We posted an ad for a helicopter instructor to work at East Coast Aero Club here in Boston. 34 people have applied so far. As our only interest is in how effective and safety-conscious the instructor will prove to be, we didn’t ask any of the applicants to indicate their race or sex. On the other hand, just from the first names we’ve been able to infer the male/female ratio. Thus far… 33:1.
2 thoughts on “Affirmative action at our helicopter school”
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Phil, I am curious, can you explain what this means: “(no R22s, so you don’t have to risk your life and your reputation instructing in a machine that wasn’t designed for the mission)”?
By the way, I don’t know how much you know about Frank Robinson, but my understanding is that he has one of the greatest revenge against former employer stories that anyone could possibly have…. Abused/ignored by Hughes, he goes out and creates the R22, and destroys (much of) the market for the Hughes 500.
jerry: I wrote a bit about this in http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/robinson-r22 ; low rotor inertia and low power reserve makes for a very unforgiving trainer.
I don’t think the two-seat R22 had anything to do with the market for the five-seat Hughes 500. The Bell Jet Ranger was much more popular for carrying passengers and limited the market for the Hughes 500 to military and police use. The R22 could definitely have done many of the Hughes 500 police missions, but taxpayer dollars are unlimited so the fact that the R22 cost 1/3rd the price to operate was not very interesting to public agencies.
The R44 cut deeply into the Bell 206 market, I think. The R22 cut into the training market for the 1955 Hughes 269, which became the Schweizer 300.