Emine Saner has written over at The Guardian about the slow adoption of female pilots by airlines. From the article:
When two children, a six-year-old girl and a slightly older boy, visited her flight deck last week, British Airways pilot Aoife Duggan asked if they would like to fly planes too. The boy said yes but the girl demurred, saying: “I think I’d like to be an air hostess – boys are pilots.” A surprised Duggan says: “I was like, ‘No! Come and sit in my seat, wear my hat.’ “
Four decades after the first female pilot started work for a commercial airline, there are still relatively few women sitting in Duggan’s seat. Of the 3,500 pilots employed by British Airways, just 200 are women, yet the airline still employs the highest proportion of female pilots of any UK airline. Globally, around 4,000 of the 130,000 airline pilots are women, according to the International Society of Women Airline Pilots. Fewer still are captains – worldwide, there are around 450.
How much has changed since Yvonne Pope Sintes became Britain’s first commercial airline captain in 1972? Struggling to explain why so few women have followed her, she suggests domestic responsibilities. “Women are just as good as men, but they seem to have more domestic issues and not all of them want to devote themselves to a full-time job.”
After publishing her book, Trailblazer in Flight, late last year, she says: “I actually met someone, just a few months ago, who said he didn’t know that there were any women pilots. I couldn’t believe it.”
When Sintes, now 83, started her career, airlines actively barred women, and although she was determined, it took her nearly two decades from joining the airline industry to making it as a commercial pilot.
Inspired by watching the planes while growing up near Croydon airport, she tried to join the RAF after school but they wouldn’t take women. So she became a flight attendant and gained her private pilot licence with the Airways Aero Club, which offered flying lessons to airline staff. After she qualified as an instructor, she became an air traffic controller. She says her male colleagues “didn’t like me at all” – they thought she was just doing it to prove a point as one of only two female air traffic control workers in the country. Airlines did not accept women as commercial pilots at the time: “I was told it was not their policy and so it continued for a while.”
You can read the rest of the article HERE.