The first military airplanes designed after WWII began to arrive in the late 1940s. A number of these early jets were more complicated to fly and the number of incidents and accidents alarmed the military. Incidents where something went wrong, but the pilot and aircraft came back safely, and accidents were more serious. As the jets were mechanically more reliable than their piston powered WWII era cousins, it only seemed natural to blame pilot error.
A few remarkable pilots would find themselves in a bad spot, but always manage to get themselves out of trouble - often saving the aircraft. Chuck Yeager was the legendary master and was sent to airbases to show pilots how to fly correctly. But the fact was this was happening to very skilled pilots. With pilot error and aircraft malfunction seen as less likely root causes, eventually cockpit design was questioned.
Military airplane cockpit measurements were based on an average of a few measurements of about a hundred airmen in the mid 1920s. Improved nutrition and larger pilots was suspected as changing the average, so a massive study was undertaken that took 140 measurements of nearly 4,100 pilots. In theory this would lead to a better average cockpit.
Gilbert Daniels joined the medical division at Wright Patterson out of college and was one of the people tasked with making these measurements and coming up with averages. It turned out he was biased. In college he did some research trying to find an average hand size and found it impossible. Sifting through the data he looked at ten measurements deemed most important for the cockpit and calculated an average range for each that included 30 percent of the measurements - a nice wide average. The surprise was than none of the pilots fell within all ten of the wide averages. Gilbert found if you picked any three of the ten, less than four percent of the pilots would be average. No one was average.
It shouldn't have been a surprise. Women's clothing designers had known it for awhile - something attributed to women being "different." Eventually the military believed Gilbert's work and mandated highly adjustable cockpits. All new aircraft had to be adjustable for males in the 5 to 95 percentiles for each of about ten critical dimensions. Airplane manufactures balked - "it can't be done", but finally came around because .. well .. contracts.
The fifties saw more adjustability come to automotive interiors, but at a much slower and more incomplete pace than military aviation. About ten years ago I found myself driving a friend's Japanese sports car on the Pacific Coast Highway. A lovely car considered one of the best handling in the world, but I didn't fit - there was no way to adjust the seat or steering wheel enough. I'm not particularly tall, but have short legs and a long torso. I also have very long feet (in theory the right dimensions for a swimmer, but not my thing). A few months later I was helping a friend move in a rented truck. The same problem. There weren't enough adjustments to prevent my feet from getting caught near the pedals. And then there's automobile safety. The instrumented dummies used in crash tests cover less than a quarter of adults bringing into question the tests themselves.
And it's not just physical differences. 'What color is the dress?' became a popular question as people legitimately came to different conclusions. Tonal language native speakers are much more likely than other populations to have "perfect pitch." Some people are purely visual thinkers, but most are a mixture of audio and visual. There are people with very poor stereo vision - I know one who is an animator. Increasingly "on the spectrum" is a meaningless construct. Our brains have so many differences - so many dimensions - that it's likely none of us are truly "normal." This has become an issue in fMRI studies recently. For example studies showing differences between men and women are often in the noise and meaningless. The field will eventually get more rigor. You really need to know what dimension you're measuring.
Finally there's neuroplasticity. We know that kids undergo huge changes in neural connectivity as they grow and some areas of the brain aren't stable until the mid 20s. (I have a neurological condition that is believed to have resulted from an incomplete severing of neural connections when I was a baby. It isn't a big thing, but is different enough to be worthy of study). One seen as stopping around 30, neuroplasticity is seen throughout life, albeit at different rates. There are examples of dramatic repurposing of regions of the brain. Helen Santoro's missing left temporal lobe is one of the more dramatic examples.
Differences are a feature.
Comments