Nancy Wii shattered PNG’s aviation glass ceiling, becoming the first female commercial pilot and now leads the country’s air unit with pride and resilience.
Breaking Barriers: Nancy Wii, Papua New Guinea’s Trailblazing Female Defence Boss
The female Defence Boss getting Papua New Guinea’s planes back in the sky.
Nancy Wii went to school with girls wearing grass skirts. Now she works among men wearing cargo pants.
At 21, she became Papua New Guinea’s first female commercial pilot, rising through the ranks before she was promoted and became the first female commanding officer in the country’s defence force.
“They didn’t give it to me because I’m a female,” Lieutenant-Colonel Wii said.
“They gave it to me because I earned it.”
At a time when geopolitics has lasered international attention on PNG’s military and security, the woman leading its air unit comes with an extraordinary personal story.
Her rise is reflective of the unit itself, which is getting back into the skies after years of being unable to fly.
Nancy Wii grew up in a village as the eldest of 11 children, and says it was her father who encouraged her to seek a non-traditional career in aviation.
He was PNG’s minister for civil aviation at the time and told her that in other countries there were female pilots and he thought she should learn to fly.
Her parents took out a loan so she could go to New Zealand, stay with a local family, and study.
“It was hard. I was dreading how I would sit at the table and eat with all these white people,” she says while laughing.
But at 19 years old, she got her pilot’s licence in just three months.
Her family took out another loan and sought help from the New Zealand government to send her back to earn her commercial licence.
Ten months after returning to New Zealand, she was qualified and returned to her home as the country’s first female commercial pilot, shattering PNG’s aviation glass ceiling.
Despite the historic achievement, Lieutenant-Colonel Wii faced a new set of problems once she was in the role.
“[Some] passengers, when they saw me on the right-hand seat, they refused to fly because they didn’t want the flight attendant in the front seat,” she said, explaining they assumed she was a flight attendant because she was a woman.
“So in the remote areas everyone wanted to argue. It wasn’t easy. It was really tough.”
But she soon began to win people over, particularly after taking on a regular route out of Daru, the capital of PNG’s Western Province.
“I think I earned my respect there,” she said.
Little by little, she witnessed changes in people’s attitudes, until eventually she felt she “had the support of the population”.
“Everywhere they saw me they just rushed to me, shook hands with me, they couldn’t believe it — everyone was proud of me,” she said.
She said people would say things like, “This is the first female pilot,” and wanted their daughters to follow the same career path.
Source: https://lnkd.in/gqRwpdSz
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