Sharon Menear

Friday's Fabulous Flyer

Sharon Menear

From Flight Attendant to 

Airline Pilot to Award-Winning Author

"Once again it brings me the greatest joy for authors to share their stories. Why? They write themselves. Today we are meeting a wonderful lady, who 

My love affair with airplanes started when I was fifteen. My brother took me flying in a Piper Pacer before he shipped out on a US aircraft carrier. I was hooked but couldn’t afford lessons.

After college, I began a career as a Pan Am flight attendant. I earned enough money as a Pan Am flight attendant to afford lessons in the Pan Am Flying Club at New Tamiami Airport near Miami (1973). It only cost $50 to join the flying club. Pan Am crew schedulers scheduled the flying lessons, Pan Am pilots were the flight instructors, and Pan Am mechanics performed all the maintenance on the Cessna 150s and Cessna 172s. The airplane cost to students was $5/hr. for the C-150s and $7/hr. for the C-172s, and the flight instructors were $5/hr. You could never get a deal like that now.


I was based at JFK Airport in New York and flew to eighty-eight countries spanning the globe. Those were the glory days of the airline industry. Pan Am stewardesses were treated like movie stars—when I was in uniform, people stopped me on the street and asked for my autograph—no idea why. 

Airline pilots were revered as sky gods. Gourmet food was cooked to order in first class, and baked Alaska was served flaming. Hollywood legends and international tycoons were frequent passengers.

In the early 1970s, I transferred to Miami and joined the Pan Am Flying Club. Three months later, I earned my private pilot license. The Pan Am sky gods were kind to me. They let me hand fly a Boeing 707 for two hours over South America on a flight with few passengers and good weather. I also enjoyed flying a Boeing 747 en route from JFK to Frankfurt, Germany. The jumbo jet felt as steady as flying a big house. That was my light-bulb moment. I wanted to fly jet airliners.

When I began my quest, there were no female pilots with major airlines. I spent the next few years earning an instrument rating, commercial pilot license, multi-engine rating, and flight and ground instructor certificates, and logging flight time instructing and flying charter flights. After enough flight experience and a perfect score on the Airline Transport Pilot written test, I was the first woman hired by a small regional airline that was part of the Allegheny Commuter Network.

With no budget for flight simulators or flight training, the chief pilot employed the sink-or-swim method. I received a half-day ground school for each airplane type and one hour of flight training followed immediately by the flight test with an FAA examiner breathing down my neck. While I waited to takeoff for my checkride, an airplane crashed right in front of us, but no one was injured. The fed onboard was also an accident investigator. My chief pilot suggested we drop him off so he could investigate. The fed said the wreck would still be there when we finished. He didn’t want to miss a chance to put me through the ringer.

I loved my job as a commuter airline pilot flying Shorts 330s and 360s and STOL Twin Otter prop jets. On a typical day, I flew several round trips in the Shorts and then switched to the Twin Otter for a late trip to JFK or PHL. The Twin Otter was the most fun because it could takeoff and land in short distances and cruise at decent speed. My copilot job included plenty of experience flying in bad weather, hundreds of instrument approaches, and lots of landings. I was well prepared when the time came to apply to USAir a year later.

Thanks to good recommendations from my old boss at Pan Am and my chief pilot, I was granted an interview with USAir right before their big hiring wave in 1980. My first hurdle was a flight check in a DC-9 simulator. I’d never flown a jet airliner or simulator. After I passed the flight test, they told me I had flown well.

 

Next, I was taken to a conference room and grilled by six senior captains who asked me lots of questions that would be illegal in today’s world. I managed to convince them they could count on me to do a good job and not be a “pain-in-the-ass whiny broad like the first one they hired, who quit when her husband complained she was gone too much.” I told them if my husband disapproved of my pilot career, I’d find a new husband, which would be far easier than getting a pilot job with a major airline. They laughed. I won them over and then endured six hours of the strangest written tests I’ve ever taken. They saved the flight physical for last.

I was the only woman in the first new-hire class. We were all trained to be BAC 1-11 copilots, which involved some exciting late-night training in the actual airplane because the simulator was a primitive machine with visuals from a camera on a track over what looked like a toy train board with model towns, rivers, hills, and an airport. My training partner had been a Navy fighter pilot, and our instructor had been an Air Force fighter pilot—absolutely fearless, until we practiced the stalls.

We were at 15,000 ft., and his voice filled with tension as he reminded me our jet would lose 15,000 ft. in the first turn if it entered a spin. Translation: “If you screw this up, Sharon, we’re all gonna die!” Everyone survived.

After some time in the British airliner, I moved to copilot on the B727, the queen of the fleet. Pilots received one week of ground school followed by written and oral exams, then six days of flight-simulator training followed by the flight check. Back then, we also got some fun late-night training in the real aircraft because the simulator wasn’t approved for everything. Later, I flew copilot on the DC-9 and B737. After seven years as copilot, I earned my fourth stripe and flew as captain on the BAC 1-11, DC-9, and B737.

During my career, I also flew many antique and exotic experimental aircraft on my days off. I helped my husband restore antique airplanes and build experimental aircraft. My flight favorites were the fully aerobatic Bücker Jungmann biplane, Italian SIAI Marchetti SF260, Glassair III, Swearingen SX300, Russian Yak 52, and my Piper Cub Special, which played a role in my thriller novel, Deadstick Dawn, but that’s a story for the next blog..." 

Sharon's flying career was taken from her without warning. But her love of flight and passion for aviation continues on. Join me next Wednesday to see what this flying angel is up to after life clipped her wings.

Enjoy the Journey!
XO Karlene