Girls, Girls, Girls

I began my flying life in the early 1970s. Saying that things were different back then would be a major understatement. Some of them seem funny to us now, like the fact that most of our airplanes had no radios or, God forbid, transponders and ELTs, while other facets of the 1970s are tragic. 

To see tragic, you would have to look at a picture of me at age 20 flying a one hundred fifty-horse Apache while wearing a powder blue leisure suit with an open-neck shirt and white tassel shoes. 

For me, the 1970s were a kind of "good old days," probably because flying and many other things were new and exciting to me back then, combined with the fact that I did not know any better.

Today, politically and socially, there seems to be a weird fixation with the good old days to the point that people want to return there somehow. "Wow," they might say, "If only we had Gerald Ford as president, and avgas was 49 cents again!"

Back in the day when I grew up, the only women found at Lakeland's Drane Field (KLAL) were receptionists and secretaries. None of the pilots or flying students were female or sported a skin color other than beige.

This uniformity of melanin and testes was a fact of life back then, especially in the southern United States. Most of us did not notice things like the fact that grown-up women had to get a man's signature on a credit card application or that they were restricted from playing certain sports because it was thought that their "lady parts" might fall out.

When I became an airline pilot at the beginning of 1979, the training classes and flight decks were male-only clubs. Females only entered the cockpit to bring us coffee, and our cockpit escape tape trap doors, rudder trim knob covers and the inside of our metal aircraft and engine logbooks were sometimes, against company policy, festooned with naughty pictures from magazines.

The number of African American or female pilots back then could be counted not on the fingers of one hand but on one or two fingers. 

When females did manage to slog through the aviation system and get a professional flying job, they were often made fun of and denigrated as being either crazy, masculine or both.

The kindest thing most of us guys would say was, "She flies OK," meaning, She flies pretty good for a girl." 

I suspect some of the comments to this column will be renditions of your favorite campfire stories about incompetent women and women who did not deserve their jobs or took their jobs from a competent male.

Have at it, but while you are squeezing your anger onto the keyboard—anger that, in some ways, makes you yearn to return to the good old days—please take a short mental moment and imagine what it would feel like if you were the only African American on an airline seniority list. How would you feel if you were one of the first three women flying for an airline and had to live on the flight decks I described?

During the twilight years of my airline pilot life, I flew at the steep turn academy in a box with metal legs. I gave tons of type ratings and ATP checkrides in that box. I was never provided with a second set of testing requirements for minorities and women. Everybody took the same checkride and succeeded or failed based on their knowledge, experience and skills.

If you miss the world of secretarial typing pools, weight checks on stewardesses and dirty pictures taped to your chart table, I suggest you binge-watch old movies.

If, after a tragic crash, the first thing people focus on is the race or gender of the pilots, it is an indication that aviation may have come a long way, but as human beings, we have a lot of work left to do.

I hope that the flying profession is filled with the right kind of people, if you know what I mean—wink, wink, nod, nod.

People who fiercely love flying and are willing to walk through the fire and jump through the dozens of hoops, snares and traps that lay along their paths to become steely-eyed aviators. 

Let's leave the sometimes hateful and often foolish desire to turn back the clock to the politicians and click-hungry idiots.