Aviatrix Book Club Reccomendations
Elizabeth “Liz” Booker is an IAWA Member who operates a 1900+ member Book Club that highlights the accomplishments of women in the aviation industry. She has been featured on IAWA’s podcast: Connect, Inspire, and Lead and her offerings are featured on her website.In order to enhance IAWA’s book reviews, Liz curated several books (more to come) that further enhance how you can reinforce what you learned.
According to Liz “There are too many fabulous stories featuring women in aviation to recommend them all here. These selections offer both an historical context and more contemporary experiences that I think everyone in aviation should read, and which I feel reflect the common experiences of women in aviation throughout our history and today. You can find interviews with all the authors on my website, YoutTube Channel, and podcast.
Blue Skies and Happy Reading!”
If you loved Measure What Matters you will love Fly Girls
Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History, by Keith O’Brien.
Fly Girls sets the stage for the collective experience of women in aviation, placing our female pioneers in the context of the early days of aircraft design and development, air races, and transatlantic crossings. There is also a young reader’s edition.
A New York Times Bestseller * An Amazon Best Book of the Year * A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice * A Time Best Book for Summer
Between the world wars, no sport was more popular, or more dangerous, than airplane racing. While male pilots were lauded as heroes, the few women who dared to fly were more often ridiculed—until a cadre of women pilots banded together to break through the entrenched prejudice.
Fly Girls weaves together the stories of five remarkable women: Florence Klingensmith, a high school dropout from Fargo, North Dakota; Ruth Elder, an Alabama divorcée; Amelia Earhart, the most famous, but not necessarily the most skilled; Ruth Nichols, who chafed at her blue blood family’s expectations; and Louise Thaden, the young mother of two who got her start selling coal in Wichita. Together, they fought for the chance to fly and race airplanes—and in 1936, one of them would triumph, beating the men in the toughest air race of them all.
If you loved Fear Less, you will love Nerves of Steel
Nerves of Steel: How I Followed My Dreams, Earned My Wings, and Faced My Greatest Challenge, by Tammie Jo Shults.
Nerves of Steel demonstrates how years of experience and training culminated in Tammie Jo deftly responding to a catastrophic engine failure in flight with 149 people on board and reveals the many obstacles she navigated to pursue her career. There is also a young reader’s edition.
Nerves of Steel is the captivating true story of Tammie Jo Shults’s remarkable life—from growing up the daughter of a humble rancher, to breaking through gender barriers as one of the Navy’s first female F/A-18 Hornet pilots, to safely landing the severely crippled Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 and helping save the lives of 148 people.
Tammie Jo Shults has spent her entire life loving the skies. Though the odds were against her, she became one of the few female fighter pilots in the Navy. In 1994, after serving her country honorably for eight years, Tammie Jo left the Navy and joined Southwest Airlines in the early 1990’s.
On April 17, 2018, Tammie Jo was called to service once again. Twenty minutes into a routine domestic flight, Captain Shults was faced with the unthinkable—a catastrophic engine failure in the Boeing 737 caused an explosion that severed hydraulic and fuel lines, tearing away sections of the plane, puncturing a window, and taking a woman’s life. Captain Shults and her first officer, Darren Ellisor, struggled to stabilize the aircraft.
Drawing deeply from her well of experience, Tammie Jo was able to wrestle the severely damaged 737 safely to the ground. Not originally scheduled for that flight, there is no doubt God had prepared her and placed her right where she needed to be that day.
If you loved Courage is Calling, you will love Flying Free
Flying Free: My Victory Over Fear to Become the First Latina Pilot on the U.S. Aerobatic Team, by Cecilia Aragon.
Flying Free demonstrates how the experience of learning to fly can liberate and build the confidence of women who never imagined themselves in the air.
The daughter of a Chilean father and a Filipina mother, Cecilia Rodriguez Aragon grew up as a shy, timid child in a small Midwestern town during the 1960s. Targeted by school bullies and dismissed by many of her teachers, she worried that people would find out the truth: that she was INTF. Incompetent. Nerd. Terrified. Failure. This feeling stayed with her well into her 20s when she was told that “girls can’t do science” or “women just don’t know how to handle machines”.
Yet in the span of just six years, Cecilia became the first Latina pilot to secure a place on the United States Unlimited Aerobatic Team and earn the right to represent her country at the Olympics of aviation, the World Aerobatic Championships. How did she do it?
Using mathematical techniques to overcome her fear, Cecilia performed at air shows in front of millions of people. She jumped out of airplanes and taught others how to fly. She learned how to fundraise and earn money to compete at the world level. She worked as a test pilot and contributed to the design of experimental airplanes, crafting curves of metal and fabric that shaped air to lift inanimate objects high above the earth. And best of all, she surprised everyone by overcoming the prejudices people held about her because of her race and her gender.
Flying Free is the story of how Cecilia Aragon broke free from expectations and rose above her own limits by her passion for flying with math and logic in unexpected ways. You don’t have to be a math whiz or a science geek to learn from her story. You just have to want to soar.
If you loved The Rise, you will love Shatter the Sky
Shatter the Sky: What Going to the Stratosphere Taught Me About Self-Worth, Sacrifice, and Discipline, Col. Merryl Tengesdal (Ret.)
Shatter the Sky gives us the perspective of a Black woman from humble beginnings whose mission it is to inspire and demonstrate to underprivileged youth that anything is possible with hard work and determination.
In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Merryl Tengesdal, has become one of the most interesting and compelling maverick women in aviation.
In this inspirational memoir, retired Colonel Merryl Tengesdal shares her Life Lessons on everything from her career in the military, being the first and only black woman to pilot the U2 aircraft, to marriage and motherhood – and everything in between.
This book is a deep reflection on life in the military, with mesmerizing storytelling. Merryl invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her - from her childhood in the Bronx, to her years deployed in the Middle East, South America, and Asia, to her experience on the hit reality show Tough As Nails. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her life as she lived it - in her own words and on her own terms. With wisdom and warmth, Shatter the Sky is the deeply personal story of a woman of substance who has steadily defied expectations - and whose story inspires us to do the same.
If you loved Think Again, you will love Jet Boss
Jet Boss: A Female Pilot on Taking Risks and Flying High, by Captain Laura Savino.
With humor and wit, Jet Boss chronicles the outrageous risk-taking teen adventures of a girl from a conservative, traditional family, through her unrelenting pursuit of the Purdue University aviation degree program and into the airlines. It also reveals the unpleasant experiences of discrimination and harassment by a woman just trying to navigate a professional career in aviation.
Captain Laura Savino takes you directly into the cockpit for an exclusive look into the boy's club of airline pilots—told through the eyes of the first female pilot many of them ever flew with.
"No math," Laura's counselor told her in high school. "That would ruin your GPA.” Laura had other plans. One teenage act of rebellion changed everything for her at a time when STEM opportunities for women were rare. If passengers on a commercial jet had trouble imagining a woman flight engineer — which Laura became — imagine their disbelief to see her as the pilot flying their widebody jet around the world.
She exposes both the harsh truths and the exciting adventure of her years in the airline industry as a commercial pilot, reveals the emotional impact of 9/11 on pilots, and writes honestly about what it means to be a working mother while keeping her dreams alive.
Laura's powerful story is a blueprint for how to defy expectations and follow your inner compass to do things you never thought possible.