Women who flew against the wind

What makes the Indian Women’s Pilot Association (IWPA) unique is that it brings together women achievers from the field of aviation. It has over 150 members, among whom, many are achievers and first-timers. They have faced odds, met innumerable challenges head-on, and broken the glass ceiling in different sectors of the aviation space. While IWPA calls itself the women’s pilot association, its membership is open to air-traffic controllers, flight dispatchers, engineers, airport managers, sky divers, educators, students and any one interested in aviation.

How they achieved it

Take Air Marshal Bandopadhyay, the first woman Air Marshal in the Indian Air Force. Her fight started in school when she wanted to try her hand at sports. She approached her sports teacher and asked for permission to play. “What? You are a girl and you want to play…. Go play langdi tang ,” she was told. This first attempt at “trying to put her in her place” continued even as she grew up in Delhi in the early 1960s.

Bandopadhyay’s efforts at joining the Indian Air Force as a pilot, too, met with failure. However, she did not let these failures deter her, and she finally joined the IAF’s medical branch, where she served for three-and-a-half decades, before retiring in 2005.

Then there is Fo Sele Roveinai Paotel, the first woman pilot from a tribal community in Manipur, who achieved her dream of becoming a pilot. She, however, is facing another dilemma – how to fulfil the promise she made to the village elders.

“After becoming a pilot, the village elders came with chicken in the form of gifts and blessings. I got a lot of chicken, which showed that they were extremely happy and proud of my achievement. They were not very sure about my job but they told me [to] take them on a flight one day without any other passengers. I do not how I am going to do that but I promised them,” she says.

There are others, too, who left their jobs to join the Indian Air Force – their dream is not just to become pilots – the very thought of releasing bombs to hit the target excites them.

Then there is Harpreet AD Singh, the first woman pilot in Air India, who after being grounded on medical grounds, worked her way to becoming the executive director and the first-ever woman chief of flight safety for the airline. “The newspapers were full of news about me being the first woman pilot, but then I was dropped down rock bottom…. You have taken loans you wonder what went wrong though you made it professionally,” said Singh. Not one to give up, Singh went to the US to get her flying licences. “I used to teach…. It never bothered me because I knew I had to repay the loan…. I am a fighter and I knew God was with me.”

It is this attitude that makes these women special. Concluded another: “When everything is against you, remember that an aircraft takes off against the wind, not with it.”

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