I was the first woman to be hired as a pilot by a major US airline in 1973. When I first started, they called me 'the little girl' and a uniform for women didn't even exist.

Bonnie Tiburzi was hired as a pilot by American Airlines in 1973, becoming the first woman in the US to fly as a pilot for a major commercial airline.

Courtesy of American Airlines

• When American Airlines hired her in 1973, Bonnie Tiburzi was the only woman among 214 new hires. 
• At the time, she was 24 years old and two years younger than most of the new hires.
• She says the hardest part of being the first was a fear of failing and harming female emancipation.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Bonnie Tiburzi, the first woman to fly with American Airlines as a pilot in 1973. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Becoming a pilot, for me, was a dream that turned into reality, rather than a conscious decision. I was proud of my dad, who was a pilot with Scandinavian Airlines — my mother was Swedish — and then with Trans World Airlines.

I saw him flying, coming home with his uniform, having many friends who were pilots, and how they would all get together and chat and have a jolly old time. I liked the camaraderie of it all, and I wanted to be part of that.

I was born and raised in Ridgefield, Connecticut, until I was 16 years old. After high school, I did a number of things. My first adventure took me to France to learn French - there I had a job as an au-pair. Then, on my way back to the United States I stopped in Rome and began doing commercials for Pepsi along with about 30 other people my age. After a few years, I decided to come home, and began taking flying lessons again and go to college. I only lasted a semester before realizing flying was what I wanted to focus on completely.

A Boeing 727 jet in American Airlines livery similar to the one Tiburzi would have operated.

Getty/Bettmann

Before being hired by American Airlines in 1973, I was a flight instructor and charter pilot, and most of my students were men, so I was used to being around men and flying with them.

But when I started training for American, the men weren't used to women. The first day I arrived at the flight academy in Dallas, the only woman among 214 new hires, there were so many questions. The guys were curious about everything. Not only was I a woman, but I was a general aviation pilot, not a military pilot like many of them, because the military didn't take women as pilots back then.

I remember I went into the cafeteria when there was a break and found a table all by myself and got an egg salad sandwich of all silly things. I sat at the table and all of a sudden a bunch of guys came over and sat down and started asking questions.

They wanted to know how I had gotten there, where I had learned to fly, and what planes I had flown. I remember I started to talk and I took a bite out of my egg salad sandwich and it just came out the back and just dripped down my hands and my arms and everything. I thought that nobody was going to think I was a lady. 

Look like a female pilot 

When Tiburzi first started working for American Airlines, there was no uniform for female pilots.

Courtesy of American Airlines

That same day Captain Ted Melden, who was the vice president of flight, called me up to his office.

"Oh my gosh, I've already done something wrong and they're not going to keep me here," I remember thinking to myself. But what he wanted me to do was figure out a uniform for myself.

"We want you to look like a pilot, but we want you to look like a female pilot," he said. It was wonderful because he assigned me another gentleman to help me go to all the different tailors and malls. 

We picked a white shirt with an ascot at an equestrian shop, a navy blue wool coat from another clothing store, and then we designed the uniform with Hart Schaffner Marx. My uniform and my blouse didn't have any pockets at first, because they thought all my pens would stick out in a funny way. So I brought a little purse with a screwdriver, and pens, and the things I was required to carry around in it. Finally, I complained enough that I couldn't carry a purse around the airplane while I was doing my preflight checks that I got lots of pockets — in my pants, in my jacket, in my blouse, everywhere. 

Getting used to having a woman around 

Tiburzi first flight as an American Airlines' employee was on a Boeing 727 from LaGuardia Airport to Albany, New York, then to Chicago's O'Hare Airport and back to LaGuardia.

Bettmann / Contributor/Getty Images

I started out with American as a flight engineer. [Editor's note: A flight engineer is a now mostly defunct position in commercial aviation that was tasked with monitoring and maintaining an aircraft's systems, which is now mostly automated.] My first flight with them was on the Boeing 727. I believe we flew out of LaGuardia Airport to Albany, New York, then to Chicago's O'Hare Airport and back to LaGuardia.

One of the first times I was working, we had a rapid decompression problem and had to put our masks on. And the captain looked at the co-pilot and told him to turn around and help me, even though I don't think he had ever even worked as a flight engineer at all. The poor co-pilot turned around, and I was not happy with that.

I just said, "Would you turn around and do your job?" And that poor co-pilot turned back around so fast. I kept working on my panel and I got things back to normal. When we landed, the captain apologized for not trusting me. They were nervous. They had a girl as a flight engineer, they'd never flown with me before, they didn't know if I could do it. It was a matter of getting used to having a woman around. 

Once they did, the camaraderie as we were studying to pass the academy was great. We studied together, we jogged together, we had a great respectful time. I was the only girl, so they would always call me "the girl" or "the little girl," even if I was 24 at the time, and I considered myself a woman, or a lady.

And people might make a little pass at me here and there, but it's all exactly the same as it would have happened anywhere else. I was two years younger than the rest of my class, and they treated me like a friend or a sister. It never dawned on me that I would be nervous about somebody being offensive, maybe because I was a little bit of a tomboy anyway. 

The responsibility of being first 

Tiburzi worked for American Airlines for 26 years. Her last flight before retirement was on August 31, 1998, on her 50th birthday.

Emma McIntyre / Staff/ Wireimage/ Getty Images

What bothered me the most was that I got a lot of publicity when I first started training with American Airlines, and I was so nervous that if I flunked the academy, after working so hard to get everything right, across the nation Americans would think that women didn't belong as pilots, and that being a pilot is not a woman's job.

It was the early 1970s, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg couldn't get a job at a law firm, and she then ended up at the Supreme Court. It was the idea of what it would have done to women's liberation if I didn't pass that was difficult for me. Other than that I never thought of being first, it just happened that I was the first woman to be hired as pilot by a major airline. 

One of the things worth considering about working for a major airline is that you have to join a union, and the union can't discriminate about pay. They can't say that a woman is going to get paid less than the guys or anything like that. So I didn't have to worry about it at all. You fly co-pilot when it's your turn, you fly captain when it's your turn, and it all happens because of the union. 

When I was hired, I thought about all the gals that came before me, starting in 1911 with Harriet Quimby, the first woman to ever receive a pilot certificate in the US. Now, there are women in every aspect of aviation, and it's heartwarming that they're there, and I don't think we've had any complaints. 

After 26 years with American Airlines, I retired in 1999. My last flight was on August 31, 1998, on my 50th birthday. 

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