I was American Airlines’ first ever female captain – and proud of it, too!

Once I was hired by American Airlines, I was treated so well by everyone, including my male colleagues. American was one of the airlines that was very proud to have women pilots, but that wasn’t true for some of the other airlines. They told their female pilots that they couldn’t wear fingernail polish or make-up, and that their hair had to be cut short. But American was the complete opposite: they let us pick out our uniform shirt and hats. I loved how I felt in my uniform.

I really think that the male pilots I worked with were just intrigued and fascinated to have a female pilot walking into the cockpit. There’s a point in the show – when my character is singing “the World War two pilots say, ‘hey baby, hey lady, get me a drink’” – which suggests that I was treated badly while working on American. But that is really artistic licensing.

However, I do know it wasn’t like that for all female pilots back then, because most of the men had never flown with a female aviator ever.

I think people’s attitudes to female pilots have changed immensely. My daughter is a pilot today, and most of the guys she has flown with have certainly flown with female pilots. But, for us, we were oddities, we were interlopers, no doubt.

In 1978 I started an organisation called ISA (International Society of Woman Airline Pilots). I co-founded it with another female airline pilot and at our very first convention we had 31 pilots show up. We’ve just had our 41st convention in Sydney, Australia, where 130 female pilots from 30 countries and 90 airlines attended. We have over 600 women pilot members, so we’ve grown a lot. But, that being said, there are 100,000 pilots in the US, and we are only 5,000 of that. So we are still only 5%.

We question that low number all the time.

Even now, there still aren’t enough women taking to the skies

One of the things that our organisation does is mentor young female aviators and we give out a tremendous amount of scholarship money to help them further their career. We’ve given over $1.4 billion and 100 of our applicants are currently flying for the airlines, so we work so hard to promote this wonderful career.

But you’d be surprised by how many people out there don’t even know that women can be airline pilots. It’s not even on their radar. I think that maybe a lot of people are a little bit intimidated because they see it as a world of “macho group of guys” who fly airplanes. Others think it would be a hard career to have if you have a family, because we travel all over the world all the time. In reality, my kids would tell you that I never missed one of their events. I only worked nine days a month when they were growing up, so I had 21 days off even as a working mother.

Come From Away: “I was one of the first female airplane captains, and now I’m the star of a 9/11 musical”