Last Tuesday marked International Women’s Day – a day for women worldwide to burst through barriers.
Never ones to shirk a challenge, an all-female Air India crew heralded the occasion by flying non-stop from San Francisco to Delhi – a distance of 14,500 kilometres and the world’s longest continuous flight.
Actually it was the outgoing AI 073 that set the record two days earlier – the return flight to India (the leg that actually happened on International Women’s Day) was fractionally shorter – but that’s nit-picking.
“What we wanted to do on International Women’s Day is to do a landmark historic event,” says Harpreet De Singh, Air India’s chief of flight safety, and a woman.
“It’s like a record that we are trying to set — where we can display that women can be equally good in any activity which is traditionally male dominated,” says Singh. We’ve tried to have an all-woman show for this longest flight in history.”
And it wasn’t just an all-female crew in the cockpit for the 17-hour flight. Singh says all the flight operations were managed by women.
“We had a lady dispatcher, we had a lady doctor, we had the radio operator on VHF, we had the ops control people who were ladies, I myself did the safety audit, made sure the ramp checks were done, and, of course, the cabin crew, and the security staff were all ladies.”
Singh says she squeezed in a quick conversation with two of the captains during the flight. “They were all extremely excited, very happy, they said that all the passengers on board applauded after the landing, and they were excited about being part of the historic flight. I told them to keep the flag of Air India high, India’s flag high and to keep the flag of women high,” she says.
Singh hopes the Delhi to San Francisco flight will send a message — especially to young girls in India.
“This entire message is actually to encourage young girls who have dreams of getting into the skies and they feel it’s too technical or this is something only men do. This flight’s a symbol that every single male-dominated function can be carried out by women safely and efficiently.”
It’s a message that seems to be getting some traction. According to India’s aviation agency, the country now has nearly four times more women pilots than the global average. On International Women’s Day, 22 other all-female flights were scheduled and almost every Indian female pilot was in the sky at some point.
Elsewhere, this week a Royal Brunei Airlines flight operated by an all-female crew landed safely and on schedule in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where they wouldn’t be allowed to drive a car!
