North Head Quarantine Station: Shielding Sydney and Surrounds from the Importation of Communicable Diseases

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Coastal geology & environment, Heritage & Conservation, Medical history, Public health,, Regional History

〝 The principle of preventing the spread of infectious disease by which people, baggage…likely to be infected or coming form an infected place are isolated at frontiers or ports until their harmlessness has been proven…〞
~ Port Nepean Q-Station‘s definition of ’Quarantine‘

Since the initial strains of Covid-19 turned the world upside down and inside out early last year, the word ‘quarantine’ has found a renewed vigour in the lexicon. In a previous blog the history of Sydney’s early animal quarantine station for imported livestock was outlined – ‘Sydney Foreshore’s Animal House of Detention and Segregation on Hen and Chicken Bay’, 21-Apr-2018. Human quarantine in Sydney has a much longer history. The story starts with governor of the colony of New South Wales Ralph Darling. In response to the cholera pandemic sweeping Europe and the risks of ship-borne disease being transported on vessels coming to the colony, Darling initiated a Quarantine Act in 1832  “subjecting Vessels coming to New South Wales from certain places to the performance of Quarantine”❅.

(Source: researchgate.net / Peter Freeman Pty. 2000)

Darling set aside the entire North Head peninsula (277 hectares)—on indigenous Gayamagal country in Manly on Sydney’s northern beaches—for the grounds of the quarantine processing centre. The exact site chosen for the Q-station, Spring Cove, overlooking Sydney Harbour, was already housing an infected and quarantined merchant ship, the Bussorah Merchant.

In the early years of the station’s operation, the practice was to keep sick passengers on board the vessels on arrival at Spring Cove. After complaints from the merchants about the delay and cost of keeping the ships tied up at North Head, the authorities started bringing the sick onshore to free up the transport ships, this required the construction of more substantial permanent accommodation and storage facilities at the Q-Station to replace the original makeshift buildings [‘North Head Quarantine Station’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Passengers disembarking at North Head Q-Station, 1940s (Photo: State Library of NSW)

Q-Station longevity
The old Quarantine Station enjoyed a surprisingly long lifespan at the North Head site, surviving albeit with decreasing utilisation until 1984⌖, this despite periodical calls for its closure…as far back as 1923 Manly Council alderman and later mayor Percy Nolan was advocating for the Q-Station’s removal in favour of open public space [Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Quarantine Station. Proposed Removal’, 31-May-1923 (Trove)].

Slabs of cut sandstone near the station’s wharf bear the markings of passengers detailing the dates and ship names of their journey to North Head

First class expectations
Conditions and facilities at the Q-station were regularly under scrutiny from the better-off passengers. First class passengers were not slow in bringing deficiencies in housing to the attention of the authorities, leading in the 1870s to the building of a new section of Q-Station passenger accommodation in what was known as “the Healthy Grounds” (Wiki).

A 1881 smallpox epidemic resulting in a large number of internee deaths❧ at North Head facility exposed major shortcomings in the management of the Q-Station, including the lack of  a medical superintendent with a grasp of infection control; no clean linen and towels, soap or medical supplies for patients isolated with smallpox [Allen, Raelene, Smallpox epidemic 1881, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/smallpox_epidemic_1881, viewed 06 Sep 2021].

Aerial view of Nth Head Q-Station – c.1930 (Image: Office of Environment & Heritage)

Bulwark against plagues, viruses, bacteria, etc.
Over the decades the Q-Station at Manly has housed the victims of numerous diseases including smallpox, typhus, scarlet fever, measles and the bubonic plague, as well as victims of natural disasters. The Q-Station provided a refuge for returning WWI veterans suffering from TB and VD. At war’s end it served as the frontline defence against the lethal assault of the Spanish Flu.

(Photo: environment.
nsw.gov.au)

Gradual obsolescence
Post-WWII, as air travel gradually replaced passenger ships, the Q-Station’s role diminished in importance. In its final decades of operation the quarantine station was put to diverse use…housing the unvaccinated (eg, pregnant immigrants), accommodating  Vietnamese orphans and as a temporary abode for women and children evacuated from Darwin after Cyclone Tracy decimated that city in 1974 [‘The plague, smallpox and Spanish flu: How Sydney quarantined sick travellers throughout history’, Sarah Swain, 9 News, 2020, www.9news.com.au; ’Q Station on Manly’s North Head echoes with history of pandemics past’, Kathy Sharpe, Mandurah Mail, 21-Jul-2021, www.mandurahmail.com.au].

The stairway (connecting the wharf with the housing) replaced the funicular in use during Q-Station period (Photo: Sydney Coast Walks)

No longer a quarantine station, the surviving 65 heritage buildings are set against the beautiful natural bush land of the Sydney Harbour National Park. Today the old Q-station is converted into a hotel complex (104 rooms including nine self-contained cottages, managed by Accor) with all the tourist trappings, including sleepovers and nocturnal “Ghost and Paranormal tours”.

Pt Nepean Q-Station (Photo: Parks Vic)

Footnote: Port Nepean, North Head’s counterpart
In Melbourne, that city’s historic quarantine station can be found on the Heads of Port Phillip Bay. Port Nepean Quarantine Station can point to a similar eventful history to that of the North Head facility. Like it, the Melbourne Q-Station owes it’s existence to an infected immigrant ship…the arrival of the SS Ticonderoga in 1852 with 300 passengers stricken from disease, necessitating the ship’s quarantining at Port Nepean, which led to it’s establishment as a Quarantine Station (originally called “the Sanitary Station”). By the 20th century Port Nepean Q-Station had developed a number of innovative processing features including the memorably named “Foul Luggage Receiving Store”. The station’s Disinfectant and Boiler buildings also became models for other quarantine stations in Australia [‘Quarantine Station’, Parks Victoria, www.parks.vic.gov.au]. At one point animals were also quarantined at the location. By 1978 Port Nepean had ceased operating as a quarantine facility and was closed in 1980. Subsequent uses of the site and holdings include a military encampment and a temporary refuge for 400 Kosovar refugees fleeing the Bosnian War in the early 1990s.

➿➿➿➿➿➿➿ ➿➿➿➿➿➿➿

❅ “to prevent the introduction of the disease called the malignant Cholera and other infectious disease”

⌖ during that one-and-a-half centuries the Q-Station was the initial home in Sydney for an estimated 13,000 passengers

 ❧ and the need to build a third Q-Station cemetery to accommodate the rise in mortality

 

The Law of Jante: Scandinavian Anti-exceptionalism and the Wealth and Social Status Taboo

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Comparative politics, Creative Writing, Inter-ethnic relations, Literary & Linguistics, Regional politics
(Image: Scandinavian Standard)

Contemporary Scandinavian society is rich and appetising fodder for sociologists and behaviouralists. The peculiar strain of egalitarianism that runs through the Nordic countries manifests itself in a concept known as Jantelagen in Swedish or Janteloven in Danish and Norwegian⊡. The origin of the word ‘Janteloven’ comes from a 1933 satirical novel by a Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose. A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, set in a fictional Danish town called ‘Jante’, is “a thinly veiled roman à clef about his hometown Nykøbing Mors”, Denmark, in which he skewers the inhabitants for their foibles – “pettiness, envy, backbiting, gossip, inverted snobbery and small-mindedness” [‘The Law of Jante’, Michael Booth, Paris Review, ‪11-Feb-2015 ‬www.parisreview.org]. One small portion of En flyktning krysser sitt spor (the Norwegian title) is of lasting significance, the “Laws of Jante”⊞, the list of ten principles designed to put non-conformists in Nordic society in their place. Sandemose’s so-called ‘Laws’ draw on long and widely held, deeply engrained Scandinavian attitudes⊟.

The 10 Laws of Jante

A society devoid of exceptionalism and ‘oneupmanship’
Janteloven/Jantelagen is a concept which celebrates Nordic self-restraint, “stoic humbleness and modesty”. Any sense of individual superiority and ambition is actively discouraged, as is talking about one’s personal success. The Jante laws are cultural codes which eschew declarations of a self-congratulatory or immodest kind. Nordic “Jante-ism” offers no haven for those seeking to stand out from the crowd. The benefits for adherence, Scandinavians assert, are collective ones, good for the nation as a whole, resulting in enhanced quality of life, a contribution to the “GNP of happiness” enjoyed by its citizens⊠ [‘Jantelagen: The Law of Jante Explained’, Swedes in the States, 22-Feb-2021, www.swedesinthestates.com].

(Source: worldlife expectancy.com)

The Jante Law instructs on what citizens need to do to fit in to the community, but it has a punitive purpose too…if an individual fails to fit in, it provides a way of “socially stigmatising anyone who break the rules”. According to author Michael Booth, it affects the everyday choices Scandinavians make, what clothes you wear, what car you buy, etc [‘Forget hygge: The laws that really rule in Scandinavia’, (BBC Ideas video, 2018, www.bbc.co.uk].

“We are all equal!”

Swedish comparisons are odious: The taboo on money and status
Jantelagen is deeply rooted in the Swedish psyche, it is de rigeur for all stratum of society never to talk about one’s wealth or income. Jantelagen also prohibits people from boasting about their social status, firing off a warning shot to allay any notions they may harbour about climbing the social ladder (the codes act as a handbrake on citizens not getting above their station). The reinforcement of the appearance of an egalitarian society helps to keep the balance (ie, serving as a control mechanism, maintaining homogeneity and societal harmony). Stephen Trotter’s study of Janteloven in Norway concludes that it operates as a “form of structural censorship (where) symbolic power is exerted (in the task of) nation-building” [‘Breaking the law of Jante’, SR Trotter, Issue 23 Myth and Nation, www.gla.ac.uk].

(Source: mbastudies.com)

Anything north of average is a win!
The claimed benefits of “Jante-ism” has also been explained in terms of a state of decreased expectations – living by the ten rules installs a sense of average expectations from life, so anything that comes your way “above and beyond the average” will be a welcome bonus, value-adding to your existing store of happiness (Lindsay Dupuis)[‘The happiness of the Danes can easily be explained by 10 cultural rules’, Lila MacLellan, Quartz, 29-Sep-2016, www.qz.com].

Stockholm’s poshest precinct (Photo: Alxpin/Getty Images)

A Millennial challenge to the Law of Jante?
The fabric of Jantelagen in a society like Sweden remains firmly intact despite the reality of growing inequalities in income since the 1990s – the top 20% of workers in Sweden earn four times as much as the bottom 20% (OECD). There are some signs in the Scandinavian countries however that the fabric is coming under strain, especially from the changing expectations of the countries’ youth. The inexorable rise of social media presages a Millennial backlash against the Law of Jante… University of Bergen academic Cornelius Cappelen points to the pervasive influence of online platforms to effect behavioural change and undermine the Jante mindset, ie, bragging on Facebook, Instagram, Vlogging, etc, all promoting “rampant individualism” (Cappelin) [‘Law of Jante’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘Jantelagen: Why Swedes won’t talk about wealth’, Maddy Savage, BBC, 18-Oct-2019, www.bbc.com].

(Photo: Sveriges Radio)

Exo-group influences
Aside from pushback from a social media-fuelled Scandinavian youth, challenges to the unspoken social norms of ”Jante-ism” may emerge from other sectors of society. Sweden is increasingly a migrant society, estimates put the proportion of Swedish citizens with a foreign background at around 25%…this growing diversity exposes the community to the influence of outside cultures, many of which have very different socio-cultural norms to the ‘native’ ones, such as the celebration of achievements, skills and talents of the individual (Savage).

Helsinki: Vanha kaupunki (Source: Multi Briefs)

🇩🇰 🇸🇪 🇳🇴 🇫🇮 🇮🇸

Sandemose’s stern image on a Norwegian jet

Endnote: TPS
Scandinavia’s Jante Law evokes similarities with other cultural phenomenons such as the (albeit less institutionalised) “Tall Poppy Syndrome”. This millennia-old cultural phenomenon—deriving from Ancient Greek and Roman sources—is conspicuously present in but by no means unique to the cultural ethos of Australia and New Zealand. Having freed themselves of the status of British colonies far away in the South-west Pacific, Australians and New Zealanders created through war and statehood a new and separate (mythic) identity for themselves as a ‘superior’ type of Briton…one in which “Jack was as good as his master”. This sustained myth of classlessness, sometimes described as a kind of “ideological egalitarianism down under”, was a conscious attempt to distance these “New Britons” from the rigid class system of the mother country.

͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡°

⊡ Jante laki in Finnish and Jantelögin in Icelandic
⊞ a sort of mock “informal Scandinavian Ten Commandments” (Booth)
⊟ Sandemose himself by all accounts was hardly a model Nordic citizen, irritable of nature, of questionable morality and thoroughly unpleasant to family according to his granddaughter Iben, also a writer (Booth)
⊠ UN World Happiness Report (2018) ranked the top three countries, in order, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Previously in 2016 Denmark topped the world poll

The Marshal Tito Collection of Big Luxury Toys and Residential Properties

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Comparative politics, International Relations, Regional History

The former authoritarian ruler of Yugoslavia and the glue that kept the multi-national “South Slav” state together for such a long period in the postwar, (Josip Broz) Tito, had a penchant for collecting things while he ruled the roost in that erstwhile country. While some people might content themselves with collecting stamps or coins or even 17th century antique French clocks, the president’s passion for accumulating was on a much larger and lavish scale. The perks for Tito that came with the job would be the envy of any ambitious 21st century CEO.

Kumrovec (Tito’s birthplace/statue)

Balkan “head honcho” with 34 addresses
Marshal Tito’s possessions in the Yugoslav property market ensured that he was never short of a bed to sleep in for the night. At one stage the Predsednik had an estimated 34 villas scattered all over the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslav. Some were residences—official and otherwise—some were holiday homes, some he lived in substantially, some he occupied only fleetingly and some he never go round to living in. There was hunting lodges galore and a castle or three, grand and opulent living was a common denominator with the Tito properties.

Beli Dvor, Belgrade

Tito’s happy hunting grounds
There were several Tito villas in Belgrade alone, the Vila Mir (the “Oval House”), the Presidential Palace and the most famous of all, used for a different kind of hunting, “diplomatic hunts”, Beli dvor (”the White Palace”), the former Karadordević royal family residence seized by the communist government♝. Within Bosnia and Herzegovina Marshal Tito had several hunting lodges in the mountains where he apparently was very partial to hunting bears, one was close to the regional hub Sarajevo. Tito also presumably liked to be close to his roots as one residence was in Tito’s childhood village, Kumrovec in Croatia. Croatia was good for hunting grounds too. Then there was Vila Dunavka, a very spacious 100-acre estate with room for a vineyard, wine cellars, a forest and of course hunting grounds, all part of the president’s fiefdom (Tito’s Legacy: Surveying the Yugoslav Leader’s Real Estate’, Milica Stojanovic, Samir Kajosevic, Anja Vladisavljevic and Malden Lakic, Balkan Insight, 28-Jun-2019, www.balkaninsight.com).

Tito, mixing the drinks in his Brijuni villa bar

Tito’s island getaway
Tito even had his own private island retreats in the Brijuni Islands, a small archipelago on the northern Adriatic. The Brijunis have been described as Tito’s ‘Xanadu’, as evidenced by his spending on average four to six months a year at the two residences—the “White Villa” on the main island Veli Brijuni and another villa on Vanga Island—which served as both his playground and his office. The 3,000 square metre Bejila vila was Tito’s principal summer palace where he held business dealings and diplomacy with world leaders and hosted other members of the glitterati of the day (Sophia Loren was a regular visitor). When Bejila vila became too public and open, Tito had Vanga Villa built which served as “a secluded hideaway” with two purposes, to conduct “sensitive political dealings”, and for private entertainment of VIPs (Haile Selassie, Elizabeth II, etc) and celebrities (Orson Welles, Sophia Loren, Taylor and Burton, etc) (Niebyl).

Tito with Liz Taylor & Richard Burton (who portrayed Tito on the big screen)
Gradu Brdo (Photo: siol.sl)

Other Tito villas were located in Split, Dubrovnik, Zagreb and in Serbia (including in Karadordević which functioned as a sort of Winter Palace for Marshal Tito), Slovenia (a villa on picturesque Lake Bled and a 16th century mansion Castle Brdo), Montenegro (including the Galeb ‘Seagull’ Villa) and North Macedonia. Since the collapse of Yugoslavia some of the myriad of residences have fallen in a state of disrepair and some have become museums (pulling in the “Yugo-nostalgic” tourists), ‘Yugo-Nostalgia Thrives at Tito Memorials’, Marisa Ristic, Balkan Insight, 25-Jun-2013, www.balkaninsight.com).

Presidential palace on wheels
In addition to the real estate there were the large moveable objects, Take Tito’s famed Blue Train (Plavi voz). The luxury train was “built as a peripatetic presidential palace to impress (visiting) international heads of state”, dictators and democratic leaders alike♗. The train had sleeper cars for over 90 people, elegant wood paneling, plush banquet rooms, conference rooms (all tastefully decorated), restaurant, bar, etc, even a specific train car to transport the president’s personal (bulletproof) Mercedes. After Tito’s demise the Blue Train wasted away in a Belgrade hangar for yonks, however in the past decade it has been resurrected and well-heeled tourists can traverse the 476-kilometre journey from Belgrade to Bar (Montenegro) on what some Yugoslavs use to call the “Blue Miracle” (‘The Return of Tito’s Train: From Serbia To Montenegro – A Track To The Past’, Michael Williams, Independent, 13-Jul-2013, www.independent.co.uk; ‘All Aboard! Explore the legendary and luxurious private train of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito’, Donald Niebyl, Spomenik Database, Upd. 13-Apr-2020, www.spomenikdatabase.org).

Tito’s Douglas DC-6B (Source: Pinterest)

Air Tito
Similarly, when travelling by air, Tito made sure he didn’t skimp on comfort and luxury. In 1958 he took possession of two specially built Douglas DC-6B planes, one for use by JAT Airways (the national carrier) and the other, his private jet. The luxury aircraft was used by Tito for diplomatic missions and state business trips…the first official mission took him to India, Africa and the Middle East to connect with potential fellow NAM leaders. When the DC-6B started to age the Yugoslav strongman traded it in for a new Soviet Ilyushin Il-14 and continued to upgrade his personal carrier, French Süd Aviation SE 210 Caravelle followed by a Boeing 727♚ (‘From Red Star to Red Bull: The History of Tito’s Douglas DC-6B’, Donald Niebyl, Spomenik Database, Upd. 16-Feb-2020, www.spomenikdatabase.org).

‘Galeb’, now docked & rusting (Source: Tendanceouest)

Have yacht, will visit
Galeb (‘Seagull’), Tito’s Italian constructed luxury yacht, rounds out the trifecta of luxurious presidential transporters. As with the personal train and aircraft, Tito used it to entertain his A-list of international political associates and celebrities on voyages. Originally acquired as as a training ship, Tito sailed it to London in 1953 for talks with British PM Churchill, a watershed meeting heralding Yugoslavia’s opening to the West, following Tito’s split with Stalin and the Eastern Bloc (‘Galeb Ship’, Muzej Grada Rijeka, www.muzej-Rijeka.hr).

Tito’s “lux-cars”
Another of Tito’s prized possessions was his 5.6m-long Cadillac Eldorado Convertible, located on Veli Brijuni, which he used to take guests (actors, artists, diplomats, politicians) on tours of the island’s national park and safari park/zoo between 1953 and 1979 (‘Tito’s Cadillac’, np-Brijuni.hr). The “Caddy limo” was just one of Marshal Tito’s 13 luxury cars including a 1960 Rolls-Royce Phantom and the Merc mentioned above (‘Ex-President Tito’s Caddy Convertible? Oh, Yes’, Eugene S. Robinson, Ozy, 03-Jun-2014, www.ozy.com).

Tito with his fourth wife Jovanka, “pressing the flesh” (Source: blis.rs)

The bulk of Tito’s possessions were not owned by the president but by the state—or so the courts say—as his relatives have now ruefully discovered. The ruling by a Serbian court in 2016 put paid to the hopes of the late president’s heirs who had pursued inheritance cases for over 30 years. Some 70,000 of Marshal Tito’s belongings have been stored in Belgrade’s Museum of Yugoslav History♔ (‘Court leaves family of Yugoslav leader Tito empty-handed’, The Daily Star (Lebanon), 25-Jan-2016, www.dailystar.lb).

House of Flowers (Photo: Ex Utopia)

⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝⍝

♝ Tito’s current ‘residence’ is also in Belgrade, his final resting place, the House of Flowers, the presidential mausoleum
♗ among the dignitaries to enjoy the extravagant palatial interiors were Gaddafi, Yaser Arafat and Mitterrand
♚ these days Tito’s personal DC-6B is owned by the Red Bull company
♔ including some moon rocks, a gift of US President Nixon from the Apollo missions

A Female Helicopter Trailblazer, the “Whirly Girls” and the Struggle for a Place in the Cockpit: Women in the ‘Contrails’ of Modern Aviation

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Aviation history, Gender wars, Society & Culture, Travel

When the first men managed through repeated trial-and-error to get manned “flying machines” off the ground, the first women pioneers weren’t that far behind them in getting into the skies. The first woman got her flying licence (Elise Deroche in France) less than nine years after the Wright brothers made their epic 59-second ‘hop’ – see the 2017 brace of articles elsewhere on this blogsite, Equality at 10,000 Feet: The Pioneer Aviatrix in the Golden Age of Aviation – Part I (May 27, 2017) and Part II (May 31, 2017).

Baroness Derouche (Source: This Day in Aviation)
🔺Reitsch testing the FW-61 (Photo: ullstein bild via Getty Images)

While many women overcame obstacles on the way to a career as an aviatrix, those of their sex wanting to become helicopter pilots have found it even more difficult and onerous. The prospects around 1940 when the world’s first modern rotary-wing copter became fully functional looked bright enough for women. Nazi Germany’s pioneering aviatrix Hanna Reitsch was leading the way. In 1938 Reitsch☸ became the first woman to test fly a helicopter, Focke’s FW-61 helicopter, even going on to set a distance record for helicopter flight of 109km. She followed that up with the record (shared  with another pilot) for being the first in the world to fly a copter in an enclosed space❇ (Sophie Jackson, Hitler’s Heroine, Hanna Reitsch (2014)).

🔺 Reitsch’s 1955 autobiography

Unfortunately, as the industry has grown since those formative days, female helicopter pilots trying to follow the trajectory of Reitsch’s stellar achievements in the air have found it much harder to penetrate the masculine preserve of the helicopter world. Today women still lag far behind in the gender stakes, in 2019 according to the Civil Aviation Authority women made up only 4.5% of the helicopter pilots in the UK, with just the single female instructor-examiner for the whole country (“International Women’s Day: ‘I’m teaching other women to fly helicopters’”, BBC, 08-Mar-2019, www.bbc.com).

(Photo: Stephanie Wallace/IMdiversity)

The statistics are hardly more encouraging in the US. The Helicopter Association International puts the number of female pilots at around 5%, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) which pointedly has no specific data on women helicopter pilots estimates the figure at a perhaps generous 7.9%. (‘How These 2 Women Became The Helicopter Pilot and Reporter Inside Skyeye’, ABC13, 11-Mar-2021, www.abc13.com). Even more concerning, the percentage of women behind the controls has been stagnant over recent decades✴.

But it’s not from the lack of trying to effect change on the part of women aviators! The barriers to female entry into both the commercial and military fields of helicopters led pilot Jean Ross Howard Phelan (above), the 8th US woman to gain her helicopter accreditation, to form Whirly Girls International in 1955—an association dedicated to the advancement of women in helicopter aviation—with just 12 other charter members🈂. Today the group has 72,000 members from 44 countries.

The minuscule inroads made by women inside the sanctum of the “male cockpit” isn’t confined to rotary-wing aircraft. Women pilots have barely had more success in cracking the fixed-wing aircraft industry, their share of the jobs in the US has hovered somewhere between five and six-and-a-half percent. Despite all the efforts of women’s aviation bodies including the Ninety-Nines (the Whirly Girls’ “older sister” organisation) to make headway in rectifying the imbalance, women today constitute just 7% of the world’s certified pilots for all types of aircraft (‘Female Helicopter Pilots on The Rise’, Claire McCann, Prestige Helicopters, Inc., Upd.11-Nov-2020, www.prestigehelicopters.com).

Women in Aviation International: best strategy, targeting girls at a young age to foster the ‘bug’ for a flying career

The reasons flying has continued to be a male stronghold are many and varied. With so few women pilots—only 13 credentialed to fly helicopters by 1955—young women and girls have been bereft of visible role models and mentors to show the way. At school-level not enough effort have been made to make teenage girls aware of the opportunities there are in a flying career. The preponderance of male pilots perpetuates the “highly masculine image of aviation“, reinforcing the stereotype that the profession is “not a woman’s job” (Why There Aren’t More Female Pilots’, Katherine LaGrave, IMdiversity 08-Mar-2018, www.imdiversity.com). This in part comes back to a prevailing mentality of “Top Gun” chauvinism. Female pilots have commented on aviation still being an “old boys’ club” and the lack of support, bias and intimidation they experienced from men in the industry during their training (‘Chances Are Your Pilot Isn’t a Woman. Here’s Why’, Kimberly Perkins, Seattle Business, (nd), www.seattlebusinessmag.com). The issue of unhelpful male pilots for some women has led to another road block, the paucity of female instructors in the industry. 

🔺 Ret.Col. Sally D Murphy, 1st female copter pilot in US Army

Once in the industry some women pilots have found themselves facing static career paths, the sheer lack of opportunities to attain seniority has eventually led a number of women in military and commercial aviation to prematurely leave the profession. Another criticism of the aviation industry is that it hasn’t embraced the change in work rules and conditions that other industries have…getting the work/life balance right is an issue of more importance to women who usually have to bear the brunt of child-rearing activities (‘Why are there so few women in aviation?’, Kathryn Creedy, CNN, 20-Nov-2019, www.cnn.com).

🔺 Cessna 172

Research suggests the prohibitive costs involved can be a barrier for women. Aircraft training in the US can cost up to US$150,000, add to this the soaring price of purchasing an entry-level commercial plane today…the (adjusted) price of buying a new Cessna 172 is four times greater than it was in 1960 (‘Why Are There So Few Female Pilots?, Rebecca Maksel, Air and Space, 06-Feb-2015, www.airspacemag.com). 

🔺 Malaysia’s 1st female copter pilot (Photo: The Star (Mal.)

What makes the persistence of multiple barriers and obstacles blocking women from realising their professional pilot dreams maddeningly vexatious is the dilemma now facing the industry as a whole, a looming worldwide shortage of qualified pilots to take the reins of the big airliners. Some airlines like United in the US recently have flagged the introduction of quotas to increase pilot numbers for women and for minorities, but much more fundamental structural change is required before we see real progress in tackling the gender imbalance. 

(Photo: PPRuNe Forums)

▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪

☸ having already been appointed a flugkapitän (flight captain), a position till then exclusively reserved for male German pilots 

❇ later Reitsch was also the first woman to fly a rocket plane

✴ numbers in the US did initially rise from the 1960s to the 1980s but have plateaued since that point (Maksel)

🈂 member #1 was appropriately enough Hanna Reitsch