Last Wednesday, we had a informational and meaningful talk with Mr. Mike Comella who is currently a First Officer for Delta’s Endeavor Air.  It’s really not a common thing to talk with a pilot who has been in the aviation industry for 32 years.

Taking a flight is a really serious thing, where passengers follow the rules strictly and quietly, people while  really curious about aviation, don’t have chance to ask questions. It’s even a rare thing to see the pilot. I haven’t. Mr. Comella is a really nice guy. While our questions are quite ‘creative’, not that professional, he answered professionally. For example, how a pilot not fall asleep, his favorite airports and one of the most memorable flights. It’s quite interesting to hear those answers from him, from a pilot’s perspective. These seemingly random questions actually demonstrate the job and industry more vividly. Quite fascinating occupation I think.

Also, he brought up some hidden issues that we passengers do not know. For instance, the small number of female pilots in the industry. It’s quite surprising that there are only a few female pilots. As Mr. Comella said when he was in the pilot class, there were only about two or three females in two classes about sixty people. In fact, I can’t see any direct reasons about this phenomenon and during the talk, we didn’t reach any conclusion either.

One of the explanations I could give is probably ‘mothers’ tend to stay home and look after the family. Even when they are not stay-home mothers, they prefer to have a stable 9-5 job close to where the family lives. Then, since it’s not that easy to get a pilot license, there might not be many single ladies in the industry. Or similar reasoning, they want to be close to their female friends or boyfriends while males can hang out with their male colleagues. its interesting that the fact that there are few female pilots might discourage female from pursuing the career from a sociological perspective.