Some carriers also assign a driver and guard to drop and pick up women flying late at night, Hana Khan, a commercial pilot with an Indian airline, said.
“It’s no secret we have the support of parents and it’s a norm to hire staff,” said Zoya Agarwal, who got international media attention when she flew Air India’s first nonstop flight from San Fransisco to Bengaluru with an all-women crew last year. “Women like me can fly to San Fransisco for five days and not think about what’s happening at home. You have that comfort.”
The absolute numbers of women pilots still tend to be higher in developed countries than in India because airline markets in places like the US are much larger, with a bigger total staff of both men and women.
Still, hiring more women can ease a persistent deficit of pilots and airport workers that is forcing airlines to reduce and cancel flights, threatening to snarl the aggressive revival in traffic. Boeing Co. estimates that the world will need more than 600,000 new pilots in the next two decades.
Some believe the benefits might extend even further, and may already be contributing to India’s airline safety rankings, which exceed some developed nations.
The US had almost five times as many fatal air accidents as India since 1945, while the UK has had 15 more deadly incidents, according to Aviation Safety Network.
Some of the differences in statistics could simply be the outcome of the US being a larger aviation market than India as more flights increase the probability of accidents. Even so, many pilots believe that having a large percentage of women is at the very least helpful to safety.
A study called Gender Differences In General Aviation Crashes, which assessed airplane and helicopter crash data between 1983 and 1997, found that crash rates for male pilots exceeded that of women. Women operate aircraft “more safely” accounting for only 3% of accidents even as they constituted 10% of all US army helicopter pilots, according to Women in Combat Arms: A Study of the Global War on Terror, which compared the accident rates of men and female pilots from 2002 to 2013.
Bolstering diversity has the potential to make air travel safer because women often take a more measured approach to risk and are therefore involved in fewer accidents than men, said Halleran, the professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
Kunjal Bhatt, chief flight instructor at Indian flight school Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Uran Akademi, said she found women trainees particularly “meticulous” and showing greater dedication to succeed because the stakes are higher for those who go against the social norms to pursue this profession.
Indian women who’ve succeeded in the airline industry are educating girls about aviation. Harpreet A De Singh, who became the first woman to head an Indian airline when she took charge of Alliance Air Aviation Ltd. in 2020, conducts outreach programs in schools to raise awareness about jobs including pilots, technicians and air traffic controllers.
“Over a period of time this consistent effort all over the country has led to large number of women choosing a profession some didn’t even know it existed,” Singh said.
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