Retiring pilot flew through gender barrier
After 37 years in the cockpit, trailblazer Judy Cameron will touch down for the final time on Sunday
The first time Judy Cameron rode in a plane, she gripped the bottom of her seat and screamed.
It was 1973, and Cameron, then only 19, had taken a summer job with Transport Canada, interviewing small aircraft pilots in Vancouver.
“The guy that took me up basically did everything that you shouldn’t do in someone’s first flight,” she recalled in an interview this week. That included doing spins, simulating a forced landing, inducing zero-gravity in the cockpit, and stalling the single-engine Cessna-150 in midflight.
Cameron was terrified. And she loved it.
“I treated this like a ride at the Ex,” she said. “I thought it was a lot of fun.”
When she landed that day, Cameron knew she had to get back up in the air, and figured the best way to do it would be to become a pilot.
She abandoned the arts degree she had been pursuing at the University of British Columbia, and by the fall was enrolled in flight school.
On Sunday, Captain Judy Cameron, now 61, will take her final flight as a commercial pilot for a major airline, a job she was the first woman in Canada to hold. When she taxis her Air Canada flight from Munich into the gate at Pearson, it will mark the end of a trailblazing, 37-year career that ended the male monopoly of the cockpit.
It all began in that small plane above Vancouver, but Cameron’s trajectory from there to flying Boeing 777’s to Tokyo was hardly straightforward.
In the aviation program at Selkirk College in Castlegar, B.C., she was the lone woman in a class of 30 men. She almost didn’t even qualify for the program, and had to hastily arrange to go to summer school for Grade 12 math, a subject that hadn’t interested her before she fell in love with flying. She lacked the mechanical expertise of most of the men, and knew nothing about the physics of flying.
Cameron remembers that there were “a lot of practical jokes” made at her expense. “It was a difficult time for me. It was a very lonely two years,” she said.
She did her best to retaliate with pranks of her own, but they didn’t always fly. When she found the pilot ready room covered with pictures of pin-up girls, she tore out a Playgirl centrefold and put it up alongside them. Unfortunately for her, she hadn’t realized that the nude man pictured happened to have the same name as of one of her instructors, a former air force pilot. The college was not amused.
After Cameron graduated, she spent three unglamorous years working for regional airlines based out of Alberta. An Edmonton company sent her to Inuvik, N.W.T., where she spent almost a year copiloting a DC-3, loading the plane herself for supply runs to oilfields near Tuktoyaktuk, north of the Arctic Circle.
By the time Air Canada hired her in 1978, Cameron was only 24 but had more than paid her dues. In those days, only about 4 in 10 Canadian women worked outside the home, according to Statistics Canada, and the prospect of one controlling an airplane was front-page news (although a U.S. airline had hired pilot Emily Warner five years earlier).
“I was thrilled (to get the job),” Cameron said. “I was very nervous too, because . . . there was a lot of interest from the press.”
At the Montreal news conference to unveil her, reporters prodded Cameron with questions about when she and her husband, an Air Canada mechanic, planned to have a baby. Even her new female colleagues weren’t entirely comfortable with the idea of a woman in the cockpit. One flight attendant told the Ca- nadian Press: “I hope I feel safe the first time I fly with her.”
Although Air Canada designed a special pilot’s uniform for her, on the job Cameron was frequently mistaken for a “stewardess.” Passengers asked her to carry their luggage, or hold their baby while they went to the bathroom. Once, when she left the cockpit to check on a problem with the wing of her plane, a passenger handed her his garbage. She took it, smiled, and kept walking.
Cameron says such slights never bothered her. If anything she found them funny, and they only strengthened her resolve.
Life as a pilot wasn’t always easy, however. About seven years into her Air Canada career she had her first daughter, and then a second six years later. She and her husband divorced when the girls were young, and Cameron was left as a single mom. While she earned the same pay as male counterparts who had equal seniority, for years she was forced to pass up higher-paying routes so that she could fly out in the morning and be back by evening for the kids.
She found strength in the example of her own mother, Betty Evans, who raised Cameron by herself while working as a secretary. Now 91, Betty will be at Pearson on Sunday to greet her daughter when her last flight touches down.
Cameron is proud of being Canada’s first female commercial pilot, but she wishes that more women followed her example. Nearly 40 years after her breakthrough, only 150 of Air Canada’s 3,000 pilots are women, a figure in line with the industry standard of about 5 per cent.
It baffles her why flying isn’t yet considered a viable career for women. “I still get stares at the airport. People still find it a novelty,” she said.
Although she’ll miss working for Air Canada, she says decided to retire in part because she “felt it was only fair to let the junior guys move up.” Now that she has free time, she hopes to do some volunteer work, go skiing, and ride her bike, but her flying days aren’t behind her yet. She wants to take an aerobatics course and might even buy a share in a small plane.
Her advice to any young women who have similar dreams of flight? “Be persistent, and it is worth it, and you can do it.”
“I treated this like a ride at the Ex. I thought it was a lot of fun.” JUDY CAMERON ON HER FIRST EXPERIENCE AT 19 AS A PASSENGER TO A PILOT TRYING OUT FOR A JOB