The increasing specialization of rotary wing missions and aircraft has precipitated a reanalysis of traditional strategies for assigning student aviators to one of four rotary wing missions: cargo, utility, aeroscout, or attack.Although previous research has suggested that certain abilities are appropriate for inclusion in a classification algorithm, there are no data to indicate that there are differences in the ability requirements (types or levels) for the four missions.This paper describes the results of several analyses designed to compare the ability requirements of the four missions. Ability rating data, obtained from subject matter experts for each mission, were transformed using the Method of Successive Intervals (MSI) to remove systematic biases identified in the raters' distributions.Analyses of the transformed data indicate that there are no differences in the types or levels of abilities required to perform the most demanding tasks for each mission.