She's the first local Malay woman to become a commercial pilot

Here's an article from a Singapore online newspaper from two days ago

She's the first local Malay woman to become a commercial pilot

SINGAPORE - Commercial pilot Farhain Abu Bakar is making waves in the aviation sector, a largely male-dominated industry.

Ms Farhain, 29, who flies with Scoot-Tigerair, was recently promoted to first officer. She is the first local Malay woman to become a commercial pilot, according to Berita Harian. 

She was profiled in the Malay newspaper last Sunday (Nov 27), and is one of 17 female pilots in Scoot and Tigerair, which have a combined pilot roster of 399. 

Singapore is an up-and-coming economy - one of the most profitable and largest in Asia. In their aviation sector, women pilots make up only 1% of the pilot force.

She's a "first officer," not a captain, which means she doesn't sit in the "left seat" or "captain's seat" but it's progress.

Of course reaching the position of First Officer is only 10% of the battle. Will her male compatriots treat her with respect or make things difficult for her? Will passengers throw a fit if they learn their co-pilot is a woman?

Time will tell.

Women pilot Lucknow's first Metro run (passenger trains, India)

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/Women-pilot-Lucknows-first-Metro-run/articleshow/55715025.cms

is the link to a news story from the Times of India stating that two women train "pilots" were given the job of piloting this Lucknow Metro.

India is a country that's not that kind to women, for all that supposedly there are more women doctors in India then there are in the United States. India has that "Untouchables" thing going on, as well as the "Dowry" thing going on, where if a woman doesn't have a dowry she can't get a husband, etc. (Easiest solution to that would be to abolish the dowry system, but I guess it's "cultural."

I'm sharing this story here because it's very much a part of The Freedom Stea ethos - women sitting in the command chair and proving their mettle.

A couple of days ago I did a search on "Women Pilots' from 1900 to 1910, at the digitized newspaper repository Newspapers.com,  because I wanted to see when the term "pilot" for the pilot of a plane first came into use - the Wright brothers referred to themselves as "operators" and in France they were "aviatiors."

I was shocked to find - in the headlines - mentions of "women pilots" as early as 1907 - well before the first women had taken to the skies.

Turns out the news articles were referring to *steamboat* pilots. In the early 1900s there were a handful of women pilots of steamboats - in fact the term pilot itself, used for everything else, has its originations in nautical activity.

Two women pilots for Zeppelin craft

I've been researching women balloonists. From 1890 to 1900, at least one woman balloonist (they'd work at fairs and would go up in balloons only to perform on a trapeze underneath the balloon and then jump by parachute 2,000 feet to the ground.)

From there I segued to doing a bit of research on dirigibles (so called because "dirigible" is French for "direction," and being able to direct a dirigible via engine and steering apparatus is what differentiates a hot air or hydrogen balloon from a dirigible).

As of 2012 when this article was written, there were two female Zeppelin pilots in the world, one in the United States and one in Germany:

From General Aviation News, June 14, 2012 by Janice Wood: America’s first female Zeppelin pilot takes off

Andrea Deyling has joined Airship Ventures in the San Francisco Bay area as an airship pilot, becoming America’s first female Zeppelin pilot. A licensed LTA pilot, Deyling has been training on the Zeppelin Eureka since November 2011 and officially earned her Zeppelin qualification this month.  

In climbing into the left seat of the world’s largest passenger airship, Deyling becomes the 22nd pilot qualified to fly the Zeppelin NT. There is only one other female pilot in this elite group, Katharine Board, who had previously piloted Eureka and now pilots a Zeppelin NT in Germany.

Sadly, as I just learned when I checked out Airship Ventures website,  the company ceased operations six months later.

They have a legacy site: Airship Ventures.

Flyin' Jenny World War II comic strip

I'm working on my Powerpoint presention, The Freedom Seat: A History of Women in Aviation, which I'll teaching February 25 and March 4 at Laramie County Community College, for the LIFE (Learning is for Everyone) program.

I'll be giving this and other seminars about women in aviation and automobiling history at LCCC and other venues in the Rocky Mountains from now on.

So, while working on my presentation, I decided I'd include a bit of information on the history of lighter-than-air craft - namely women pilots of balloons and dirigibles prior to 1903.

I have an account with Newspapers.com, and did a search on Aida de Acosta, the 19-year-old girl who flew Alberto Santos-Dumont's dirigible across Paris in May 1903, thus becoming the first American and the first woman to pilot a powered, controlled, lighter-than-air craft.

There was an article on Aida de Acosta in a 1933 newspaper, and above that article was a comic strip, Tailspin Tommy, featuring a male adventurer and pilot, Tailspin Tommy. Funnily enough, the comic strip featured a "strong" female character (at least in this particular installment) whom Tailspin Tommy entrusts with a gun and orders her, "If anyone comes, shoot!" And he apparently expects that she'll do it!

In the next panel, the character says, "I don't like being ordered around, but because it's Tailspin Tommy, I like it."  Well, that's a paraphrase, but you get the idea.

Anyway, at the Wikipedia page for Tailspin Tommy, the author of that entry listed other aviation-based comic strips including Flyin' Jenny. (The title is an in-joke - the Flying Jenny is the nickname of a plane, the Curtiss JN-4 known as a Jenny.)

I'd never heard of this comic strip before, which debuted at the start of WWII and saw the female pilot "a test pilot at the Starcraft Aviation Factory, Jenny encountered spies, saboteurs and criminals. Since the strip began simultaneously with the start of World War II, Jenny was active in wartime escapades."

That page had a link to a comic strip encyclopedia, and on the Flyin' Jenny page there, there was a mention of a strip called Connie, which was actually the first woman-as-pilot comic strip ever. That strip debuted in 1927.

Connie the pilot

There are a few Flyin' Jennie comic strip Sunday strips available at eBay, and I'll probably pick up a few to use as displays for my seminars.

The Freedom Seat Seminars website is now live!

I've got a lot more stuff to add to the site - I'll be sharing photos of my collection of women-in-aviation memorabilia, sample chapters of the book I'm writing and so on, but I decided I may as well make it live now.

The first seminars I'll be teaching will be at Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne, Wyoming, February 25 and March 4.

Front page of The Freedom Seat Seminars website.

The women pilots that history forgot

On November 15, 2016, Karla Pequenino of CNN had an article published in their Best of Travel section called "The women pilots that history forgot."
Here are the first three paragraphs:

More than 100 years after Harriet Quimby broke down barriers as the first woman to earn a pilot certificate, there are still very few women who choose flying as a career.

Worldwide, only 3% of airline pilots are women, the Royal Aeronautical Society said earlier this month.

Now, there's a move to change that."

Aviator Penny Hamilton has established an project called Teaching Women to Fly in an effort to encourage more women to go after a career as an airline pilot.

Author Laurie Norato has researched women pilots for a new book called Crossing the Horizon which was published in October 2016.. It's a novelized version of history - about three women and their co-pilots who attempted to fly across the Atlantic Ocean (before Amelia Earhart finally succeeded

The book can be purchased from Amazon, Barns & Noble, and other retailers.

Profile: Alma Heflin - first American woman Test Pilot

Alma Heflin was born on September 2, 1910 in Winona, Missouri, and died in 2000. Her father was Irvin Heflin, her mother Nora Heflin nee Kelley.

Heflin learned to fly in 1934. While not flying, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Eastern Washington College in 1936.

In 1940, she and a friend, Margie McQuin, took a Piper Cub called Mister Shrdlu on a vacation to Alaska. She wrote an account of their trip in Adventure Was the Compass, published in 1942.

First of 6-page comic book story featuring Alma Heflin

She went to work as a test pilot for the Piper Aircraft Company, and test flew the Piper Cub. Her first flight as a test pilot was of a single wing two-seater on November 12, 1941. She also became the editor of Cub Flyer magazine.  

From Click Magazine

In 1943 when the WASP sent out a call for women pilots, Alma Heflin joined, but did not complete the program.

After the end of the war, she went on to earn her Master’s degree in Education from Eastern Washington College in 1949.

In 1949 she also published a second book, the semi-autobiographical novel Merry Makes a Choice, and in the same year married an Air Force Pilot named McCormick.

In 1953, Alma founded a department for helping severely mentally disabled children in the Tri-City Public Schools in Richland, Washington. In 1955 she was the co-founder and direction of the Adastra School for Gifted Children in Seattle, which she ran until 1964.

She went on to earn her PhD at Clayton University in 1977, and continued her career as a child psychologist.

A chapter of her book Adventure was the Compass can be found in the book Into the Blue: American Writing on Aviation and Spaceflight, edited by Joseph J. Com.  You can read it here:

Adventure Was the Compass Excerpt at Google Books

Resources

Profile: Prabook

Test-pilots (Popular Mechanics, digitized at Google Books)