Young Pilots

I was online today checking out aviation jackets for women, like the cool leather bomber jackets. They’re exceedingly difficult to find for women, and not exceedingly difficult to find for men. Which I guess makes sense in some twisted way. I read today that approximately only 6% of pilots are women; so why bother marketing to such a small market?  I don’t know if that number is the absolute truth, it was surprisingly difficult to find in the first place, but I suspect it’s fairly close. My flight instructor in Michigan had gotten 145 people their licenses, only 18 of which were women, including me.

I’ve been lucky in the last 6 years to meet quite a few female pilots, but yes, many more male pilots. It never bothered me. I’m not one of those women who do things to show up men. I don’t climb trees because the boys down the street did it, I do it because I always enjoyed climbing up trees. I’m unabashedly feminine. Aside from a serious lack of makeup, I keep up a steady diet of chick flicks and teen dramas. So it always surprised me whenever I met a female pilot who seemed like she had something to prove and would congratulate me on being one of the few “just like her” that managed to break into a male-dominated sport. They always make it seem like the men are keeping us out or something, standing at the door with their rifles yelling “We Don’t Want Your Kind Here!” and throwing fruit with all of Society to back them up, clawing at the windows with pitchforks. This is hardly the case, as you might imagine.

Sure, our parents don’t tend to raise us with the idea of us growing up to be pilots, but most people’s parents don’t raise them with that idea in mind- male or female.  Private Pilots are few and far between, as far as I can tell, we’re lucky to even have people flying us commercially. So of course I always feel a certain kind of kinship with the female pilots who come through the airports I’m at. But I feel that with any pilot. Almost every pilot I’ve met has been friendly, welcoming, and just excited that there’s somebody else who shares their enthusiasm for such an odd hobby. Nobody has once questioned my sex, age or inexperience.

All this didn’t actually have a point, other than as a social commentary that might make you think, but what it lead to while I was researching, was a realization that I couldn’t find a single site devoted to young pilots. I didn’t exactly score the internet, but I did quite a few searches and came up with one MySpace page that had 30 people and a poor amount of conversation concerning the topic.  There’s this group called Young Eagles that tries to get children and teens interested in flying. A lot of times they’ll do free flights, etc. but I couldn’t find anything specifically for like students/pilots under the age of 30. I was thinking that somewhere out there, there might be like one site devoted to the 16 to 29 year olds of the world who have too much money on their hands or a dream in their heart or whatever, but there was nothin’.

Does anybody here know of something I’m missing? I typed in things like young pilots, young adult pilots, teen pilots, young private pilots, etc. into Google and came up with some news articles and apparel for children.

The thought then came to me that if there isn’t anything, maybe I should figure out how to do something. But I don’t know a lot of young pilots, because in reality the number is probably smaller than that 6% of female pilots out there. How do you generate interest in something so specific? Any ideas? I just feel like there should be a site out there where younger students can go and read articles, look at pictures, share stories, complain about balancing school and flying, talk about their dreams whether they’re planning to fly for UPS or just for fun, and maybe make some connections with people in their area or future $100 hamburger trips. I just wish I knew how to start something like that and actually get enough people involved that it would really help somebody if they came across it.