An aviator’s journey

Lola Reid Allin speaks about her career as a commercial pilot

Last Thursday evening about a dozen people gathered in the comfy confines of The Wandering Albatross bookstore in Bloomfield to listen to author and adventurer Lola Reid Allin speak about her life as a commercial pilot, as well as to listen to some readings from her book Highway to the Sky: An Aviator’s Journey. Ms. Allin grew up in Belleville and was inspired as a child by the Golden Hawks, Canada’s first aerial acrobatics team, which was formed in 1959. But it was a family trip to Regina by air in 1962 that cemented a love of flying in the then Grade Two student. However, family pressures and a lack of role models—save for one teenage girl in a television series— meant that Ms. Allin was dissuaded from pursuing aviation as a career, and instead she followed a different pathway. At age 24, with a child and a marriage that was in difficulty, her then-husband suggested flying lessons as something they could do together. By the third or fourth lesson, Ms. Allin overcame her initial nervousness, and three months later she obtained her private pilot’s licence. “I knew I could do it. It felt very comfortable and very natural,” she said. By March of the following year she had her commercial licence. A little later, she quit her job and then took a month to become a flight instructor. She flew for the Ontario government as well as for private companies, eventually flying a Dash-8 passenger plane.

She loved the tranquility and freedom of flying, and said that she had very good jobs. However, there were very few other female pilots and she endured disrespect and harassment—from colleagues as well as passengers— in this male-dominated profession. She was passed over for promotions and expected to do menial tasks by her senior copilots. “It was a sketch of what life was like at that time. Even though I had the same licences and had been trained on the same aircraft to the same standards, there was still an overarching assumption that women weren’t as qualified. And part of that was our society that tends to treat men and women differently,” said Ms. Allin. “In terms of one-on-one, some of the guys—and it was guys in that field—were great. They were lovely human beings and very supportive. But from some, it was just a combination of micro-aggressions. It was outside of their frame of reference to see a woman in that situation.” Yet she did not let that get in her way, and she enjoyed a long and ultimately satisfying career as a commercial pilot and flight trainer.

During her talk at the bookstore, she spoke about the history of women in aviation. When she began her commercial flying career in 1979, only four per cent of all commercial pilots worldwide were female. That has increased to just six per cent. There are some exceptions. Porter Airlines is up to about 12 per cent, and there are a number of countries where the ratio of female commercial pilots exceeds that number. Ms. Allin is a member of The Ninety-Nines International Organization of Female Pilots, which was begun by Amelia Earhart and 98 other women pilots—hence the name—in 1929 after they were denied participation in transcontinental flying derbies.

They launched the Powder Puff Derby for women and raced separately until 1936 when the two derbies were combined. Fittingly, Louise Thaden and Blanche Noyes won the race that year while competing against men. Ms. Allin spoke about a number of pioneering women aviators, including flyers such as Rosella Bjornson who got her private pilot’s licence at age 17 and went on to become the first female airline jet pilot, as well as aeronautical engineer Elsie MacGill, who was known as “The Queen of the Hurricanes” for her role in the production of 1,451 Hawker Hurricane fighters in Canada during the Second World War.

In addition to being a pilot, Ms. Allin is a scuba divemaster and an award-winning photographer. “I’m a thrill-seeker, and I like challenging myself. But I’m a calculated risk-taker. At one point I thought I would like to jump out of an airplane, so I volunteered to fly for a weekend for a skydiving group, and let me tell you, as soon as that door opened, I thought ‘There’s not a hope I’d jump out of a perfectly good airplane!’” She started writing her book about 10 years ago, and she wanted to get it right, so she took a creative writing course at the University of Toronto. “I thought, how hard could it be to write about me? But it’s not about me. It’s about what happened to me, what I learned from it and how it changed me, and how I can impart that knowledge to other people.” Ms. Allin’s book is available from The Wandering Albatross bookstore. Please visit wanderingalbatrossbooks.com.