Singapore Airlines has hired its first female pilots. They are not yet flying commercial routes; each will undergo two to three years of training before being added to the airline’s roster of roughly 2,000 pilots. The carrier does not set hiring quotas for women. “We will recruit whoever is the most qualified,” said Nicholas Ionides, a Singapore Airlines spokesman, in The Straits Times.
SIA has lagged behind many other major airlines in bringing women into its cockpit ranks. Across Singapore’s carriers, women account for fewer than 1 percent of pilots; at Singapore Airlines the figure is about 0.1 percent. Those numbers are well below the global average of roughly 5 percent reported by the International Society of Women Airline Pilots.
By contrast, Indian carriers lead in female pilot representation: almost 600 women among approximately 5,050 pilots, or about 11.6 percent. In March, an all-women Air India flight crew operated one of the world’s longest non-stop routes — from Delhi (DEL) to San Francisco (SFO) — to mark International Women’s Day.