Names to Remember

First female airline pilot flies west

On 3 July 2020, Emily Howell Warner, the first female airline pilot and captain for a major airline died at the age of 80.

According to the National Women’s Hall of Fame, Warner was born in Denver in 1939 and fell in love with flying when she was 18. Over the next 15 years she logged 7,000 flight hours and earned numerous FAA certificates and ratings: private pilot, commercial, instrument, multi-engine, CFI and Airline Transport Pilot. She was a flight instructor from 1961 to 1967 and by 1973, she had been a chief pilot, air taxi and flight school manager, FAA pilot examiner and in charge of the United Airlines’ Contract Training Programme for Clinton Aviation.

“She persevered through years of training male students who went on to become pilots for various airlines and applied for an airline pilot’s position with Frontier Airlines in 1973. After a gruelling simulator test, Ms. Warner was offered the opportunity to realise her dreams,” her biography on the website of the National Women’s Hall of Fame says. “She made aviation history almost every time she climbed aboard an airliner,” the biography continued. “She was the first female pilot for a scheduled US carrier, the first female captain and in 1986 commanded the first all-female flight crew in the US. She was the first woman member of the Airline Pilots’ Association, pioneering the way for today’s women pilots.” Warner retired in 2002 after 42 years in aviation, where she logged more than 21,000 hours of flying. In 2015, Granby-Grand County Airport (KGNB) in Granby, Colorado, was renamed Emily Warner Field in her honour.