Women in aviation

They were competing and winning against the men in air races, and women on every continent except Antarctica had begun to fly, perform in aerial shows, parachute, and even transport passengers.

The first woman passenger in an airplane was Mlle P. Van Pottelsberghe de la Poterie who flew with Henri Farman on several short flights at an airshow in Ghent, Belgium between May and June 1908.

Edith Berg, an American, who flew as a passenger with Wilbur Wright in Paris in October 1908, was the inspiration of the hobble skirt designed by Paul Poiret.

[26] Early pioneers include French Raymonde de Laroche who was the first woman in the world to successfully pass a flight test and earn a pilot licence on March 8, 1910.

[37][36] On October 13, 1910, Bessica Raiche received a gold medal from the Aeronautical Society of New York, recognizing her as the first American woman to make a solo flight.

[41] Thirteen days after Quimby,[42] her friend Matilde E. Moisant an American of French Canadian descent[43] was licensed and began flying in air shows.

Rosina Ferrario, first female pilot of Italy, earned her license on January 3, 1913, and was as unsuccessful as Marvingt had been to get her government or the Red Cross to allow women to transport wounded soldiers during World War I.

She agreed to test "Farman-22" aircraft manufactured in the Chervonskaya airplane workshop of Fedor Fedorovich Tereshchenko [ru][54] The first woman on the African Continent to earn a pilot's license was Ann Maria Bocciarelli of Kimberley, South Africa.

[55] In 1916, Zhang Xiahun (Chinese: 張俠魂) became China's first female pilot when she attended an airshow of the Nanyuan Aviation School and insisted that she be allowed to fly.

[65][66] By 1921, she had set a world women's parachute drop record of 15,200 feet[65][67] and worked as a wing walker for the Fox Moving Picture Company's The Perils of Pauline series.

[75][76] German Marga von Etzdorf was the first woman to fly for an airline when she began co-piloting for Lufthansa in 1927[77] and piloting solo on commercial Junkers F13 on 1 February 1928.

The 1929 stock market crash and ensuing depression, coupled with more stringent safety regulations, caused many of the flying circuses and barnstorming circuits to fold.

[92] Antonie Strassmann, a German emigre to the US, became the first woman to successfully cross the Atlantic aboard an aircraft, traveling in May 1932 with a team on a Dornier Do X flying boat.

On 19 September 1931, the first all women's flying meeting in the UK was organised by Molly Olney and Mrs Harold Brown through the Northamptonshire Aero Club, at Sywell.

[102] The following year she began teaching as the first female instructor at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy[103] and then in 1935 received her certification as a flight instruments trainer.

[106][107] In 1935, Nancy Bird Walton obtained the first Australian license allowing a woman to carry passengers so that she could fly an ambulance service for the Royal Far West Children's Health Scheme.

[124] General Henry Arnold on September 14, 1942, put Cochran in charge of a new program called the Army Air Forces Women's Flying Training Detachment (WFTD).

[127] Women in the United States were also hired by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) to work as scientists and engineers, as well as analysts, reviewing data from windtunnels on airplane prototypes.

Fifteen of these women pilots lost their lives in the air, including British recordbreaking aviator Amy Johnson and Canadian born Joy Davison.

[135] Korean Lee Jeong-hee [ko], who had earned her pilot's license in 1927, joined the Republic of Korea Air Force in 1948 and was appointed first lieutenant.

[139] The Night Witches flew 30,000 missions and "dumped 23,000 tons of bombs on the German invaders": the unit was granted both 'Guards' status and a battle-honour: 'Taman-sky' (for their work during the Battle of Taman), and was therefore re-numbered to finish the war as the 46th 'Tamansky' Guards Night-Bomber Air-Regiment.

[170] Adding to the allure, Bernard Glemser's novel, Girl on a Wing, and the British movie based on it, Come Fly with Me (1963), depicted stewardesses as stylish seekers of romance.

Because NASA required all astronauts to attain an engineering degree and be graduates of military jet piloting test programs, none of the women could meet the entry prerequisites.

[204] At the close of the century, legal efforts to eliminate barriers of race and sexism in the aviation sector resulted in industry modifications in hiring practices.

In the United States, in the late 1970s the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which the court monitored over the next decades and decreed in 1995 had been sufficiently addressed.

[205] In Africa, lack of a strong national carrier resulted in many tourism routes being overtaken by European airlines, but growth in the sector during the 1980s and 1990s saw that 26% of the market share on intercontinental flights were run by Africans.

Through her weekly articles in various magazines, she challenged women, and through her visions of airlines to ferry people and scheduled air routes, she made a huge contribution towards the growth and the development of the aviation industry.

[266] In terms of tourism-driven growth in the aviation sector, throughout the Asia-Pacific region, there is a shortage of pilots, which is driving gender biases to be pushed aside for women to be hired.

EasyJet provides scholarships for women pilots to help offset the high cost of training and EVA Air has actively recruited candidates from university programs.

The organization is funded through donations which are used to produce educational materials, create speaking and networking opportunities and enable attendance at job fairs and get more women into the aerospace field.