Following a year of restricted travel and missed opportunities, I didn't get the chance to meet Women in Aviation International's new CEO, Allison McKay, until last spring in Lakeland, Florida, at the Sun 'n Fun fly-in at Women in Aviation's exhibit space in one of the busy halls. After saying hi to some friends at WAI, whom I hadn't seen in way too long, I was invited by Allison to sit down and chat. The first thing she asked about was an op-ed article in Plane Pilot some months prior entitled "Where Are All The Women Airline Pilots?" The opinion piece, written by retired airline pilot Andrea Eldridge, claimed that there were very few women airline pilots because women don't want to become airline pilots because it's too unpredictable and demanding of one's time. In her article, Eldridge writes, "... it's not an easy life, unless, that is, you want to wear a uniform with sensible shoes while lugging your bags up and down stairs through empty terminals and dark parking garages in the middle of the night, then this is your gig. If you believe in absolute standardization, ongoing training and physical evaluations every six months (an evaluation that, if you fail, there's the possibility of losingyour job), then this is the job for you." This is the job for her, though, and for many thousands of men and women, many of whom do indeed have kids at home, though, as she pointed out in her article, exact numbers on how many airline pilots have kids at home are hard to come by. Still, Eldridge pointed out that even given that a pilot's life might be doable for a working mom, she claims that this is the main reason we've stayed at historically low levels of women in commercial aviation.
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