Pioneers of female aviation honored.

Byline: SUSAN PALMER The Register-Guard

Pilot Gladys Corderman doesn't know what all the fuss is about.

Sure, she loves flying and getting paid for it. She also loves teaching people to fly, and in her 23 years as a flight instructor she's helped hundreds of people get their licenses.

But there's no way the 60-year-old who now pilots a corporate jet for the Pape Group figured she rated any sort of recognition.

"I don't think I'm doing anything special," Corderman said.

Ruth Rockefeller begs to disagree. Women have played an important, sometimes overlooked, role in aviation, and they ought to be honored for their contribution, she said.

Furthermore, there aren't that many of them out there. According to the Federal Aviation Administration's Web site, only 35,000 of the 618,000 people registered as pilots in 1998 were women.

So Rockefeller, a 42-year-old Eugene Web designer, set out to recognize the Northwest's female aviation pioneers with a special exhibit that goes on display today at the Corvallis Airport. If the display also happens to encourage more women to try flying, so much the better.

Rockefeller, who has her student's pilot license and is on the verge of getting her private license, gained a great deal of respect for fliers when she finally got into the cockpit herself.

"I learned that learning to fly is not really easy," she said. She figured it must have been even more difficult in the 1920s and '30s when women's roles were much more limited.

The pilots her exhibit will honor include Edith Foltz Stearns and Nancy Livingston, who flew during World War II and trained others to fly.

Stearns, a former Portland resident who began flying in the 1930s, was a charter member of the 99s, an international women pilots association. During World War II, Stearns was among dozens of female pilots who ferried military planes between bases for the British Royal Air Force as part of the Air Transport Auxiliary in England. After the war, she taught U.S. Navy fliers the basics in flight simulators until her death in 1956.

Livingston, who earned her private pilot's license in 1940, also flew for the Air Transport Auxiliary. One of two women on the West Coast to obtain a helicopter license in 1947, she was a flight instructor in Corvallis for many years.

Rockefeller sought help from a New York sculptor to create two pieces of art: an aluminum plaque that resembles a flight log book with the names and brief biographies of veteran pilots, and a bronze winged sculpture that symbolizes the wildness of flight.

The log book is designed so that additional names can be added, she said.

The exhibit will be installed at the Corvallis airport because that's where many women pilots gravitated for training with Livingston, Rockefeller said.

Many of the pilots being honored were surprised to learn of the efforts on their behalf.

"A lot of them are really kind of reserved. They didn't feel their accomplishments were noteworthy, not as noteworthy as, say, Amelia Earhart's flight," she said.

Corderman, 60, falls into that group. She fell in love with flight 25 years ago when her husband resumed an interest in flying and she succumbed to the same passion.

She got her student certificate in 1977, her private license six months later and a commercial license a year after that. In 1979, she became certified as a flight instructor.

She got all that training fairly quickly because her instructor told her if she wasn't moving forward with her flying skills, she would lose what she'd learned.

But she didn't need much egging on.

"I was feeding a habit, needing to fly, wanting to fly," she said.

Among her former students are commercial airline pilots and Air Force pilots flying F-16s, she said.

After running her own flight school at the Creswell airport for several years, she hired on in 1987 at Flightcraft, which is owned by the Pape Group, a Eugene-based holding company for aircraft and heavy-equipment dealerships. She started as a flight instructor there before moving up to fly executives around the country in the company's corporate jet, a Citation 650 that can cruise at about 51,000 feet and 540 mph.

"I like speed," she said.

Rockefeller said it is women such as Corderman, carrying the tradition of trailblazers such as Livingston and Stearns, who will bring more women into the wild blue of flight.

"They really are role models for us," she said.

AVIATION EXHIBIT

"Women of Wings, Eternal"

WHEN/WHERE: Opens today with 10:30 a.m. ceremony in big hangar at Corvallis Airport, five miles south of Corvallis on Airport Avenue off Highway 99 West.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Call 434-9424.

CAPTION(S):

Gladys Corderman is among those honored in an exhibit on female aviators going on display in Corvallis. A longtime instructor, she now pilots a corporate jet.