[mnehring]

They wanted a female pilot for purposes of a potential future lover interest among the pilots

I guess this is a good time to thank God that Ang Lee didn't direct this..

[discostu]

Which brings up something I thought about at lunch while falling behind on this thread. If Ron Moore really wanted to make BSG PC there'd be at least one gay love interest already. Really all the things that made people think before the show started that it was going PC were either done for clean plot reasons or for rather non-PC reasons (I think the President is a woman as part of establishing how not presidential she was at the beginning of the show).