Believe me, we are all serious pilots.
It was started by a bunch of middle-aged broads (we’re all in our 40s) who recently started flying in reaction to the collective “mid-life crisis.” (If we were guys, we’d probably be driving red Porsches.) We are in this for fun, not for a career change.
The name “Babes and Airplanes” came from a long-ago posting on the AOPA website message boards by an ATP (commercial airline pilot) named Ralph, who wanted to know where he could get pictures of “good-lookin’ babes and airplanes.” We jumped all over him!!! How rude and sexist!!! Through us gals blabbing and joking with each other, and picking on poor Ralph, we became pals and eventually decided to take the name on for ourselves.
Through the AOPA message boards, this original group of five or six people has grown to many. Both women and men. Both younger and older. From Mexico to Alaska, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The only prerequisite is that you must have a sense of humor. We’re famous for sacrificing chickens to the checkride and weather gods. We also dream about the ideal plane, which would, of course, have a hot tub in the back. Since most pilots are men (only six percent are gals) the gal babes in the group try to coerce the “wives” into becoming pilots themselves. Our goal is to increase the current 6% female pilot population to at least 6.005% by the year 2000.
As a group of pilots we ABSOLUTELY believe in being serious and safe. Because we are all fairly new pilots we continuously encourage each other to really learn how to fly. (The Private certificate is a license to learn.) Because we live in different states, we rendezvous in new places each time we fly, always a learning experience. And, we always leave a copy of the above, “Bad Plane Day” picture on the bulletin boards of the FBO’s we stop at, and on the sides of cash registers at the restaurants where we eat.(BTW, no, we didn’t break it, just stumbled across it. It’s all better now and back in the air.)
We may take our flying seriously, but we also have a lot of fun.
