HIGHWAY TO THE SKY

A Canadian woman takes on the boys’ club of professional pilots in Reid Allin’s debut memoir.

The author grew up listening to her grandfather, a World War I vet, tell heroic stories of Canadian aviation. Though Reid Allin’s father was an aircraft maintenance engineer, her parents refused to indulge her childhood dreams of becoming a pilot one day. Her first flight, in a commercial plane with her family, cemented her love: “A roar like thunder blasts into my ears, then suddenly, the nose of the aircraft pitches up and the earth slips away, slowly at first but we pick up speed, and I pretend I’m a shooting star.” (Her mother vomited.) Once she was out of her parents’ house, the author quickly fell in with a group of ski instructors, married an alcoholic, and had a child. As the 1970s drew to a close, she did two things that, as a woman, she wasn’t ‘supposed’ to do: She got her pilot’s license, and then she left her husband. Starting with little more than her Cessna-150 (her ex-husband kept the house), the indefatigable Reid Allin set out to make her living as an aviator, from instructor to charter pilot to airline transport pilot. In this memoir, the author describes how the joys of flying were tempered by the sexism she experienced at every level of her training—and how she found it within herself to sail above it all. Reid Allin has a gift for capturing the otherworldly view of the earth from the sky: “Since every night flight has been perfect, I bring a colleague for a quick zip to North Bay for supper. During our return trip, the northern lights shiver kiwi-green and turquoise and a slivered crescent moon glistens on endless fields of white.” It’s not a book that needs to be nearly 350 pages long, and the author sometimes seems too enamored with her own mythology. The narrative does, however, illustrate the level of perseverance required to be a woman in a male-dominated field, an experience many readers will no doubt relate to.

An inspiring memoir about pursuing one’s dreams to the other side of the clouds.