The struggle is real as female pilots battle to overcome perceptions
▶ Only 3% of professional pilots are women, an imbalance some airlines are addressing
When a stricken Southwest Airlines jet was expertly landed after an emergency descent in April, saving 148 lives, it was a surprise to some that a woman was at the controls.
Role models remain few and far between for women wanting to enter the cockpit, rather than serve the onboard drinks, despite a huge shortage of pilots worldwide.
“So often we’re shown men as pilots, and women as cabin crew. This could be sending a message to young girls that if they want to work in aviation, it can’t be as a pilot,” the British Airline Pilots’ Association told AFP.
But things are finally starting to change and a few airlines are trying to redress the gender imbalance.
Europe’s biggest budget carrier easyJet, under an initiative named after pioneer aviator Amy Johnson, wants 20 per cent of its new cadet pilots to be women by 2020. Today, get married?” was the first just 3 per cent of professional question Salma Al Baloushi pilots worldwide are women, was asked a decade ago during according to the International a job interview to become a Civil Aviation Organisation. pilot, The National reported
The UN agency estimates last summer. that passenger numbers will That question stings Etihad’s double over the next 20 years, first female pilot to this day. and that airlines will need to Ms Al Baloushi said it was recruit 620,000 pilots to keep family support that helped her up with the demand. wear down the naysayers who
Tammie Jo Shults is one of disapproved when she travelled those few women. from Al Ain to Abu Dhabi
Ms Shults, one of the first to apply for a pilot’s position female fighter pilots for the that she saw in a magazine. US Navy, performed heroics “My mother was worried but in safely bringing down her she supported me even though Southwest Boeing 737 after an some people cut off relations engine blowout. with me because they thought
According to retired captain Kathy McCullough, “having someone in the spotlight who’s a lady who does a great job just points out that it can happen and does happen and isn’t really that much of a surprise”.
The Top Gun machismo attached to aviation runs deep. In the UAE, there has been positive change but, like everywhere else, there are assumptions women face that men don’t.
“What will you do when you the job was not appropriate for a woman. Now their girls are engineers and wear the same dress that I’m wearing and they realise they were wrong.”
Ms Al Baloushi graduated as first officer in 2012.
Like most women, she has learnt to juggle career, home and acknowledges that her husband’s involvement in caring for their two children has helped her devote time to work.
“People felt I would have to choose between my career and family. But I love both my work and my family and it is support at home, from my husband, my family and from my batch mates that have helped me focus on my job.”
Girls who want to grow up as pilots still lack role models, said Sophie Coppin, diversity officer at the French Civil Aviation University in Toulouse, AFP said.
Among students and parents “there is a conscious or unconscious suppression” of the idea of women as aviators, she said.
About 15 per cent of the university’s student pilots are women. Double that figure are training as air traffic controllers.
There has, at least, been some progress since 1979 when Ms Shults, 56, attended a careers lecture on aviation by a retired colonel.
The Southwest pilot said she was the only girl in the class, and he asked her if she was lost.
“I mustered up the courage to assure him I was not and that I was interested in flying,” she wrote in a book about female military aviators.
“He allowed me to stay, but assured me there were no professional women pilots.”