Egyptian aviatrix Lotfia Nady commemorated in a Google ‘doodle’

Archive photos show an indomitable-looking young woman in flight goggles and an old-style leather helmet, ready to take to the cockpit of a 1930s-era prop plane.

On Wednesday, pioneering Egyptian aviatrix Lotfia Nady was commemorated on what would have been her 107th birthday in a Google “doodle,” viewed by many millions of search engine users around the world.

Decades after her heyday, however, Nady’s exploits are for some a painful reminder of the basic rights denied in the present day to many women in Egypt, where sexual harassment and assault are rampant, female genital mutilation is commonplace and social mores grow increasingly conservative.

In 1933, Nady became the first Egyptian woman to obtain a pilot’s license. That same year, at 26, she flew from the Egyptian capital, Cairo, to the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, winning an air race in the process.

She cut a dashing figure with her dark hair swept back, clad in slim skirts and open-necked, short-sleeved skirts – outfits that would draw unwelcome stares on the streets of many Egyptian cities and towns today.

The Google doodle depicts Nady in the manner of an antique portrait, superimposed on a stylized image of a vintage plane circling over domes and the Pyramids.

In life, she hobnobbed with world leaders, inspired other would-be female pilots and reveled in the many honors bestowed upon her.

Six years before her death in 2002, Nady, who spent much of her later life in Switzerland, was the subject of a documentary, “Take Off From the Sand,” by director Wageh George. In it, she recounted her fascination with flight and her determination to take to the skies.

“I learned to fly because I loved to be free,” she told George, recalling her defiance of a strict father to take flying lessons. Her job as a receptionist at the Cairo airport, she said, provided her with the cover she needed to take flying lessons and eventually win her pilot’s certification.

“As soon as I took off, I felt the plane was light, and I owned the whole world,” she told the filmmaker. “Freedom. Freedom. The freedom you always dreamed of.”

Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany, in an op-ed published last year in the New York Times, contrasted Nady’s bold aviation feats – and the relative freedoms of the era in which she came of age – with the often suffocating social restrictions faced by Egyptian women in more recent decades.

“I don’t recognize Egypt as it is now,” he quoted Nady as saying shortly before her death. “But the Egypt I knew then will return. I am certain of that.”

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