Female Pilots: Could you answer these questions please?

Question

What is a typical day like for you (domestic and international)?

How has it been in a male dominated field?

What is your typical shedule (days on and off, vacation, and etc)?

How is hygiene?

I have a lot more I just can't think of them right now, sorry if this is a lot.

Answer 1

work max of 1,000 hors a year or 100 a month.

Answer 2

I flew for 37 years, and have been retired almost 3 years.

The "typical" day depends on how much seniority you have with the company.  Basically, you just get up, get dressed, and go to work.  A pilot has quite a bit of office work and paperwork to do in addition to actual flying, so you allow time.  When your seniority is low, you may be on the duty line at any hour of the day or night.  You may get up at 1:00 am to be on duty at 2:45.  Or any other hour.  It's up to the Crew Executive (sometimes called the "chief pilot") and the dispatcher.

When you have more seniority, you have a better pick of the more comfortable schedules.  On Pacific routes, we used to fly to Narita or Kai Tak and lay over for as long as 2-3 days, fly home, and repeat.  The company schedules route crews like buckets on a conveyor belt:  you go, you come back, you go, you come back.

I enjoyed that.  I sang in the choir at St. John's Anglican Cathedral in HongKong, and loved it.  A fellow choir member was one of the richest men in Asia, and we used to get invited to some really interesting parties.  This was the way of life at its best.  "Typical?"  It varies a lot, and it probably gets less ideal as the business gets deeper into financial distress.

"Male dominated?"  Who?  Me?

I soloed in 1964, and first flew for a living in 1967.  It was much more problematic then than it is now.  I only ever had to kick a fellow crew member in the zipper once in my whole career, but there was a more or less constant flow of men who did not understand that a female pilot was there to fly and not to make out.

It helped that I am 5 foot 11, rangy, and rather slender.  Used to be very slender.  I never tried to impersonate a man, but I sometimes dressed sort of butch when out of uniform, and it sometimes helped.  Most company uniforms allow women to wear slacks, and do that.

In the old cargo planes, we wore jeans, sweatshirts, and a baseball cap.  Lots of appearance options with that.

Things have been very different in recent years.  There are plenty of female flight deck crew members, now.  Almost to a man, the guys are a great bunch, and you have to love them, and everybody respects each other and works together.

35 years ago, I still occasionally had to prove to men that I actually understood what the controls do, how to read a magnetic compass, and what a circuit breaker does.  There is very little of that sort of thing nowadays.

When I was flying cargo, we occasionally flew in and out of places where the local customs created problems.  I carried a long skirt and a head scarf, and actually had to cover my face a couple of times.  Several times I decided the simplest solution was for me to stay aboard the airplane the whole time.  We had a loo where I could improvise a shower, and I brought an air mattress or a sleeping bag.

As I described, there have been times and places where hygiene was a bit on the primitive side, but that's been a long time ago in most parts of the world.  No different from working in an office in downtown Anytown, USA, now.

You want to work on a look that minimizes the effort put into hair and makeup.  I always did a pageboy of some kind or other.  If you are on the flight deck, you need a 'do that doesn't look too stupid with the officer's cap.  And it's good to stay tanned and just use a little liner and shadow.  Or not even that, if you can pull it off.

On the whole, it's fun, and it's been worth it.  With the economic future looking grim, it may become harder to have as good a life in the aviation industry.  You will just have to keep your ear to the ground.

I realize it's hard to keep your ear to the ground and your nose to the grindstone at the same time, but it sure beats working.

Good luck.