Although she has been flying for decades, Colette Morin’s eyes still sparkle when she speaks about being in the pilot’s seat.
“It’s fun,” Morin said simply. She’s been going up and doing aerobatic flying lately, just for the challenge, she said. “I still love it.”
It is this passion for aviation Morin wants to inspire in other girls and women.
Morin, chief pilot and owner of Glacier Air, hosts an annual day for girls and women to fly for free with her and other female pilots during the internationally celebrated Women of Aviation Worldwide Week, March 7-13.
On Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., females 12 years old or older who have never flown in a small airplane before are invited to come fly at Glacier Air at the Squamish Airport.
“Women have had pilots’ licences for over 100 years now and yet girls and women still think, ‘I can’t do that,’” Morin said. “Well, why not?”
Female pilots currently make up six per cent of the total pilot population, according to Women in Aviation International. Approximately two per cent of all aircraft mechanics are females and around 10 per cent of aeronautical engineers are women.
Both of Morin’s parents were private pilots, so she grew up around planes and believing any career related to flying was an option for her, she said.
“I have been in little airplanes since I was around four years old,” she said, adding she has had her pilot’s licence for more than 22 years.
Morin said it is still relatively rare to be a female owner of a flying company.
There’s another woman owner in Chilliwack and one she knows of in Ontario.
“That’s about it,” she said with a laugh.
Sometimes people come into the office and assume she is the receptionist, never mind a pilot or the owner, she said.
“Tourists come in and I’ll say, ‘Well, I am your pilot,’” she said. “They are like, ‘Oh, really?’”
She scoffs at the suggestion that perhaps women can’t be bush pilots, for example, because they can’t lift a 45-gallon drum of fuel. “I don’t know any guys who can lift a 45-gallon drum of fuel, either,” she said. “That is pretty darn heavy to try to lift up. So what do they do? They use leverage.”
This is the sixth annual Women in Aviation week, which was founded by pilot and aviation educator Mireille Goyer in 2010. She started it, she said, because there was nothing she could find to honour the centennial of women pilots. On March 8, 1910, Raymonde de Laroche of France became the first woman to earn a pilot’s licence.
“I decided that the problem was we [female pilots] were so few and we needed more,” Goyer told The Squamish Chief over the phone from her home in Tsawwassen. “That was actually the most meaningful way to celebrate that anniversary, to create more female pilots, which was a vision of the pioneers.” The event started with about 1,600 flights for women in 26 countries in its first year, Goyer said.
The Women in Aviation week now involves women and girls in 36 countries on five continents and has had 96,000 individuals involved in its activities, according to the organization’s website.
Morin, Goyer and other female pilots set to be at the event belong to The 99s, an international organization of women aviators.
Mentoring other girls and women is a goal of Goyer and Morin, who both describe it as “flying it forward.”
