[Update: once again, I missed a syndication URL] Pilots have been painfully slow to take to the blogsphere compared to people in other areas. We love our newsgroups, mailing lists, and web sites, but gosh-darn-it if we’re going to mess with them new-fangled blog thingeys. One of my ongoing goals for Land and Hold Short is to collect together links to other aviation weblogs, especially those that have something to set them apart, to start to build us from a bunch of fragmented sites into an online community.

I just stumbled upon an entertaining aviation weblog, Cockpit Conversation, which has three strong selling points:

1. it’s by a professional pilot (using a pseudonym for obvious career-protection reasons)
2. it’s by a fellow Canadian (giving an alternative to the usual U.S. perspective)
3. it’s by a woman (not the one pictured here, though)

It’s been 76 years since Amelia Earhart (the one who is pictured here) and 98 other pioneer woman pilots founded the Ninety-nines, but the face that aviation presents to the general public is still usually that of the pudgy, grey-haired middle-aged male (i.e. people who look like me). The reality inside aviation is different: go to many flight schools and you’ll see lots of women going through the professional pilot programs as well as sitting in the right seats as instructors, trying to survive their students’ bounce-and-go landings. It’s time we heard from a lot more from them, so that girls don’t end up thinking of flying only as an embarassing-old-dad kind of thing and shun it, either as a career or as a hobby.

I hope that the author finds a way to make an RSS or Atom feed available some time in the future. [Update: I missed it here]