2018 Delta Air Lines Girls in Aviation Day flight
September 26, 2020 marks the 6th annual Girls in Aviation Day, a day to promote and encourage girls to consider careers in the aviation industry. The Delta Flight Museum has been a site of this vital program in previous years, but this year the program will go virtual and give access to girls around the world.
In honor of the day, we are featuring a few women from our exhibition Half the Sky: Stories About Women in Aviation:
Patricia “Mother” Malone
Every white hair on my
head is a stripe on some pilot’s sleeve somewhere in the world – Patricia
“Mother” Malone
Born on the Fourth of July in 1924, few Delta employees are
as celebrated as Patricia Malone. She began her aviation career training squadron
pilots in 1944 as part of the U.S. Navy Waves (Women Accepted for Volunteer
Emergency Service). After the war, Malone worked training pilots for various
commercial airlines, eventually accepting a position in 1960 at Northeast
Airlines. In 1972, Northeast merged with Delta and Malone became an Operations
Specification Instructor in the Pilot Ground Training Department.
She was a mother of four, but her nickname “mother” came
from pilots who credited her with saving their careers as she developed manuals
and procedures in plain English that allowed them to understand FAA regulations
and proper operating procedure.
In 2009, a year after her death, Malone was posthumously
inducted into the Women in Aviation International Pioneer Hall of Fame and in
2010 she was also included in the Georgia Aviation Hall of Fame.
Captain Joy Walker
I was a novelty. People would point and stare. It took some time to be accepted as a female pilot, from both colleagues and passengers. Back then, even the flight attendants were not on my side. I remember one time after I made a bad landing, I heard a female passenger say, “With that landing, we should have known it was a female pilot.” – Captain Joy Walker
In February 1973, when Frontier Airlines hired pilot Emily
Howell Warner, it had been almost 40 years since a woman had been hired as a
pilot for a U.S. airline. By 1978 there were about 300 female commercial pilots
in the United States. Later in 1973, Delta Air Lines hired Joy Walker as the
airline’s first female pilot. Walker started as a flight engineer on the DC-8.
Walker grew up in a small town near Hattiesburg,
Mississippi. Her dad was a professional baseball player and encouraged Walker
to participate in athletics. A college professor encouraged Walker to try flying
and she took part time jobs in order to pay for flying lessons. She eventually
became a FAA examiner in Africa, before applying for a pilot position with
Delta.
Delta promoted Walker to captain on October 17, 1988, and she
continued to fly for the airline until she retired in 2002. Walker remains
committed to encouraged women to pursue careers in aviation through her
participation in the Girls in Aviation program.
