The Truth About Life as a Female Pilot | For a Living

I think one of the biggest factors that's contributed to having so few women in aviation comes down to showing people what's possible. When I show up at work, I don't feel like my job is any different because I'm a woman. And in reality, we're all there with the same qualifications, the same certificates to safely bring our passengers to their destination. My name is Danielle Voss and I'm a commercial airline pilot for a living. So on a typical workday, I tend to show up at the airport later in the afternoon or the evening and fly to Europe overnight. Certainly one of the challenges of being an airline pilot is that when you're at work, you are away from home. Generally, what I like to do is spend three days on the road, followed by a couple days at home between each trip. I felt fortunate that my husband's also an airline pilot, so he did understand the schedule and he's away from home just as much as I am. Oftentimes, people think that family planning might inhibit females from becoming airline pilots. My argument against that is that men have families and they've been pilots, so why can't women? So this is the Airbus A320 and A321 series. This is the plane that I fly. I fly this airplane out to the West Coast, down to the Caribbean, as well as from Boston over to Europe. So in my flying career, I've accumulated over 6,500 hours. Over 3,500 of those hours have been here at the Airbus and the A320. As far as the career path goes, at the majority of major airlines, you do become a first officer and then work your way up to the captain's seat. When I did start in this industry, the pay scale was different than it is today. Starting out, I only made about close to $30,000 a year, whereas today I'm in a much better situation. Here at JetBlue, pilots do make six-figure salaries. Starting out, you will be in the $100,000 range, and long-term as a tenured captain, you can be looking to make upwards of $350,000 a year. All right, into the cockpit. There's a lot of circuit breakers up here. We have fire, hydraulic, fuel, electric, air conditioning. We have our APU controls, as well as the lights. This is the seat where the first officer sits. This is where the captain sits. On these boxes below, this is where we program the flight plan. Also, where we control our radio communications and frequencies, so we can communicate with air traffic control. As you can see, it can get pretty bright up here, so it's important to always have sunglasses, wear sunscreen, but we also have a sun visor to help us on those sunny days. The first time I was ever on a flight, the first initial takeoff, I instantly fell in love with the aircraft, the power, the look out the window, the fact that everything was getting smaller. I can't remember a time when I was younger and traveling that I saw a female pilot, but it was still something I knew that I always wanted to do. One of the biggest frustrations is that sometimes, even at the airport, even in full uniform, people will see me or meet me, and there's the assumption that I can't possibly be the pilot. There was one time actually just last week here in the terminal where I went to go get some food, and one of the other workers in the airport saw me and asked if I was a flight attendant or a gate agent, and when I replied that I was a pilot for the airline, his eyes popped out of his head. He said, I've never actually met a female pilot before, but it really made me realize what an impact I can make just day to day being in the airport. Only about 6% of U.S. commercial airline pilots are women. I think the more women pilots are out there, the more exposure we have. The more young girls will see us, and the more they know what's possible. It doesn't happen frequently, but there have been times I've actually been paired up in an all-female crew. We tend to call this an unmanned flight. There is a lot of pilot terminology or pilot lingo that we use in aviation. In addition to the phonetic alphabet, we'll use words like affirmative or negative, meaning yes or no, as well as, um, you want me to do that again? The feeling of flying is hard to describe in words, but for me, it's the feeling where you know you're in exactly the right place at exactly the right time doing what you're supposed to be doing. Thank you, Refinery29, for joining me on today's flight. I hope you feel inspired to join me in the skies. Before I take you to the cockpit, quick fun fact that pilots don't actually have a bathroom up there. We use the same bathroom here as the customers do.