Then the university called off its partnership with the flight school, making it difficult for Ms. Unable to ignore her dream of becoming a pilot, she transferred to Texas Southern University in 2015, where she continued a grueling work schedule for about a year before deciding to cut back to focus fully on school. Percy would arrive at the airport early to watch the gates change over and the planes and crews come and go. There, she continued working to pay for her studies as a prospective psychology major at Long Island University.īut on trips home to San Francisco, Ms. She put her piloting dream on hold and, after graduating in 2011, she worked several jobs to save up to move to New York City, which she did two years later. Percy, that cost seemed prohibitive when she started to research flight training in earnest while in high school. That’s what it takes, in most cases, to gather the experience necessary to qualify to become a commercial airline pilot.įor Ms. “All of these different comments that suggest ‘this is our club, you can’t really be a part of it.’” No role models, no pilots “We would get very rude comments like, ‘Oh, wow, you guys are really flying down there?’ or, ‘Oh, you want to be a pilot? Why?’” she said. Percy and her peers feel like outsiders, she said. Some of the white students and instructors there found ways of making Ms. The school’s pilot program was new and the university didn’t own any planes, so she and other students would visit a nearby flight school to buy study materials, take written federal exams and receive training. Percy arrived at Texas Southern University, a historically Black institution, the industry’s exclusionary past didn’t feel so far away. Green got his job, recalled having to bite his tongue as a white co-pilot unleashed a “nasty” tirade days after the assassination of the Rev. David Harris, a trailblazing Black pilot hired by American Airlines at about the same time that Mr. Warner once recalled a co-pilot refusing to shake her hand and instructing her not to touch anything in the flight deck. A decade later, Frontier Airlines hired Emily Howell Warner, making her the first woman hired permanently to command the cockpit for a major American passenger airline. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned such discrimination outright, but insidious forms of prejudice have long remained. Marlon Green, a former Air Force pilot, became the first after winning a discrimination case before the Supreme Court in 1963, forcing Continental Air Lines to make him an offer. There were few Black pilots at the time, in part because airlines had only recently started hiring them. “This simultaneously plays into this often subconscious association between whiteness and maleness and technical competence.” “It just continues to reinforce this image,” Dr. I think it will always be exciting.” ‘This is our club’Īs air travel became more popular in the 1970s and 1980s, airline advertisements almost exclusively depicted pilots as white men, with some exceptions in publications directed at Black consumers, said Alan Meyer, a history professor at Auburn University who is working on a book on the slow pace of racial integration in airline flight decks. “Honestly, I don’t think it’ll ever change. “Even though I fly every day, several times a day, the adrenaline’s still going every time I take off, every time I land,” she said. The goal is to staff up to meet the industry’s aspirations. Other carriers have launched similar initiatives, too. United recently launched a flight school with the aim of hiring thousands of pilots in the years ahead, at least half of them women or people of color. “Most airlines are simply not going to be able to realize their capacity plans because there simply aren’t enough pilots, at least not for the next five-plus years.”Īirlines have started to do more to diversify. “The pilot shortage for the industry is real,” Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines, told analysts and reporters on Thursday. Pilots are in short supply, and if airlines want to make the most of the thriving recovery from the pandemic, they will have to learn to foster lasting change. Now there’s urgency for the industry to act. The cost of training and the toll of discrimination can be discouraging, too. Few women and people of color aspire to fly planes because they rarely see themselves in today’s flight decks. Percy, piloting has long been or seemed out of reach.
Time pilot license#
Percy, who is Black and a first-generation college graduate, expects to have her airline pilot’s license within a year, bringing her a step closer to that goal.įor many like Ms.