6' 10" Briton Can't Even Win The Lawsuit

by Aero-News Senior Correspondent Kevin R.C. "Hognose" O'Brien

"I don't want him, you can have him, he's too tall for me," I remember my grandmother singing  when I was small. My grandfather would sing that line from some music-hall ditty right back at her, changing the pronouns. And we all had a laugh out of it (my family generally being built rather low to the ground). After all, it's supposed to be good to be tall, and the only times I've ever been glad to be short is when stuffed into an airliner seat, or under enemy fire.

But it turns out you can be too tall for your own good. Ben Sargeaunt-Thompson is hearing that song from his employer of choice: National Air Traffic Services (NATS), the quasi-private company that provides ATC services in the UK and eastern Atlantic (for swingeing user fees, as it happens).

Sargeaunt-Thompson thought that he exceeded NATS requirements by a wide
margin: he had a university degree in physics, and NATS requires controllers only to have a secondary education with some study beyond the GCSE level -- for instance to "A" levels (at age 18). You have to study all the way to the exam, but you don't have to pass -- so Sargeaunt-Thompson was all but overqualified for a profession that, in Britain, accepts the equivalent of US high school graduates with a "C"
average.

He was 23 and in generally good health, so he breezed through the medical exam. NATS offered him a job at Swanwick control center in Hampshire. But before the young man could start work, one not-so-small snag cropped up: Sargeaunt-Thompson's six foot ten inch frame, particularly the three feet three inches of which were legs. Sargeaunt-Thompson is in the 99th percentile for human height, at the very tip of the bell-curved normal distribution -- and most ergonomic designers design from the 5th up to the 95th percentile only (which by definition, when you consider it, excludes ten percent of the population). He didn't fit the workstation desks in Swanwick: there was no place for legs that size to go.

Sargeaunt-Thompson's job offer was rescinded, due to his anthropometric unsuitability. As he had no personal control over his height, he secured attorneys and presented his case as discrimination to an employment tribunal. NATS managers countered that there was no way of making him comfortable at his station, and an uncomfortable controller might be prone to errors. The tribunal accepted this: yes, it's a textbook case of discrimination, but it's justifiable on the grounds of public safety.

NATS does not appear to have directly imposed a height limit. But the NATS Careers website has been altered since Sargeaunt-Thompson filed his suit. It now contains a paragraph informing applicants that they "may be required to undergo an assessment to see if they can work safely with operational workstations." Call it the Ben Sargeaunt-Thompson clause.

How abnormal is Ben Sargeaunt-Thompson? A quick look at anthropometric information on the web brought us to this treasure trove of human-physical-factors information at Cornell University. After reading the notes for Cornell's classes DEA 325/651 one gets an idea just how unusual a human being Ben Sergeant-Thompson is.

"'Clinical normality' in height is defined as about the range 54 to 79 inches," say the notes on anthropometric design. So at 82 inches Sargeaunt-Thompson is an outlier, most probably in the 99th percentile.

But there is a man alive in Pakistan today who is a full foot taller than the Briton: 94.1" or 7' 10". And a 20th Century American was an incredible 107 1/2" tall -- That's a half inch short of nine feet tall!

So designing to include that last percent is -- no joke intended -- a tall order. And, of course, humans who are incredibly small may be equally rare, but they're no less human for that -- how do you include them?

As far as Sargeaunt-Thompson himself is concerned, he may yet get a job as a controller, just not with NATS. According to The Telegraph, he's been offered a trainee position at Eurocontrol's training academy in Kirchberg, Luxembourg. How can they take him on, when NATS can't?

Apparently they have a technical innovation that's yet to make it to British shores, or at any rate to Hampshire: adjustable desks and chairs.

FMI: www.nats.co.uk