Being a female airline pilot has its moments

JACK KNOX (COLUMN) — Jack Knox’s column appears once a week in The Armchair Mayor News.

After WestJet pilot Carey Steacy landed her plane at Victoria International Airport last Sunday, one of her passengers left her a note.

“The cockpit of an airliner is no place for a woman,” read the message, which was scrawled on a napkin and left on a seat as the flight from Calgary emptied. “A woman being a mother is the most honor. Not as ‘captain.’ We’re short mothers, not pilots.”

“PS I wish westjet could tell me a fair lady is at the helm so I can book another flight,” it continued. On the flip side of the napkin were stick figures of a mother and child and the sign-off “not impressed/respectfully in love/David.”

Now, if I were Steacy, I might have wondered how the Taliban had snuck through security and boarded her plane. Or I would have checked to see if this was an old episode of The Twilight Zone and she had accidentally flown into 1962.

But no, Steacy’s response was very 2014: She posted a photo of the napkin on Facebook, along with her reply to David: “It was my pleasure flying you safely to your destination,” it said, in part. “I respectfully disagree with your opinion that the ‘cockpit’ (we now call it the flight deck…) is no place for a lady. In fact, there are no places that are not for ladies anymore.

“I have heard many comments from people throughout my 17-year career as a pilot. Most of them positive. Your note is, without a doubt, the funniest.

“You were more than welcome to deplane when you heard I was a ‘fair lady.’ You have that right. Funny, we all, us humans, have the same rights in this great free country of ours.

“Now, back to my most important role, being a mother.”

WestJet backed her up, as you would expect. “We take enormous pride in the professionalism, skills and expertise of our pilots and this note is very disappointing,” said spokesman Robert Palmer.

In truth, the note was so goofy that it barely merited response.

It did open the door to a broader question, though: Why are there so few female airline pilots?

“From a structural standpoint, I think the industry embraces the opportunity to hire more women,” says Air Line Pilots Association vice-president Sean Cassidy, whose wife was an air force pilot, on the phone from Washington, DC.

Perhaps it’s just a case of change occurring slowly. Those U.S. stats show just 12 per cent of student pilots are female.

“For a long time, it was a boys’ club,” says Victoria’s Noreen Newton. She has been a commercial pilot since 1980, a captain since 1990 and is the senior female at Air Canada Jazz.

She had hard time breaking in. “People would say to me: ‘We will not hire you because you are a woman.” Or they would say that they had hired a woman once, it hadn’t worked out, so they wouldn’t do it again. Could you imagine saying that to a man?

For her first job, she had to go to Fort St. John, where the rig pigs who propositioned her might earn a bumpy ride. Passengers boarding her Dash 8 used to point: “There’s a female pilot.”

“You don’t hear it as much as you used to,” she says — but you do hear it.

“Women still aren’t treated with equality in our culture. As much as we pay lip service to it, there are people who believe our place is at home.”

Maybe that’s one reason more women don’t chase aviation as a career, which is a shame. “It’s a great job.”

In the end, she notes, the Davids of the world aren’t in charge.

“This guy can say whatever he wants to say, but she’s the captain.”

jknox@timescolonist.com

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