SNW- Lt Ortegas...

vetteguy904

She is support/engineering? traditionally helmsman was a command track spot.

jonsills

Lt. Erica Ortegas is a pilot, who flew small craft during the Klingon war. I don't think the track is as important for that position as the skill - if your best pilot's a science officer, are you going to put your second- or third-best at the helm just because the best one has the wrong color shirt?

rattler2

There are cases of helmsmen not being Command Division.

Off the top of my head:

• Mirror Sulu was actually Operations Division in TOS.
• Jadzia Dax was Science and she flew the Defiant in DS9.
• Keyla Detmer is Operations Division in Discovery.

phoenixc

rattler2 wrote: »

There are cases of helmsmen not being Command Division.

Off the top of my head:

• Mirror Sulu was actually Operations Division in TOS.
• Jadzia Dax was Science and she flew the Defiant in DS9.
• Keyla Detmer is Operations Division in Discovery.

Not to mention that Sulu was Science when first seen, before transferring to Ops, and while the information never made it into onscreen dialog because the episode he came back in was too long and had to get trimmed down, he was officially also in Starfleet Intelligence as a nod to the part he played in the movie while he was away from Trek (Roddenberry liked to adapt realworld stuff into Trek like that).

Some of the division oddness is probably because Roddenberry was in the AAF, not the Navy, and apparently used what was familiar to him in some parts rather than what the Navy did, resulting in a weird mix of Navy and Army structure and traditions.

That said, in the case of piloting, some sort of pilot is needed for many of the things all three departments do, so it is not surprising that people from all three end up at the helm of capital ships eventually.