Jenny Beatty
Captain Jenny Beatty was told by a high school career counselor that she couldn’t be a pilot because she was too short and wore glasses. Today she is still five-foot-three, still wears contact lenses to correct her eyesight to 20/20 – and is a captain for the world’s largest airline. She has been flying for four decades, with over 19,000 flight hours, rated on the B737, B747, B777, B787, BE-1900, DC-9, seaplanes, and gliders.
Unusual for aviation, Jenny is a third-generation female pilot. Her maternal grandparents learned to fly in 1930, and their daughter, Jenny’s mother, earned her pilot’s license as a teenager in 1945. After a 30-year break in flying, and now with four teenaged daughters of her own, Jenny’s mother brushed up on her flying skills and took each family member up for a flight. That one flight with her mother, and the stories about her grandparents, inspired Jenny to become a pilot, too. She found the last remnant of her grandmother’s airplane, its large wooden propeller, and brought it upstairs to her room. It remains a treasured memento of her family legacy.
After lifting off for her first flight lesson, Jenny knew that she wanted to fly for a living. This being 1981, however, she only thought about flying for a living somehow, never daring to dream she might one day become an airline pilot.
Jenny earned her commercial pilot certification at Spartan School of Aeronautics in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a Bachelor of Science in geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Beginning her career instructing and flying in single-pilot charter operations carrying bank checks, light freight, and passengers – both alive and dead – Jenny attained the Airline Transport Pilot certificate in 1988, when less than 2% of ATPs were women. Finally breaking into the airlines in 1991, Jenny progressed from first officer to captain, check airman, and flight operations manager with two regional airlines and a national airline before joining a premier global airline in 1999. She was the only woman in every airline new-hire pilot training class. Following jobs, Jenny lived in ten U.S. cities, including several years in a small vintage Airstream travel trailer, which she moved four times.
Early in her pilot career, Jenny was lucky to meet amazing women pilots at 99s events and Women in Aviation Conferences – daring women like Elinor Smith (author of “Aviatrix”), Bobbi Trout (subject of Donna Veca and Skip Mazzio’s “Just Plane Crazy”); WASPs like Dora Dougherty Strother and Barbara Erickson London (subject of Sarah Byrne Rickman’s “BJ Erickson: WASP Pilot”); Mercury 13 pilots like Wally Funk (author of “Higher Faster Longer”); pioneering women airline pilots like Emily Howell Warner (subject of Ann Lewis Cooper’s “Weaving the Winds”), Bonnie Tiburzi (author of “Takeoff!”), Nancy Bird (author of “Born to Fly”), and Norah O’Neill (author of “Flying Tigress”); and record-setting women like Jeana Yeager (co-author of “Voyager”) and Patty Wagstaff (author of “Fire and Air”).
Fascinated by these amazing women, and by so many other women beginning to enter a variety of professional pilot careers ranging from aerial fire-fighting to wildlife surveying, Jenny began to interview and write articles about them. She has no particular technique: “I just write about subjects that interest to me, sharing the words and stories of inspirational women pilots, their interesting flying jobs, and the effort it took for them to get there.”
Jenny’s writing was first published in 1994 in Women in Aviation magazine, a precursor to the now well-known organization, and over the next two decades her articles and features appeared in such magazines as Woman Pilot, Aviation for Women, The 99 News, and ISA News, and in The New York Times. Her column “The View From Here” ran in Aviation for Women magazine from 2001-2013.
As a bibliophile, Jenny especially relishes biographies of women pilots. Her book collection of more than 350 books and magazines, many of which are rare signed first editions, tell the stories of trailblazing women pilots who opened up the skies for her and others to fly.
Throughout her four decades in aviation, Jenny has actively worked to promote and advocate for women and under-represented populations in aviation careers, both through her writing and also by creating networking and job forums and mentoring programs for pilots. She is the visionary and co-founder of the 99s Professional Pilot Leadership Initiative, the intensive formal mentoring program for women pilots with over a hundred graduates. She also regularly gives presentations on aviation topics, speaking to audiences ranging from American Mensa to Zonta International.
Captain Jenny Beatty currently researches, writes, and gives presentations about the progress of women, diversity, bias, harassment, and discrimination in aviation, and leads a research study of harassment in aviation with a Research Scholar Grant from the Amelia Earhart Memorial Scholarship Fund of The Ninety-Nines. Her “day job” is commanding 737s on flights throughout North America, Central America, and the Caribbean.
Website: www.JennyBeatty.com