wore nail polish, jewellery, make-up. I always say, I’m a girl first, I just happen to be a pilot.”
So far, the lyrics of “Me and the Sky” could have been lifted verbatim from our conversation. But here her
story deviates from that of Come from Away’s Bev, who sings: “The World War II pilots, they all
complained/ They said girls shouldn’t be in the cockpit, hey lady, hey baby, hey why don’t you grab us a
drink?”
But Bass says in almost 50 years of aviation, flying with thousands of pilots, she has only had one bad
experience. The Second World War pilots found it fascinating to have a female in their cockpit. “Nobody’s
ever even flirted with me,” Bass says in mock outrage. “And I was single for eight years at American!
Sometimes a co-pilot would say to me, ‘I bet every guy in this airline has hit on you.’ And I would say, ‘Are
you kidding me? I’ve never even been asked out.’ And they’d say, ‘That’s because they’re afraid of you.’”
Were they right? “I think so.”
Bass’s daughter is now a pilot for EnVoy, and she is due to begin her captain’s training next month. Every
cockpit she walks into, Bass says, the pilots have probably flown with a woman somewhere along the line. I
suggest to Bass that they’ve probably all heard of her. Her response: “Unfortunately, yes.”
Beverley with her daughter, who begins
captain’s training next month (Beverley
Bass/American Airlines)When Bass became, as the song goes, “1986, the first female American captain in history”, 10 years after
they hired her, she didn’t anticipate the furore. But American Airlines was ostensibly proud of their new
female captain; they didn’t shy away from publicity. “Every day there were people swarming the
simulator, they just wanted to peak in the window. If I made a mistake, everybody at the flight academy
knew about it. It was a lot of exposure; I felt like a fish in a bowl.”
That would pale into insignificance a month later. She had taken the captain’s position in Washington DC,
where there was one female first officer and one female flight engineer. These days, planes are flown with
just a pilot and co-pilot, but in the 1980s you still needed all three. The three women traded their trips and
manipulated their schedules until, against every mathematical odd, Bass assembled the first all-female crew
in the history of commercial flying. It made headlines across the world. “It made the papers in Oman. I
didn’t even know where Oman was.”
The minute the plane landed in Dallas, it was swarmed by camera crews, reporters and company personnel.
“We just wanted to fly together because we were three girls,” she laughs.
All these decades later, it might still be news. Women still only account for about 5 per cent of pilots,
estimates Bass. Why is that? “Oh gosh, I don’t know,” she laments. “I worked so hard to recruit young
women. I started an organisation with female pilots in 1978 [the International Society of Women Airline
Pilots]. When we had our first meeting, there were 21 of us. Today we are more than 600 strong.
“We are the single largest contributor to scholarship money for aspiring female airline pilots; we give