THE JOB FOR ME
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WOMEN IN CANADIAN MILITARY AVIATION By Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail
Whiplash is how they described it. In 1980, when captains Nora Bottomley, Deanna (Dee) Brasseur and Leah Mosher walked anywhere in their Canadian air force blue flight suits, heads snapped around. The three women were the first in the country to receive their wings for active duty, and they knew they were under the microscope from their fellow pilots, superiors, the media and Canadian society. As Major Brasseur said later of that time, “If one of us burped, Ottawa knew.”
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They were part of a five-year trial program called SWINTER (Service Women in Non-Traditional Roles) launched in 1979 to gather information and assess the effectiveness of mixed gender operational units. The trial, Brasseur noted wryly, “was not whether women could fly but whether the men could accept us.” The air force—and the rest of society— should have had no doubt that women could equal their male counterparts as aircrew, ground support and “total war” aviation workers. After all, they had been licensed as civil pilots in Canada since 1928 and worked as nurses on the front lines since the days of the Northwest Rebellion in 1885. But little had changed since Alan Sullivan published Aviation in Canada, 1917-1918, just after the Great War. The perceived challenges were an exact echo from then: women would be too expensive to uniform and accommodate, too much trouble to integrate. History had proven, however, that when given the opportunity, women were exactly as good and as bad as men.
MARCH/APRIL 2017 > legionmagazine.com
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2017-01-27 2:33 PM
