laststandonzombieisland

International Women’s Day (March 8) is a global day celebrating the “social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women.”

With that, I give you Canadian Second Officer Helen Marcelle Harrison of the Air Transport Auxiliary in November 1943 with a Spitfire IX.

Helen was a pioneering Canadian female civil aviation instructor and the first Canadian Air Transport Auxiliary ferry pilot during WWII.

After the war, she worked as a demonstration pilot for Percival Aircraft Company, flying a single-engine airplane across Canada in 1946. In 1968, she was awarded the B.C. Aviation Council’s Air Safety Trophy, after logging 14,000 hours as pilot-in-command of numerous aircraft types, without injury to passenger or crew.

Inducted into Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame in 1974, she passed in 1995, aged 85, when she got her final set of wings.