Recently King Mswatii III of Swaziland announced he might like to take a wife, and immediately more than 50,000 women showed up to parade in front of him—most of them topless, and all of them professing to be virgins. The king got this kind of turnout even though he admits to already having 12 wives.
Maybe we should offer this guy a shot at running the FAA. Why? Because we pilots have done a lousy job of attracting females to aviation, and this guy seems to have it wired.
Data from the FAA shows a total of 618,660 pilots in the United States in 2011—37,243 of which were women. That’s about six percent. We’re doing something wrong, because women go with us to football games, to car races, to the movies—they just don’t go with us to the airport. How come?
Some of you might say, “So what? I enjoy my time doing men things.” Again, let me apply scientific data:
Like pilots talking hangar talk, men used to sit around telling spirited stories of great white whales, scratching themselves in front of each other and laughing at squeaks of flatulence. (Also—like pilots—they spent more time talking about whaling than actually whaling.)
If ever the importance of what they did was questioned, they would quickly remind anyone how important whale oil was to the country, and that riding around together in the ocean yelling, “Thar she blows!” was an irreplaceable bonding of American freedom and lifestyle.
But while the men were away, women invented paraffin candles. That was it for whale oil and whaling. Ahoy, laddie, lest the same thing happen to ye aviators.
The reality is that women have made tremendous contributions to aviation. There have always been so many high points (and, I’d like to think, more to come). For example:
E. Lillian Todd (USA)
First Woman to Design and Build an Aircraft (1906)
Thérèse Peltier (France)
First Woman to Pilot an Aircraft (1908)
Blanche Stuart Scott (USA)
First Woman to Solo an Airplane (1910)
Raymonde de Laroche (France)
First Woman in the World to Receive a Pilot License (1910)
Harriet Quimby (USA)
First U.S. Woman to Earn a Pilot Certificate and to Cross the English Channel (1911)
Katherine Stinson (USA)
First Female Aerobatic Pilot (1915)
Marjorie Stinson (USA)
First Woman Airmail Pilot (1918)
Bessie Coleman (USA)
First African-American (male or female) to Receive a Pilot License (1921)
Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie (USA)
First Woman to Obtain an Aircraft Mechanic’s License (1927)
And then there were the WASPs (Women Airforce Service Pilots), the lady flyers who helped ferry warbirds all across the country. By the war’s end, there were 1,074 women who had crawled into every type of military aircraft and flown 60 million miles, each freeing a male pilot for combat service and duties. Better late than never perhaps, the WASPs were given the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009.
And women’s accomplishments are not just mired in the history. Marta Bohn-Meyer was the first woman crewmember to fly on the SR-71; Eileen Collins was the first woman space shuttle pilot and commander; Jane F. Garvey was the first woman administrator of the FAA.
Carol Hallett was president and CEO for the Air Transport Association; Evelyn Bryan served as FAA Designated Flight Examiner at 90 years of age; Martha King was the first woman to obtain every flight and ground instructor rating; Deborah McCoy, the first woman vice president of flight ops for a major airline; Jennifer Murray, the first woman to fly a helicopter around the world. The list goes on and on.
A couple of decades back, competing in the National Aerobatics competition meant you were a guy. It was the last bastion of the good ol’ boys club. In the 1990s the group succumbed to pressure and allowed women to compete with the good old boys for the first time.
A young woman named Patty Wagstaff entered the contest—and whooped their chauvinist butts quite handily. And just to show it wasn’t a fluke, she kicked their butts the next year, and the year after that, becoming the U.S. National Aerobatics Champion three years running. The airplane she flew, an Extra 260, now hangs in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.
The great thing about aviation is that women are on a level playing field. Women would not do as well competing against men in the NFL or the NBA or the PGA and lots of other acronyms, but the truth is, women can fly airplanes as well as any man ever born.
I got the opportunity to do an air-to-air session with Ms. Wagstaff (air-to-air typically means two airplanes fly close together and a photographer in one plane shoots pictures of the other) and though I’ve flown these missions a zillion times, it’s the experience with Patty that I remember.
We took our cameraship into a variety of unusual attitudes—pitch up, down; big banks in either direction—and Patty’s job, flying the subject airplane, was to keep close enough for us to get good pictures.
That typically means the pilot has to keep his/her airplane within several feet off the trailing edge of the cameraship to make the photographer happy.
It’s hard work and in my experience, few pilots do it well. But Patty stayed right with us, no matter what the attitude we selected.
Only she did it inverted.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so impressed with any pilot’s ability as I was with Patty Wagstaff’s. I’ve been fortunate enough to fly with the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds, and I can easily say Patty is the best pilot I’ve ever seen, bar none.
Still, women make up only aboutfive percent of the 53,000 members of the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents pilots at major and regional carriers in the United States and Canada. About 450 women worldwide are airline captains—Pilots in Command who supervise all the other crew members on a flight, according to the International Society of Women Airline Pilots.
Women also make up less than five percent of the more than 14,000 pilots currently in the U.S. Air Force, according to the Air Force Personnel Center.
During the last two decades, the number of women involved in the aviation industry has steadily increased and women can be found in nearly every aviation occupation today. However, the numbers are still small by comparison. So why don’t women go to the airports with us?
For one thing, a lot of male pilots like sitting around in hangars on rejected Salvation Army couches wearing vintage shorts and tennis shoes or sandals with black socks. We might also be wearing baseball caps with our aircraft’s N-number stitched across the front; or jumpsuits with oil on the knees; or cotton shirts with a picture of our favorite aircraft stitched above our left nipple. We think we look like pilots, but to women, we’re merely in costume. We might as well be wearing lederhosen and carrying an Alpine horn.
Should a woman ever venture into our hangar, we think of ourselves as accommodating by trying to explain how a carburetor works. And because demonstrating our machismo to females is programmed into our genes, we also like telling them flying stories about all the times we were nearly killed. Our audience has often left the theater while we’re still beating our chests.
So come on, guys. Take a lesson from the King of Swaziland. Instead of expecting women to throw themselves at your sock-and-sandaled feet because of your status, ask them what they might like to know about aviation—and please, do it without the machismo.
We all need to learn to share our passion about aviation with the opposite sex, so guys, get off of your smelly airport couch and start scouting for the next Patty Wagstaff. I guarantee you’ll find one—or a dozen.
Screenwriter, philanthropist and good guy Lyn Freeman has been writing aviation articles since before John Glenn joined the Marines. He is the former editor of Plane & Pilot magazine, founder and current chairperson of the Build-a-Plane organization, a master scuba diver, a championship table tennis player and an all-around Renaissance man. Send questions or comments to editor@piperflyer.org.
