Like many of the great leaps forward in aviation history, the contribution of women to aviation manufacture and maintenance was prompted by war.
The fabric-covered construction of the earliest aircraft meant a few women with expertise in this material were involved in construction, maintenance and repair from the beginning of aviation. The numbers of women involved in the aircraft industry expanded dramatically in World War I but the overwhelming majority of these women left their jobs in the aircraft industry with the coming of peace. Some of their daughters rejoined the industry in World War II. In the United States, 65% of the workforce in the wartime aircraft industry were women.
Although aircraft manufacturing on a production line is a different and less involved task than aircraft maintenance and repair, female workers gained a reputation for diligence and accuracy. They were more patient and attentive and excelled at measuring and checking small objects at a constant pace. In an essay published in 2000, historian Chitose Sato records how in one tricky precision manufacturing task, no man could drill more than 650 holes a day, but a woman exceeded this record on her first day and soon lifted it to 1,000 holes or more a day.
Female workers established a reputation for better industrial safety. Sato writes of how a manager of a factory noted that when a machine broke down, men generally tried to fix it by themselves, but most women would leave it and call their supervisors. This behaviour, and the introduction of benches, supports and hoists for female workers to use instead of raw muscle power, contributed to a reduction in industrial accidents.
Women also flew, plotted, controlled and repaired wartime aircraft as part of the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and the Air Transport Auxiliary, the US WAC and WASPs and the US Navy WAVES. In Australia, members of the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force served in more than 70 roles, including electricians, flight mechanics, drivers, meteorological assistants, radar operators and technicians. At its peak in October 1944, it consisted of 18,664 women or 12% of RAAF personnel.
During the World Wars, women proved they had a place in aircraft construction and repair.
‘We now know that the fact that many women were neither interested in nor good at things mechanical was largely due to a social environment which gave women less opportunity to learn about machines since their childhood,’ Chitose writes. But once again, most of this participation faded with the end of war.
Over the past 60 years, women’s participation in other formerly male dominated areas has multiplied dramatically but stagnated, relatively, in aviation. A 2015 Embry Riddle Aviation University study reported fewer than 1% of women in the aviation workforce worked in the pilot or aircraft mechanic aviation fields in 1960 (the majority were cabin crew or administrative). By 2010, the numbers had increased to 4.3% of pilots and 2.17% of engineers. For lawyers and doctors over the same period, women’s percentage of the professions went from 4% to 38.3% of American lawyers and from 6% to 31.8% of doctors and surgeons.
Peacetime 21st century aviation faces a labour challenge that is less urgent but just as implacable as the demands of war. Boeing’s 2023 Pilot and Technician Outlook forecasts a demand for 690,000 new maintenance technicians worldwide over the 20 years to 2042, including 11,000 new positions (1,000 more than the number of pilots needed) in the Oceania region, containing Australia.
The shortage of licensed aircraft maintenance engineers (LAMEs) in Australian aviation is ‘now at crisis point’, the Regional Aviation Association of Australia declared in a 2022 report. ‘If we do not address this immediately, the continuing airworthiness of the Australian aircraft fleet will be significantly compromised.’
If the RAAA is right, aviation is once again in crisis. Women have come to the rescue twice before. It is in aviation’s interest to welcome them a third time.
