Personal Narrative-The Absence Of Female Pilots

"Get the nose up, woman!" The flight examiner screeches in my ear. As I yank back on the yoke, I wonder did he just say that? There's no way. I must have misheard. "Girl, are you forgetting something? Take the carb heat out!" Okay. I definitely didn't hear wrong. For the next hour, I struggle to keep my cool as the examiner screams at me. I perform the requested maneuvers and try to drown out his excessive noise. From the moment I walked into his office, I knew this would be a difficult few hours. He was an older man, probably in his early seventies. He had a thick beard that covered most of his face and mouth, which didn't help in understanding his thick rural Missouri accent. On the ground I had struggled to understand him, but now in the plane, the headset picks up his every word and amplifies them in my ears. As he spits out female superlatives, I come to the conclusion that he is uncomfortable with me because I'm a girl. …show more content…
The absence of female pilots was evident almost immediately. At any given time at the airport, I was always the only girl. I started to notice that the men felt they needed to treat me differently. The air traffic controller spoke slower to me, and the fuel servicemen insisted on pulling out the plane for me. While I appreciated their gestures, I was neither weak nor incapable of doing things just as well as them. It wasn't what they thought of me that made them act this way; it was that they had probably never before been in this context with a