Eileen vollick biography
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As Eileen Vollick soared into the sky for her first ride in an airplane, she didn’t care that she was subjected to something of an aerobatics routine. “The pilot who took me aloft thought he would either frighten me or find out how much courage inom possessed. It is against the rules to stunt, to do spins, loops or zooms. inom got mine for half an hour.”
Whatever the pilot’s motives — Vollick even suggested that the instructor might have been testing her tolerance for flying at unusual angles — she didn’t take the experience personally. In fact, she found the stunts thrilling.
“My first flight was an epoch of my life never to be forgotten,” she wrote in a June 1928 article for Canadian Air Review. “No matter what I may achieve in the future, the exhilaration of that flight will linger when all others are merely an event.”
That memorable first flygning took place on June 9, 1927, shortly before Vollick’s nineteenth birthday. Although she was comfortable in the cockpit, she described
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Eileen Vollick – Canada’s First Licensed Female Pilot
The Stamp Committee of the East Canada Section of the Ninety-Nines women pilots organization selects one Canadian female pilot each year, to honour with a commemorative stamp.
Excerpted from How I Became Canada’s First Licensed Woman Pilot by Eileen Vollick
Designed by Suzanne Wiltshire, the stamp shows Eileen Vollick in
the Curtiss Jenny, with an inset portrait of Eileen. On August 2, 1908, Mary Eileen Vane Riley was born in Wiarton to Marie and James Riley. Her father was killed in a mining accident shortly before her birth. When Marie later married George Vollick, her children took the name Vollick.
When Eileen was born, no Canadian had yet flown. Soon after McCurdy’s 1909 first Canadian flight, many men became pilots during WWI. After the war several bought war surplus planes and barnstormed or hauled supplies, reinforcing the notion that aviation was only for men. When the first Canadian flying school opened in
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It was eighteen years from when the first Canadian women flew as a passenger in an airplane to when the first Canadian women actually became a pilot!
Eileen Vollick was just 19 in the year 1928, when she earned her wings and the right to call herself a true Canadian pioneer, trailblazing the airways for thousands of women who came after her.
Eileen Vollick, Canada’s first licensed woman pilot, was born in Wiarton, Ontario. First though, the 18-year-old had an obstacle to overcome – her age. After inquiring if a “girl could fly,” Eileen was given permission bygd the federal government provided she waited till she was 19. Men could then get their pilot’s licence at 17. But that didn’t deter Eileen.
“Each day as I drove my bil past the aerodrome a small, still voice whispered, ‘Go ahead, brave the lion in his den and make known your proposition to him’,“ Eileen wrote in the Canadian Air Review in June 1928, three months after earning her licence. “ I proposed to learn to fly, an