Highway to the Sky: An Aviator’s Journey

With females making up just 5% of the world’s pilots, this memoir crosses genres to combine aviation history, the author’s journey from unwanted child to successful pilot, and the feminist experience, and will appeal to multiple aviation communities.

＂Don’t be silly! Girls can’t fly,＂ seven-year-old Lola’s father admonishes her as they fly across Canada on a commercial flight in 1962. She is crushed--but decides he must be right. She’s only ever seen male pilots, after all.

Highway to the Sky begins during the empty zone of women in aviation, a three-decade drought following WWII when men reclaimed the jobs that had been performed by women during the war and forced women back to diapers and dishes, where they ＂belonged.＂

Despite Lola’s childhood desire to avoid the straitjacket of traditional female roles and become a pilot, her desperate need for unconditional affection after a lonesome childhood sways her determination. At age twenty, she leaps into marriage and motherhood. Four years, one toxic relationship, and one private pilot license later, she leaves her husband, even though she knows she’ll be censured by friends, family, and 1970s society at large.

Lola’s head-on battle with tradition continues as the lone female pilot in her advanced flight training program and on the job as a flight instructor, bush pilot, charter pilot, and commuter airline pilot between 1979 and 1993. Flying is challenging at times, yes--but her true obstacles are the hostility, sabotage, and discrimination she faces in her industry. She perseveres, however. Ultimately, flying is what gives her the courage to regain control of her life--and helps her find personal happiness.

Lola Reid Allin is a commercial airline transport pilot, flight instructor, SCUBA divemaster, and an award-winning author and photographer whose work has appeared in national newspapers and publications and in juried national and international shows. Her professional aviation affiliations include Women in Aviation International, The 99s: International Organization of Women Pilots, and the Northern Lights Aero Foundation. An adventurer who lived with the Maya in Mexico and Belize for three years, Reid Allin has explored more than sixty-five countries in depth. When she isn’t backpacking Baffin Island, trekking the Andes or the Himalayas, forging deep into the Guatemalan jungle, summiting Kilimanjaro, or guiding a dogsled team in the Yukon, she lives with her husband of twenty-five years in a small community east of Toronto, Canada.