How many lady pilots are there in India? - Airliners-India

karatecatman · Member

How many lady pilots are there in India?

TKMCE · Recruit

Better to ask which airlines do not (YET) employ women pilots in India?

Is the answer 2, 1 or zero?

http://www.ninety-nines.org/india.html

Cheers

karatecatman · Member

Thank you, TKMCE, for the link!

There are a lot more ladies of course. Guess a way out will be by writing to all the airlines in India. But IA "leads the pack".

And ...

A relative was flying from Chennai to Bangalore by Jet (ATR) last week and says a "bright young thing" with spectacles catwalked out of the cockpit. A passenger hissed out and asked her to fetch him his coat. She reacted with a very grim and frozen expression, but complied. Recovered it from the overhead bin and dropped it on his head before walking off. She did have a word with one of the 3 all-male "Amul Baby" cabin crew, who was then despatched to look after passenger needs in the front of the cabin.

While landing the starboard touched first and the plane was certainly not on the centreline. The purser was quite shaken, as he was strapped in and facing the cabin. Later said in a low tone that "She was at the controls". Turns out that "She" is one of the 7 new Jet recruits for co-pilot.

karatecatman · Member

NDTV had an interesting programme today. Aug 13, 2006 9.25 p.m

About India's oldest woman pilot Sarla Thukral (NDTV kept wrongly saying she is the first)

Now she's in her late 80s having migrated from Pakistan and is in Delhi. Spends her time painting and making ethnic jewellery. Also likes to talk to her tenants who occupy her property.

Married into the family that operated Himalyan Airways (that was merged with eight other airline companies to form Indian Airlines) that flew from Delhi to Dehradun and some parts in thw Himalayas. Her father-in-law was the one who asked his son/her husband to enroll in flying school.

Husband was too busy to do so , so it was the f-i-l who got her admitted into a flying school. After just 9 hours of being at the controls, the instructor was suitably impressed and said she could fly solo.

So she did the flight from Pakistan to India in a Tiger Moth.

There were also pictures of her standing next to the plane.

She finally had to leave Pakistan during Partition with her two daughters.

-- Edited by karatecatman at 23:18, 2006-08-13

karatecatman · Member

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2006/20060205/society.htm#1
Flying colours & ground reality
Smriti Kak Ramachandran

(article came on Feb 6, 2006)

India’s oldest woman pilot Sarla Thakral at 91 is still firmly piloting the course of her life. She fondly recalls her flying days and how she landed up with other interests like painting, block printing and jewellery designing.

Sarla Thakral against the backdrop of one her paintings. — Photo by Rajeev Tyagi

IN the year 1936, when even imagination was not permitted to fly free, Sarla Thakral, a 21-year-old married woman with a four-year-old daughter, soared into the sky. In the cockpit of a Gypsy Moth, dressed modestly in her saree, Sarla’s flight into the firmament landed her a place in history. She became the first Indian woman to fly.

Unlike girls her age who found their desires chained, Sarla was given wings to fly, with her husband and her father-in-law also becoming the wind beneath those wings.

"My first husband was a pilot as were some other members of his family. After I got married to him at 16 and was blessed with a daughter, both my husband P D Sharma and his father encouraged me to fly," she recalls.

"My husband was the first Indian to get airmail pilot’s licence and flew between Karachi and Lahore. When I completed my required flying hours, my instructor wanted me to fly solo, but my husband was away. All I did was ask for permission to wait till he returned," she says.

And once she took off, there was no looking back. "I had the support of my family, the boys who trained with me never asked a question, the only person who wanted to know ‘why’ was a clerk at the flying club`85otherwise I have faced no opposition," says the lady, who at 91 does all her work by her self.

"I believe in doing things with my own hands. I don’t waste time, don’t take an afternoon nap and don’t need help to cook and for other chores. Working keeps me busy, helps me fight loneliness," says the woman who was recently honoured for being the oldest yet the fittest person in her neighbourhood.

Pilot Sarla Sharma (later Thakral) got her flying licence in 1936. — Photo by Rajeev Tyagi

Going back to her flying days, she says, "After my first husband died in a crash in 1939, I went to Jodhpur to get a commercial pilot’s licence. Unfortunately World War II broke out and flying was suspended. I returned to Lahore, and joined the Mayo School of Art where I trained in the Bengal school of painting and obtained a diploma in fine arts."

Breathtaking watercolours of women that hang on her walls next to her own pictures are a testimony to her talent. Adroitly crafted costume jewellery that lies nestled in a box handcrafted by the lady herself emerges next and even as you watch in complete awe, she shows you her meticulous calligraphy.

"I write out shlokas from the Vedas and gift it to my friends. In our times there was a lot of stress on good handwriting`85these days children have such poor writing," she rues.

A dedicated follower of the Arya Samaj, she says it was easier for her to remarry because, "we Arya Samajis advocate widow remarriage." She met her second husband P. P. Thakral when she moved to Delhi after the Partition.

"I dabbled in designing costume jewellery, which was not only worn by the who’s who of that time, but also supplied it to Cottage Emporium for 15 years. After that I took to block printing and the sarees designed by me were well sought after. This too continued for 15 years. Then I began designing for the National School of Drama`85and all along I kept painting, " says Sarla, who is known as Mati.

"I like to take things to their conclusion. If I sit to paint or design I have to finish it`85of course, now it is a bit painful for me to sit for longer hours, but I have not given up," she says.

Another thing that she hasn’t given up on yet is her motto. "Ever since I was a girl guide in school, my motto was: always be happy. It is very important for us to be happy and cheerful. After all we humans unlike animals have been blessed with the gift of being able to laugh. This one motto has seen me tide over the crises in my life," she tells you.

karatecatman · Member

More details in this.

http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/jun22006/she91632200662.asp

A STORY OF TWO WOMEN IN DIFFERENT AGES BUT WITH SIMILAR AMBITIONS AND IDENTICAL INSTINCTS!
Soaring in a saree!

Dhanvanti Keshavrao is amazed at the guts of 91-year-old Sarla Thakral, the oldest living woman pilot in India today

Woman aircraft pilots have become so common nowadays that it no longer excites public attention. According to newspaper reports, there are more than one hundred women pilots in India’s Civil Aviation and the Indian Air Force has nearly one hundred woman pilots in its pilot strength of 3,300. In this context, it is nostalgic to look back at the story of the oldest woman pilot in India, Mrs Sarla Thakral.

The times she started flying was quite different, to say the least.

Actually another woman Mrs Urmila Parekh is said to be the first Indian woman to obtain pilot’s licence is 1930. Her photograph was published in the magazine ‘Indian Aviation’ in July 1931 as the first Indian woman to receive the air pilot’s licence. But no details are available of this pioneer. As such, the 91-year-old Mrs Sarla Thakral (born in 1914) is the oldest Indian lady pilot alive today.

Student pilot

It was only by 1929 that the British government allowed Indians to take flying lessons, although there had been Indian pilots for the Royal Air Force as early as 1914. In 1936, there were very few Indian pilots and happily for Ms Sarla, her fiance Mr Sharma was one of the aspiring student-pilot of the Lahore Flying Club. He encouraged his lady love. After marriage, he pointed out that now she belonged to a ‘flying family’ as more than nine of his relatives were aircraft pilots and that she also should take the pilot’s licence.

“In fact it wasn’t so much my husband. My father-in-law was even more enthusiastic and got me enrolled in the flying club,” says Sarla and adds, “I knew I was breaching a strictly male bastion. But I must say the my co-students, never made me feel out of place.” Sarla took her flying lessons dressed in a saree! In her words “My instructor, Timmy Dastur, told me to be gentle and patient, and to handle the machine as you would your spouse. I took his advice seriously.”

Criticism

However, there was some cutting criticism from outsiders. The one Sarla remembers most vividly had to do with her dress.

“I used to hand over my dupatta to my instructor before I sat in the cockpit. One day, one of my senior relatives told my husband to scold me and tell me not to be such a be-sharam and that I should not take off my dupatta while flying,” she says with a laugh. The training fees was very high for those days in terms of the purchasing power of the rupee. Sarla paid Rs 30 per hour of training and in today's money value, it is equivalent to Rs 3,600.

After obtaining the initial licence, she preserved on and completed one thousand hours of flying on the aircraft owned by Lahore Flying Club.

Then she decided to become a commercial pilot and moved to Jodhpur. But it was the days of World War II and civil training was suspended. Still would have managed to complete her ambition, but tragedy intervened in the death of her husband and her pilot brother-in-law both in aircraft accidents. Now in her early twenties, with two daughters aged one and six, Sarla found herself a widow.

This put an end to Sarla’s aviation plans. In any case, World War II was in full swing. She decided to concentrate on Arts, her second love and joined the Mayo School of Arts in Lahore, where she completed a four-year course in the Fine Arts.

Love for flying

Still, her love for flying persisted and when the opportunity came up, she took up a job in Rajasthan as a personal pilot to the royalty of Alwar. That lasted six months.

She remarried in 1948 to Mr P P Thakral and he encouraged her plans to set up an enterprise for jewellery designs/ block sanghaneri prints for sarees. Today, despite being 91, Mrs Sarla Thakral is a very active businesswoman living alone in her bungalow near Delhi. “I never looked back and I worked hard in whatever I did.”

karatecatman · Member

http://www.blonnet.com/life/2005/03/04/stories/2005030400050300.htm

Flying high

March 4, 2005

Neeta Lal

When Captain Indraani Singh is not flying, she helps children of daily wage earners become productive and responsible citizens.

Chhotu Mian, just over eight years, is the star attraction on stage as he expertly mouths his dialogues from Alibaba and the Forty Thieves. He is playing Alibaba's `wife' and his face is all made up; it hardly matters that his dupatta keeps straying and his bindi is a tad askew.

His comrades — a bunch of 50-odd children — applaud his performance thunderously, especially when Chhotu yells at his cowering `husband'. At the end of the performance, a woman in a pilot's uniform strides up to the stage and congratulates Chhotu.

For many underprivileged children like Chhotu, `didi' or Captain Indraani Singh, 42, has brought sunshine into their otherwise drab lives by setting up Literacy India, a Gurgaon-based NGO.

Started in 1996, the NGO began with five children. It currently benefits 800 children — 200 girls and 600 boys — whose parents are daily wage earners from the surrounding seven villages of Palam Vihar.

Apart from providing children with education, clothes and nutritious mid-day meals, the NGO also imparts vocational training and involves children in creative activities such as drama and theatre.

Some of the older children have even found employment with corporates, export houses and hotels, and earn between Rs 2,000 and Rs 3,000 a month.

Indraani, who holds a record for being Asia's first woman pilot to fly an Airbus 300 and is one of Indian Airlines' senior-most woman commanders, put her personal funds into the project to get it going initially.

She even made paintings and sold them to art galleries to channel money into the organisation.

Then there was the task of convincing parents, for whom it was a toss-up between sending their children to school or letting them earn a daily wage. Indraani and her volunteers convinced them that a short-term income would have to be sacrificed for a better future for their children. "It certainly wasn't a cakewalk," she recalls, "but I was determined to make a go of it."

Determination has been her hallmark from the time she dreamt of flying as a child. Unfortunately, opportunities for aspiring women pilots during the 1980s were zilch. "There were no financial resources or scholarships to see us through."

But since she was a first-rate NCC cadet in college and the winner of the `best glider pilot' competition at Delhi's Palam Airport, she was able to bag a trainee pilot's position at Indian Airlines (IA) after her graduation.

There was no grounding the plucky pilot thereafter. She went on to clock a record 7,500 flying hours by extensively flying Boeing 737s and 747s before switching to Airbus 300s and 320s in the mid-1990s.

In fact, when she went to Toulouse, France, for her Airbus training programme in 1995, the European pilots were shocked that an Asian woman could clock so many flying hours in such a short span of time.

But despite stellar professional achievements, 15 years of non-stop flying at IA and a fulfilling personal life (she is married to an IA pilot and has a 13-year-old son), Indraani felt a desperate need to give something back to society.

"I thought bringing smiles on the faces of underprivileged children was a step in the right direction," she says. And thus was born Literacy India. Today, the NGO takes up practically all of her non-flying hours.

And though she gets substantial help from her airline, colleagues and her staff of 34, including 14 full-time teachers, she is indubitably the captain.

Apart from garnering funds, fleshing out projects, steering the NGO's future course of action, she also gets celebrities to inspire kids. Recently, Bollywood director Vishal Bharadwaj (of Maqbool fame) was so impressed with some of the kids' histrionic abilities that he signed five of them on for his next commercial Hindi venture, Neeli Chhatri (an adaptation of Ruskin Bond's famous story The Blue Umbrella).

Last year, the NGO's 35 kids put up a splendid show before President Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam at the Rashtrapati Bhawan. Some have even performed at Delhi's Sri Ram Centre and National School of Drama, and a string of venues in Kolkata. Every Child Rights Day (November 20), the NGO organises a special treat for its children.

While last year it was a 55-minute joy ride for 129 kids in an A-320 flight from Delhi to Jaipur, this year the NGO put up a fund-raising charity cricket match — Media Vs Corporates — in Delhi.

The efforts met with tremendous response and blue-chip companies like Electrolux and Coca-Cola pitched in with monetary help. Clearly, with Indraani Singh in the pilot's seat, Literacy India and its children are flying high.

Women's Feature Service

karatecatman · Member

http://www.hindu.com/mp/2006/03/18/stories/2006031800070100.htm

Sky isn't the limit for her

Captain Saudamini Deshmukh, Deputy General Manager, Indian, has many firsts to her credit

FLYING HIGH Captain Saudamini Deshmukh PHOTO: K.V. SRINIVASAN

On board an aircraft, how often have you paid attention to the voice of the captain announcing details about the flight? Well, next time, maybe you should. For it could be a woman in the cockpit. And that could well be Captain Saudamini Deshmukh, Deputy General Manager, Indian (formerly Indian Airlines).

Capt. Deshmukh has many firsts to her credit. She was the first woman in 1985 to become a check-pilot on a Fokker-27. Then, she went on to captain an all-woman crew on a Boeing 737 from Calcutta to Silchar in 1989. Then, in 1994, she became Captain on Airbus-A-320, and in 1995, in another first, she captained the airbus with an all-woman crew. And to top it all, she's the first woman to occupy the chair of deputy general manager (Operations). So what made the Science and General Law graduate, who had a comfortable bank job, take to the skies? "My childhood dream. I always wanted to be among the clouds," said the Captain during a snappy interview. She was in Chennai to participate in the Madras Management Association's Golden Jubilee Women Managers' Convention, recently.

She continued, "Since my father could not afford it at that point, I temporarily gave up my dream. And took up a bank job. When I could afford it, I started taking flying lessons at a private club. After paying Rs. 25 per hour and completing 250 hours of mandatory flying, I got my commercial pilot's licence. And my dream came true."

Capt. Deshmukh landed a job with Indian Airlines in 1980 as a commercial pilot. Did she face any kind of discrimination, you wonder. Pat comes an emphatic reply, "Never. I was never treated differently because I was a woman. I think it's in the minds of people... this discrimination thing."

That she also trained with pilots from the Ninety-Nines Inc., an international organisation of women pilots in the U.S., was an added advantage. "I had a great time during that period. I got to live with these women and train under them. It was a liberating experience. It taught me much more than just the nitty-gritty of controlling an aircraft," she reminisces. The organisation conferred the `Achievement Award' on Capt. Deshmukh.

As for the various records that she has set, she says, "Well, the first all-woman flight on the Fokker was sheer coincidence. My co-pilot was Nivedita Bhasin, the youngest pilot in civil aviation. But the Boeing flight was planned to the last detail. It was indeed an exhilarating experience."

Explaining the difference between the two aircraft, she says, "A Fokker is a small two-engine turbo, while a Jet is a high-powered aircraft. To fly a Boeing, I took a six-week course that included ground classes, simulator and actual flying. Here, I'd like to add that once you are behind the controls, size does not matter."

So, what matters, you want to know. She replies, "An alert and scientific mind, the power of analysis and judgment, and above all, passion for the job."

With the Indian skies opening up to private airlines, the Government outfit faced stiff competition. What are Capt. Deshmukh's views on the issue? "I think it's a good move. Our service has improved a lot. Competition has made a difference in the way we operate. In fact, plans are afoot to introduce flights to the U.S. and the U.K." Today, the organisation has more than 12 women piloting aircraft across various sectors.

As for aspiring women pilots, she says the options are many. There are several private flying clubs, which operate across the country. Then, there is the Indira Gandhi Udan Academy, where one can undergo formal training.

What's that one overpowering emotion that Capt. Deshmukh experiences when she enters the cockpit and takes control of the aircraft? "Joy. Absolute Joy."

the_380 · Member

IC even operated an all-women crew in an Airbus A320 between Bombay and Delhi back in the 1985s