Nancy-Bird Walton passes away

Australia’s aviation legend Nancy-Bird Walton passes away at 93.

Nancy Bird-Walton, 93, the first woman in Australia to operate a commercial aircraft, is no more.

The pioneering aviatrix and also one of Australia’s most famous aviators was named ‘Living National Treasure’ by the National Trust of Australia in 1997.

Nancy Bird-Walton had been in and out of hospital in recent months and died on January 13, 2009, of natural causes in the Sydney suburb of Mosman in Australia, her granddaughter, Anna Holman, said.

Anna Holman said her grandmother’s health had declined soon after she took part in a ceremony in Sydney in 2008 in which the first Airbus A380 of Qantas Airways was named after the celebrity aviator. At the ceremony, Nancy Bird-Walton, who preferred to be known as Nancy-Bird, had said: “I was asked if Qantas could name this plane after me at my 90th birthday three years ago and I made it my decision to stay alive.” She had added that that she was “particularly thrilled by the tribute.”

Nancy was the founder of the Australian Women Pilots Association, which was the starting point for generations of female pilots who fly commercial aircraft alongside men in Australia.

Nancy Bird was born in Sydney in New South Wales, Australia, in 1915. At the age of 13, she went for a joy flight in a Gipsy Moth aeroplane at a local fair, and immediately she fell in love with flying.

Notwithstanding opposition from her father, Nancy started her first flying lessons at the age of 17. Her first lessons were conducted by Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, the first man to fly across the mid-Pacific and himself a legend in aviation. Though Kingsford Smith did not take Nancy, who stood only at 5 foot, in the beginning, he soon discovered the flare for flying in her.

That was the year 1933 – a time when women pilots were very rare.

Two years later, she obtained a commercial pilot’s licence and began taking paying passengers for joyrides around the country.

In 1935, she was hired to operate an air ambulance service, named the Far West Children’s Health Scheme, in outback New South Wales. Nancy’s own Gipsy Moth plane was used as the air ambulance.

She ran the air ambulance service for remote Outback areas of New South Wales state and came to be known as the ‘Angel of the Outback.’

In those days when airfields were in crude form, navigation instruments were basic and usually road maps rather than aviation maps were used, Nancy needed a great amount of skill and perseverance to fly the air ambulance.

In 1939, Nancy fell in love with Englishman Charles Walton while aboard a ship in which she was returning to Australia after conducting aviation research in England.

Nancy was 24 when she married Charles Walton. They had two children, named Anne Marie and John.

She set up the Australian Women Pilots Association in 1950 and remained its president until 1990. The Association’s their motto was “skies unlimited.”

Nancy Bird-Walton is survived by her two children, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.