RAF Harrier pilots fly ground-attack missions). Is RAF pilot dismissive of the British fighter pilots who fought in the Korean War: Fleet Air Arm pilots aboard Royal Navy carriers and RAF pilots on exchange with the U.S. Air Force? Some of the Royal Navy’s Cold War dinos of that war were good enough to shoot down MiG jet fighters with their propeller-driven aircraft. And what of the RAF and Fleet Air Arm fighter pilots who flew – again with distinction – during the Suez Crisis of 1956? Cold War-era fighter jocks all, along with all the other RAF and Fleet Air Arm fighter pilots from 1945 through 1991 who helped contain a Soviet Union intent on expanding Communism’s sphere.

Grounding oneself because of stress or PTSD is an admission of a failing: that a pilot cannot manage operational stress and perform his flying duties. That is not, unless it’s actually an excuse to shirk duty, a moral failing. But neither is it something to celebrate; it is an abandonment of duty – even if a necessary one. Either someone else will have to step in and do the incapacitated pilot’s job for him or his squadron will have to fly short-handed. In Flt Lt Stewart’s specific case, the Red Arrows are finessing the shortfall by flying a season of seven-aircraft shows instead of the customary nine. I feel sorry for Red Arrow #8, who through no fault of his own has just lost a full season of flying shows.

For a fast jet pilot, in British parlance, who is truly incapacitated by stress or PTSD clearly it is right to acknowledge the problem and ground oneself. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to expect well-led fast jet pilots – that is, with adequate crew rest and rotations in and out of combat – to cope with operational stress, including the occasional accidental death of a squadron mate, and to carry on. Fast jet pilots – especially British ones – are (Cold War-era jocks definitely were) products of long, very expensive and highly selective training. So, yes, the normal thing among us Cold War-era fighter jocks – and the expected thing in our all-male fighter squadrons – was to honor fallen comrades, man up and carry on. We did not consider those unreasonable expectations. RAF pilot says that is no longer the case. I would be interested to know, then, what is the new case. Still, as I think I make clear above, stress and PTSD are real, and do need to be dealt with; as RAF pilot says, a fast jet cockpit is not the place for sub-par pilots. But the over-sympathetic fawning over the stricken Flt Lt Stewart is, dare I say it, unmanly.

I’m also confused about how “the current conflict that both our nations are involved in” (by which RAF pilot must mean our foolhardy and futile interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan: exercises in frustration and waste that both the British and U.S. governments should have avoided) changes matters. The running sore that is the ground wars in both of those God-forsaken places must be conducive to PTSD among the troops who are actually involved in patrolling and ground combat. However, neither war strikes me as particularly stressful for flyers – except for transport helicopter crews. What is the credible threat to fast jets over those Middle Eastern countries? My impression is that the surface-to-air threat against fast movers is negligible, and there is no air-to-air threat at all.

Perhaps two things are converging to create what – to this now-outside observer – looks like a therapy-first approach in an outfit such as the Red Arrows.

The first, of course, is the general softening that is the inevitable (intended?) result of relentlessly feminizing the armed forces, the British forces just as the American.  And that will now be force-multiplied by normalizing open homosexuality in the armed forces.

 The second is more specific to the high-tech world of fast jets.  What is their threat today?  We Cold War-era fighter jocks may have been insensitive dinosaurs, but we had to be ready to fight the Soviet Air Force and those of the USSR’s Warsaw Pact satellites – some of which, the East Germans in particular, were quite competent in their own right.  In Europe, we prepared to fight a very capable surface-to-air and air-to-air threat heavily outnumbered, when it was a given that our adversary would have the advantage of starting any war.  Fortunately for us all, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Warsaw Pact dissolved before there was a World War III.  When the Cold War got hot, as in Korea and Vietnam, the Soviet surrogates Western forces fought were well-equipped with current Soviet weaponry, so the threat to fighter pilots – over the Yalu River and later Hanoi and Haiphong – was pretty effective.

In the absence of a threat comparable to our own capabilities, I guess our political and military “leaders” think they have the luxury of using our armed forces as human lab rats for their progressive social experiments.  Should a threat comparable to our forces arise again, I can only hope political leaders will have the sense to knock off the cultural Marxist experimentation and get serious again about having armed forces that exist to fight.  That is, if there are still armed forces left to restore to fighting condition.  I’m not sanguine…

I would be very interested to know if RAF pilot perceives any problematic trends in how today’s RAF is run.  With anonymity, I hope he will feel free to write freely.  And I would welcome learning what his issues are with the other points I made.

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