To Boldly Go Where No Woman Has Gone

For a woman who has spent her life shattering gender stereotypes, Continental Airlines Capt. Deborah McCoy has a funny way of describing her career progression.

She compares it to untangling a “wad of coat hangers.”

“It was always like, ‘Listen, that’s messed up over there. Would you mind taking that on too?”’ she recalled of her 20-year rise at Continental.

In September, the 44-year-old DC-10 pilot became the airline’s senior vice president of flight operations, supervising 5,200 pilots and 8,700 flight attendants. The position makes her the highest-ranking woman in America’s airline industry.

The irony of comparing such a career to housework isn’t lost on McCoy. She is fiercely proud of her status as a role model and the way she attained it--one “coat hanger” at a time.

It seems to have been McCoy’s destiny to fly. As a preschooler, the Louisville, Ky., native would sit and watch the low-flying military planes streak over her grandparents’ farm.

“I thought that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen,” she said. “Sometimes I’d see the contrails up with a little airplane way up in the sky, and I always wondered where they were going.”

When she was 2 1/2, her father, Air Force Capt. Malcolm Lee McCoy, died in the crash of a training flight. Years later, as an aspiring pilot, she worried about how her career choice would affect her mother and brother.

“I didn’t want my mother wringing her hands every time I went on a flight,” McCoy said. But her mother had different concerns.

“She said, ‘Well, when your father was killed, I said if one of my children wants to be a pilot that would be OK with me. I just didn’t think it was going to be you,’ ” McCoy recalled. “I think she would have preferred that I choose another field, not because of my father but because at the time there were no women [in aviation].”

McCoy is intensely private about her life outside of work. But she said she earned cash for her first flying lessons by working as a grocery store cashier. After attending the University of Louisville and graduating in 1977 from Southeastern Oklahoma State University, which had a professional aviation program, McCoy opened her own flight school in California.

Then in the mid-1970s, she saw news stories about commercial airlines hiring the first female pilots. She was hired by Continental in 1978 and became the airline’s first female pilot the next year.

McCoy said that not all of her male colleagues were enthusiastic about her arrival, but she said she doesn’t remember any specific incidents of sexism.

“I went in very worried about what it would be like, but I really wanted to fly and I just kept that focus,” she said. “I’m such a positive person, I tend not to dwell on things like that. Plus, I’m very driven performance-wise. . . . Nobody can say anything about my flying, because I’m going to make sure, by golly, it’s the best there is.”

Over the years, McCoy received numerous promotions, each time applying the same work ethic. She was Continental’s first female fleet manager, then its director of flight standards and training.

In 1994, McCoy headed a newly formed operational performance department that took the airline from worst to first in on-time service in just three months.

As vice president of flight training and inflight, she brought computer-based training and state-of-the art flight simulators to Continental. Through her efforts to streamline scheduling, turnover of flight attendants was reduced and sick leave declined.

Gordon Bethune, Continental’s chairman and chief executive, called McCoy “one of the best and brightest in the business.”

She also has the respect of her employees.

“She’s the kind of a manager that, if you take an issue to her and say, ‘Here’s the problem. Here’s my proposed solution,’ and if it makes sense to her, she’s going to support you financially and in every other way,” said Capt. David Lundy, the fleet manager for Boeing 777s.

Despite McCoy’s success, few women have followed her lead.

At Continental, only about 2% of pilots are women. Nationwide, only 2.7% of pilots rated to fly for commercial airlines are women, according to Women in Aviation International, based in Dayton, Ohio.

Jennifer Sadler Thomas, a spokeswoman for the group, hopes pioneers such as McCoy and Eileen Collins, the first female space shuttle commander, will change that. McCoy will be featured on the cover of the group’s magazine, Aviation for Women, in March.

“Ms. McCoy is not only a good role model for women in general but more specifically for little girls,” Thomas said. “It’s great for girls to see women in these capacities. A lot of older women didn’t have that opportunity.”

McCoy, who still serves as a pilot once a month, said inspiring young girls is the greatest reward of her new job.

On one recent trip, a man and his daughter asked to visit the cockpit.

“He came up and introduced me to his little girl, and said, ‘I just wanted her to see that she can do this job because you’re here,’ ” McCoy said. “I just love stuff like that.”