Women take wing

Melissa Schorr

Monday, May 18, 1998 | 9:58 a.m.

In 1934, Helen Richey was hired by Central Airlines as the first woman airline pilot. Ten months later, she was forced to resign when the all-male pilot's union refused to accept her. Penniless and out of piloting work, she committed suicide a decade later.

Fast forward 50 years.

In 1984, Tammy Blakey was hired by Continental Airlines and became its first female to captain an Airbus A300. Ten years later, she filed a lawsuit against the airline, claiming the male pilots refused to accept her, placing girlie magazines in the cockpit and making sexist comments about her on a computer bulletin board. Last October, a jury agreed with Blakey's charge of sexual harassment, forcing Continental to pay her damages of $875,000.

Sound like progress?

Fast forward half a year.

A former pilot and his two pals are discussing the recent court decision. An all-female flight crew wouldn't be half bad, they snicker -- if the women would agree to fly in the buff. Why, you could set a video camera up front, cancel the in-flight movie, and hold screenings back in the cabin.

After more than half a century of flying, female airline pilots are still experiencing heavy turbulence -- more of it from inside the plane than out.

A 1993 survey of 134 female pilots showed that all but three reported significant incidents of either gender discrimination or sexual harassment -- remarks that "women don't belong in the cockpit," demeaning terms of "honey or sunshine," and comments on their body parts.

What happened to Capt. Nancy Novaes, a pilot for Continental Airlines, last week was a first -- she was flying into a new radio frequency and checking in with ground control when a voice from out of the darkness told her, "Go home, lady."

"My first officer was as surprised as I was, hearing such a thing in this day and age," Novaes says. "The most shocking thing is that it just happened. This is 1998!"

That lingering attitude is a huge letdown to an aviatrix such as Novaes, one of 130 female pilots who made a stop-over this week at Harrah's hotel-casino to mark the 20th anniversary of the International Society of Women Airline Pilots.

Founded in Las Vegas in 1978, the ISA-21 has grown from an informal gathering to an organization providing networking, scholarships, mentoring and all-around encouragement for female pilots to continue flighting the good flight.

The name, ISA-21, is a combination of ISA, the acronym for International Standard Atmosphere (an aviation term), and 21, in honor of the original number of members.

"There just weren't any (women pilots) at the time," says Maggie Rose, a 45-year-old Las Vegas-based captain of U.S. Airways who was among the 21 "pioneers." "We thought of as many as we could think of. It was just exciting seeing other women pilots, and we decided to do (the gathering) every year."

Today, the group boasts 580 captains and first and second officers from 93 airlines in 34 countries, including China, India and Russia, although the vast majority are Americans.

While incidents such as Novaes' experience and cockpit porn are becoming much less common than they were in what Novaes calls the "bad old days," it's still been a long, bumpy ride.

Earning their wings

Most major airlines such as TWA, U.S. Airways, Northwest, Delta, American and Continental hired their first female airline pilots back in the '70s.

Since then, the ratio of women airline pilots has remained stubbornly low: at about 5 percent of the 80,000 airline pilots worldwide.

"It's still a little disappointing to see that hasn't changed quite yet," Novaes says. "I don't think I'll see it in my working lifetime."

Traditionally, commercial airline pilots came primarily from the military, making the pilot population closely resemble a mile-high fraternity. Nowadays, more and more pilots are coming up through the commercial sector, the traditional route for female pilots. Now that the military has opened up its ranks to female pilots, you would expect to see a spike in the numbers.

But step on a typical airline flight and odds are that the voice of the captain pleasantly greeting you is still a masculine one. (When Novaes welcomes her passengers, she figures they probably just think she's "one of the flight attendants.")

The field is proving harder to integrate than most because there are still a flurry of deterrents.

"The military still does most of the training and the military still trains men," Novaes explains. "The civilian route is available, but very expensive. And it's a very rough lifestyle. It takes a special toll on people, requires them to make a lot of sacrifices. Not only are you asking a lot of yourself, you are asking a lot of those who love you."

"There are a lot of things about this kind of work that take a non-traditional woman," she says. "It requires a career focus -- an unashamed career focus."

"It's not for women who want to stay at home," Rose agrees. "It's a gypsy lifestyle."

And when airlines do making hiring women a priority, there is the pervasive suspicion that they are underqualified.

United Airlines currently boasts the most female pilots -- 513 out of 8,800 -- but that is mainly as a result of a court order from an '80s lawsuit by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Attitudes such as the captain of a Boeing 727, who told his female second officer that "all you need to work at this airline is a bra and 200 hours of light plane time" are all too common.

Closing the gender gap

And many were quick to question whether women belong flying for the military at all after Lt. Kara Hultgreen became the first female fighter pilot to die in a fatal crash. She received posthumous criticism of her credentials after failing to properly land her F-14, even though later she was mostly exonerated from any piloting error.

That stigma makes a good chunk of the estimated 4,000 female airline pilots worldwide reluctant to join an association such as the ISA-21, in a field where it is so important to downplay and deny any significance to having matching chromosomes.

"That was true of me," Novaes admits. "It's difficult to join an organization where the focus is on gender. There is a bit of self-consciousness involved with it. I finally decided to join when I made captain. For some reason, I said, 'Now is time to start.' "

Despite the sacrifices, Novaes is clearly pleased in her chosen profession.

"How do you explain the thrill of hearing that engine rumble beneath you as you put the gas to it and light it off?" she says. "How do express the sensation of going from zero to 200 in three minutes? The rush of breaking free of the ground, heading into the clouds, where it's all gray on the bottom, popping through the top to a gorgeous pink and blue sunset?

"I guess I was born with it," she concludes. "It's kind of a calling."

In 1937, Amelia Earhart set out to complete a 'round-the-world flight. She was lost somewhere in the South Pacific and was never heard from again. Headlines mourned her loss.

Fast forward 60 years.

In 1997, Linda Finch restored a 1935 Lockheed Electra 10E, the same plane as Earhart's, and retraced the legendary and doomed 'round-the-world flight on its 60th anniversary. Headlines noted her triumph.