Provided
Judy Cameron in 1978
Judy Cameron was hired in 1978 by Air Canada. She is pictured here aboard a Boeing 727 where she was the second officer.
Before Judy Cameron got a scholarship named after her, before the commemorative stamp, before the Order of Canada, and before she blazed a trail through Canadian commercial aviation, she was an adventurous child, raised by a mother who respected her abilities and believed in her.
"I was brought up believing I could be whatever I wanted to be," says the 67-year-old Oakville resident. "My mother was a strong independent single mother. She never put limits on what I could do."
Cameron’s mother, Betty Evans, 98, has the same memory: "she was an only child, and I went along with most things she did. I had the utmost respect for her and her competence. Otherwise, we’d be arguing quite a lot of the time!"
Because Evans always worked out of necessity, she was forced to give her daughter a lot of responsibility early on. "I knew I could trust her. And she was comfortable with it too."
"I’m not so much in favour of caution," Evans admits. "There was a time, she went out and bought a motorcycle with her own money! I said, 'That’s fine, just follow the rules.'"
At the time, mother and daughter were living in a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver, Evans on the couch so her daughter could have the bed. They didn't have a lot of extra cash, and the motorcycle was a convenient and affordable way to get to and from her university classes, Cameron explains.
She recalls her mom didn't much care for the motorcycle but would gamely accept rides on the back. "I took her for Christmas to visit relatives up the Fraser Valley -- two hours in the dark!"
Evans says, "That was something etched in my memory: it was a Sunday in Vancouver, and there wasn’t a person on the road because it was just pouring. I said when we started out, 'This is strange, there’s no automobiles out. No one is travelling.'" As it turned out, there was a weather advisory, and no one was supposed to be travelling.
Before she had Cameron, at the age of 30, Evans had earlier adventures, working for the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II as a secretary and stenographer. In that capacity, she observed that many of the pilots who delivered airplanes from the factories to the airfields were women, even if they were still barred from flying them in combat.
"Nothing has ever been said about what those particular women did during the war," Evans says. "These were heroic women -- they were brave, flying planes with not a lot of hardware then, just compasses to help ferry them to where they were going. I guess a lot of that, I had seen."
Two decades later, when her daughter decided to quit university to attend flight school, Evans didn't bat an eye: “I always had confidence she knew what she was doing.”
Cameron rode the motorcycle eight hours to arrive at Selkirk College in Castlegar. "My mom was really quite happy that I took up flying because I had to sell the motorcycle to pay for my flight training," Cameron laughs.
In 1975, she became the college's first female graduate of the Aviation Technology Program. Three years later, she famously became the first female pilot to be hired by Air Canada and the first female pilot in Canada to be hired by a major commercial airline.* She spent 37 years working for the airline, becoming a captain in 1997 and Canada’s first female captain of a Boeing 777 in 2010.
Now, almost a half-century since she began her aviation journey, Cameron is still working for the advancement of women in aviation through her involvement with organizations like the Ninety-nines (International Organization of Women Pilots) and the Northern Lights Aero Foundation. For the latter, she does fundraising for their scholarship programs and attends outreach at airshows.
She is disappointed by the stagnation of progress in achieving gender parity in the cockpit (worldwide, just six percent of commercial airline pilots are women).
Still, there are reasons to be optimistic -- for example, Cameron points to a recent recipient of the Elsie Macgill Education Award, Jo-Anne Tabobandung. Tabobandung is the dean of aviation for First Nations Technical Institute, which had the distinction of producing as many female as male graduates. FNTI is in Tyendinaga.
For any young women and girls who are curious about becoming pilots, Cameron has this to say: “If you like to do a job where at the end of the day, you can see concrete results, if you would like to see the sun rise over the Atlantic and the sun set over Barbados when you’re on a layover if you want to travel the world and get paid to do so, if you like operating really expensive high-performance equipment that is so much fun, then this is for you.”
For Evans' part, she says, “it’s so great to see the women in aviation these days. We know quite a few of them that fly for Air Canada, and they do such a great job. It seems so strange to think there was a time they thought women couldn’t do certain things.”
*Rosella Bjornsen was the first female pilot hired by a Canadian airline. Transair, a regional carrier out of Winnipeg, hired her five years earlier.
