The Flying Seven
Just seven years after women were declared “persons” under Canadian law, Vancouver’s pioneering female pilots encouraged their sisters to reach for the skies.
“‘Well, we showed them we could do it!’ exclaimed Miss Margaret Fane as she landed her plane, ‘The Golden Eagle,’ at Sea Island Airport in the gathering dusk of Sunday evening. She was the last of seven Vancouver women pilots who had flown in relays from dawn to dusk all day, never a moment of the time elapsing without at least one plane being in the air. The group was celebrating formation here of the first women’s flying club in Canada and performed their stunt under conditions that had male pilots shaking their heads in disapproval and freely predicting disaster.”
—Vancouver Sun, November 16, 1936, following an aerial exhibition by Vancouver’s Flying Seven.
Offensive. Dangerous. Unthinkable. That was how most regarded the idea of women pilots when Margaret Fane founded the all-female Flying Seven group in Vancouver in 1936.
The need for mutual support drew them together, along with the opportunity to change public perception. To that end, the seven gathered in Vancouver in November 1936 for a women-only airshow at the Sea Island airfield. Tosca Trasolini took to the air first just before sunrise at 6:59 a.m., battling a light ground mist and low visibility.
“[T]he only way I could tell how I was flying was to circle the field close in. . . . There was no horizon for one to judge one’s position in the air.”
Read more in the current issue of British Columbia Magazine
