Do flyers expect flight crew to talk in a certain (male) manner?
And does that hold some pilots back?
By B.R.
THERE are two professions in which you can identify members by the tone of their voice. One is teaching. Those who deal with unruly kids all day never quite lose that twang of exasperation mixed with bossiness. The other is flying aeroplanes.
There is something instantly recognisable about the calm, authoritative voice of a pilot. It is at once reassuring and mellifluous. This is important. Nervous flyers need to think that the person in the cockpit has complete control of himself and his plane. Never more so than when the craft is in difficulty and passengers need reassurance. When part of an engine fell off a Qantas A380 a few years ago, the pilot calmly announced, without a hint of a tremor in his voice, “I do apologise. I'm sure you are aware we have a technical issue with our number two engine. We have dealt with the situation [but] I'm sure you are aware we are not proceeding to Sydney at this stage.”
Gulliver is willing to bet you read those words in exactly the same tone of voice that he did. One can recognise this authority even when the pilot is speaking in a foreign language. But probably because I was brought up flying on the airline more than any other, I find the voice of a British Airways captain particularly comforting. As I have mentioned before, the BA voice tends to be redolent of those black-and-white war films, featuring unflappable RAF pilots, that were once a feature of Sunday afternoon television. Indeed, so uniform is the intonation of BA’s flight crew that I often wondered whether it was specifically taught as part of the airline’s training.
Apparently not. According to Mark Vanhoenacker, a BA first officer (and author of a marvellous book on the wonders of being a pilot), that calm manner “comes simply from the training we’ve been given, our knowledge of the aircraft, our experience in the sky and our understanding of what is most helpful to customers.” “After all,” he goes on, “every pilot flew first as a passenger (one who probably paid extra attention to the voices from the pointy end).”
Yet the fact that flyers are so used to being reassured by the sangfroid of (what always sounds like) a middle-aged, middle-class man, can have its consequences. I have sat in a cabin when a female voice has emanated from the cockpit and noted the distinct uneasiness of the passengers around me. For one irrational moment, I daresay my own heart has leapt a little; anything even slightly out-of-the-ordinary on a plane can have that effect. Until, that is, my rational self has taken over and reminded me that any pilot who qualifies through a rigorous 18-month training programme like BA’s is likely to be exceptional. (And what is more, given the inevitable sexist obstacles that a woman will face on her way to becoming a commercial flyer, the likelihood is that those who do finally make it are probably above average.)
Not everyone is reasonable. As Aoife Duggan, a female BA pilot, told news.com.au:
At one of my earlier jobs in another company, also as a pilot, we once had a male passenger on a flight from north Vietnam who didn’t want to fly as both the pilots on the day were female.
He asked if any male pilots were joining the crew flying the aircraft as he refused to fly without [one]. When he was told that no male pilots were joining and asked what he preferred, he decided to be offloaded and fly on a different flight.
If such irrationality is borne out of unfamiliarity, then there is an obvious way to overcome it. Currently only around 4,000 pilots, out of 130,000 worldwide, are female—most of them in America. And there are still more men than women who apply to join carriers’ training programmes. But many airlines are aware of the discrepancy and are trying to do something about it. BA sends its female pilots out to schools, colleges and careers and recruitment fairs to encourage more women to consider a job in flying. When that pays dividends, and a female voice in the cockpit becomes unremarkable, then people will adjust their idea of what a pilot is supposed to sound like.
But what if you heard a youngster’s voice telling you that you were about to enter some heavy turbulence at 30,000 feet? The question is not hypothetical: easyJet recently hired a teenage pilot. Nineteen-year-old Luke Elsworth is the youngest flyer of a commercial jet in Britain, and possibly the world. While no one should cast a doubt on his ability to land a plane—he came through the training programme of Britain’s second-biggest airline after all—Gulliver freely admits that if he heard such callow tones on the intercom, his rational self would have a battle on its hands. Even in one of the safest forms of transport, most of us need a little bit of reassurance.
