Nancy Bird Walton

Born in Kew, New South Wales, Australia on 16 October 1915 as Nancy Bird, she was educated at Brighton College, Manly. Bird wanted to fly almost as soon as she could walk. As a teenager during the Depression in Australia, Nancy Bird found herself in the same position as many other children of the time, leaving school at 13 to assist her family. In 1933, at the age of 18, her passion drove her to take flying lessons. Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, who was the first man to fly across the mid-Pacific, had just opened a pilots' school near Sydney, and she was among his first pupils. Most women who learned to fly did so for recreation, but Bird planned to fly for a living, which had never been achieved by a woman before. ==Aviation career==

When she was awarded a commercial pilot's licence at the age of 19, through a legacy of £A200 from a great aunt, plus money loaned from her father (which she paid back), Bird bought her first aircraft, a de Havilland Gipsy Moth. Soon after, Bird and her friend, Peggy McKillop, took off on a barnstorming tour, dropping in on country fairs and giving joyrides to people who had never seen an aircraft before, let alone a female pilot. While touring, Bird met Reverend Stanley Drummond. He wanted her to help set up a flying medical service in outback New South Wales. In 1935, she was hired to operate the service, named the Royal Far West Children's Health Scheme. Bird's own Gipsy Moth was used as an air ambulance. She bought a better-equipped aircraft and began covering territory, including Queensland, ==Recognition and honours==

Throughout her life, Walton was notable for her support of charities and people in need. As a result, she was invested as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1966. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 1990. She was the inspiration for generations of female pilots. She was never involved in an accident, despite the risks of early aviation. The Nancy-Bird Walton Memorial trophy, sponsored by the family, is presented by the Australian Women Pilots' Association for the "most noteworthy contribution to aviation by a woman of Australasia". The National Trust of Australia declared her an Australian Living Treasure in 1997, and in 2001 she was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women. The first Airbus A380 (VH-OQA) delivered to Australian airline Qantas was named in her honour. Her name on the A380 was originally written "Nancy Bird Walton", but Qantas respected her preference for the hyphenation that her late husband used ("Nancy-Bird"), and the hyphen was added before the aircraft's naming, shortly after she was aboard the ceremonial flight above Sydney. This aircraft was operating flight QF32 when it suffered a serious uncontained engine failure after takeoff from Singapore in 2010; coincidentally, Walton wrote the first officer's reference when he first joined Qantas as a pilot. One of her last main interviews was for the feature-length documentary film Flying Sheilas which provided an insight into her life along with seven other Australian female pilots. In March 2019, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that the new Western Sydney Airport will be named Western Sydney International (Nancy-Bird Walton) Airport. A tunnel boring machine used in New South Wales is named after her. ==Personal life==

She was 24 when she married an Englishman, Charles Walton, and had two children. He preferred to call her "Nancy-Bird" rather than "Nancy", and she became generally known as "Nancy-Bird Walton". Bird also had two children: John and Anne Marie. On 10 September 2008, shortly before her death, Walton conducted a 45-minute interview for the one-hour documentary. On 13 January 2009, Nancy Bird Walton died at the age of 93 in Mosman, Sydney. ==References==