10/13/2026
Norah O’Neill would have turned 77 in August. At 23, she finished a ski-clothes modeling shoot on North America’s tallest mountain and rode in the cockpit on the flight back to Talkeetna, Alaska. That flight changed her life. She decided to stay in Alaska and learn to fly, whatever it took.
She took a night-shift job at a bar in Kodiak and lived in a furnace room. She worked through the night, slept a few hours, then took flying lessons during the day. Every cent she earned went to flight school.
Later, a flight school owner hired her as an instructor, partly because he thought a woman instructor would bring in more male students.
Not everyone wanted her there. False rumors spread that she had slept with her boss, male pilots called her “an accident waiting to happen,” and a chief pilot refused to fly with her to give the required FAA tests because she was a woman. Her boss gave her the tests, and she passed.
She went on to fly charters, mail and cargo in Alaska, and she was the first woman pilot hired by Alaska Central Air. When she interviewed with Flying Tigers, a major cargo airline, the men hiring her asked whether her menstrual cycle would make her miss work, she later said. She became the first woman pilot in the airline’s history.
Some of the male pilots she flew with made it clear they didn’t want a woman in the cockpit. She kept flying. She was the first woman in the world to fly the DC-8 jet, and magazines in Asia featured her as the first woman airline pilot to land in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and the Philippines.
Flying Tigers mostly hauled cargo, but it also flew passenger charters. 7 years after she started flying lessons, she became the first woman in the world to fly passengers on a Boeing 747. The Museum of Flight in Seattle, which now holds her logbooks and her Flying Tigers captain’s uniform, credits her with that first.
She logged 22,000 hours without an accident, helped found the International Society of Women Airline Pilots and wrote a memoir called Flying Tigress. In retirement, she spoke at schools, hoping girls who dreamed of flying would take the chance.
She passed away at 68, with her children by her side.
