WOMEN AS AVIATORS

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 309, 18 September 1918, Page 3

WOMEN AS AVIATORS

Doubtless a number of ardent young women who are out for adventure at any price have by now seen themselves in imagination attired in the coquettish kit of the Royal Air Force gallantly dropping bombs on Berlin, or possibly even landing with a mass of others," and abducting the Kaiser from German Headquarters from under the very nose of a staff petrified by mingled astonishment and admiration (writes Mr. C. G. Grey in the "Daily , Express," commenting on a Parliamentary utterance vqgardini; women as aviators). '•As a matter of fact, flying is not a woman's job. Admittedly, there have been women who could fly quite welj, but in ten years' intimate and constant connection with aviation! can only remember three women who could by any stretch of tho imagination be .called good pilots, and they were altogether exceptional in every way. The rest were like the average woman cardriver. They had excellent eyes and excellent hand's, but they always lost their heads in a sudden emergency. To put it more or less metaphorically, they always let go the wheel and grabbed for their hats whenever a gust hit them. No doubt by a process of very careful elimination it would bo possible to discover several hundreds of women in the British Isles who would mako very excellent pilots, but those hundreds would be the exceptions to tlic rest, just as the three already mentioned were the exceptions to several dozen, and the question arises whether the finding of those few hundred capable women would justify the cost of weeding them out from the thousands of enthusiastic young women who would apply for the job.' This cost would not bo merely a matter of money, because money does not count in war-time, especially when it is somebody else s money. The. cost would be the waste of precious time and material, in the machines smashed hy incompetent learners, and in the lives of the prospective mothers of the next generation. In peace-time it might be all very well for a well-to-do woman to keep a nice, quiet, comfortable aeroplane for her own private flying, or it might be very nice for the pilot of a fast two-seater fitted with dual controls to hand over the control to his best girl when taking, her for a cross-country trip, and at a safe altitude; but there certainly does riot seem tho slightest reason, still less any necessity, for women pilots in war-time.