The wind beneath her wings

Anne Lewis is an aviation pioneer who broke the glass ceiling and then flew higher. Now 97, she tells The Weekly there have been a few close calls but she wouldn't swap her years as a pilot for anything.

- BARRY DIVOLA

She may be closing in on her century, but Anne Lewis remembers the day she took her first solo flight as if it was yesterday. In fact, it was almost eight decades ago, the plane was a Tiger Moth and the place was Maylands, in Perth’s inner-city.

“I was 20 at the time,” she recalls, sitting in her apartment in a retirement village in Perth’s western suburbs. “I did a circuit, then got on the downwind leg and I thought, ‘This is wonderful. I’m on my own, completely disconnected from the world.’ I did a perfect landing, too. That was the first climax and it just went on from there.”

The 97-year-old gives a wide, sunny smile, which is her default setting. There are a few indicators of her past life around her – a world atlas; a model of a plane on her desk; a black-and-white photo of her perched against an Auster plane in Blackpool, England, in 1950.

But few people in this retirement village are aware of the fact that Anne was a local aviation pioneer. She was the first woman to earn a commercial pilot’s licence in Western Australia and the first woman to fly for the Australian Aerial Medical Service, which eventually became the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

Anne was a woman in a man’s world, but when she is asked about any challenges or difficulties she faced because of that she brushes it off.