On Wednesday, Claudia Simpson Jones and Graham Simpson received the FAA Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award during a special ceremony at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. The award is part of the agency’s recognition of safe pilots.

To be eligible for the Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award, the applicant must hold a U.S. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) or FAA pilot certificate, have 50 or more years of piloting experience, or 50 or more years combined experience in both piloting and aircraft operations.

Applicants are required to submit three letters of recommendation from someone in the industry along with a detailed account of their aviation experiences. 

The application packets for Simpson Jones and Simpson were a little over an inch thick, and according to an FAA representative, “enjoyable reading.”

Simpson Jones, 79, started her aviation career with her first solo on December 3, 1967. As if that wasn’t enough of a memorable experience, an aviation luminary was in attendance. 

“William T. Piper was there the day I soloed,” Simpson Jones said. 

She earned her private pilot certificate in March 1968 and continued training, earning a helicopter rating, commercial certificate for airplane, seaplane rating, Airline Transport Pilot and CFI certificates, and type rating in a Boeing 737. She was one of the first women to be hired by a major airline when she became a first officer for Continental Airlines in 1977.

Eventually her career took her to Southwest Airlines and the captain’s seat as well. She became an simulator instructor for Alaska Airlines for a time, eventually retiring from aviation in 2000 with 24,000 hours logged.

Among her aviation accolades, she served as the first president of the International Society of Women Airline Pilots (ISA+21).

She didn’t learn to fly to get to the airlines, she said. Also a musician, she originally learned to fly as a means of transportation, flying her band around in a Piper Cherokee Six.

“I had maybe 40-something hours at the time, and the band would just jump in the airplane and we’d go,” she said, noting that music remains a big part of her life.

She was working as a CFI when she intercepted her younger brother Graham on his way home from high school. Ten years his senior, she was in charge, she said. Simpson said he remembers her telling him, “We’re going to the airport for an hour,” and she then gave him a flying lesson.

Graham Simpson soloed on September 23, 1970, in a Piper Colt and earned his private pilot certificate in 1971 right after his 17th birthday. Like his sister, he spent the next few years adding ratings, including commercial, helicopter, instrument, CFI, Flight Engineer, ATP, and type rating in a B-737 and Airbus A320. 

Simpson spent 41 years at the airlines, racking up more than 30,000 hours. Some of those were flown in the former Piedmont Airlines 737 now on display at the Museum of Flight. 

“The last time I was in this airplane was in 1985,” said Simpson, taking the left seat for a photo op with his sister.

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“The dream felt so real, but I wondered if falling really felt the same way,” she said recently, more than 22,000 jumps later.

As it turned out, Stearns had to wait until she was 17 to find out if reality matched the dream. That was when she joined a group of girls from her high school who were going for an introductory jump with the local parachute club.

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“What I didn’t realize was that it would be a static-line jump, so there was no freefall. And that did not satisfy my curiosity,” she said. While the other girls headed home, Stearns stuck around. “I went back for more jumps, and kept jumping until they allowed me to freefall. By then I was hooked.”

While babysitting for 25 cents an hour to help fund her new sport, she also earned her private pilot certificate as a Civil Air Patrol member while working at the airport drop zone, packing parachutes and serving as a jumpmaster. It was the 1970s, and general aviation and skydiving were gaining popularity. Young people routinely worked odd jobs at airports in exchange for flying lessons—earning stick time to build hours.

“I was 19, naive as ever, living in a hangar, making 20 bucks a month and loving it,” Stearns said of the time.

She almost immediately became interested in competition, and excelled in style and accuracy contests. For style, the skydiver performs a series of flips, twists, and other figures during freefall. In her early days of competition, accuracy meant guiding her old-fashioned round-canopy parachute so precisely that she could land on a target just  10 centimeters in diameter.

“I’m a competitive person and I wanted to do more, so I set a goal to become national champion, and after that, to be world champion,” she said 

Some people laughed off her ambitions which, at the time, might have seemed beyond far-fetched. But, like many women involved in difficult, adventurous, or dangerous pursuits, Stearns was accustomed to being told she could not do certain things, yet accomplishing them anyway.

During her skydiving career (she is still jumping), she has won two world championships—in 1978 and 1994—along with 33 national championships, and she has set 30 world records. She spent two tours of duty with the U.S. Army’s elite Golden Knights parachute team after becoming the first woman to join the team in 1977. Stearns continued her military career with Army Reserve and National Guard units, retiring as a Master Sergeant after 29 years.

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While juggling skydiving stardom with a military career, Stearns attended Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Pope Air Force Base campus, where she received bachelor of science in aviation administration and master of aeronautical science degrees. In 1986 she began working for Piedmont Airlines, which became part of U.S. Airways, and later was absorbed by American Airlines. Stearns retired from American in 2019.

Last month the National Aeronautic Association presented Stearns with its Distinguished Stateswoman of Aviation Award in recognition of her accomplishments as a parachutist, pilot, and mentor. Stearns said receiving the NAA award “is a great honor,” and being nominated by the United States Parachute Association made the experience particularly special.

“It meant so much to me to be nominated by my peers. This is the group that has made such a difference in my life,” she said.

These days Stearns shares her aviation knowledge with cadets in the Shelby, North Carolina, Civil Air Patrol Squadron. She continues to perform demonstration jumps as a member of the Children of Fallen Heroes Skydiving Angels team, a non-profit organization.

She said she is working toward matching her jumps—just over 22,000—with her roughly 26,000 flying hours. She flies her Cessna 185 regularly, so reaching that goal might take a while.

The post Pioneering Skydiver and Pilot Looks Back on 50 Years Aloft appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

The bonuses, however, target pilots with specific levels of experience.

Pilots with 950 hours of Part 121 time will qualify for the $100,000 bonus, and pilots with 500 to 949 hours of qualifying time are eligible for $75,000 under the program. Pilots would need to accept a conditional job offer before the end of the year to qualify for the limited offer.

Eric Morgan, Piedmont’s CEO, explained that the rebound in commercial travel precipitated the generous offer as Piedmont, like other airlines, is trying to ramp up capacity to meet the overwhelming demand.

“Passengers are back, and the demand for travel is high, but our industry hasn’t settled into a steady state yet,” Morgan said. “We are in a unique position to say to pilots, ‘come to Piedmont, help us expand our fleet and our routes, and here’s a big check to spend while you do it.'”

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U.S. airlines have struggled to fill the void left by the glut of pilots who retired in the early part of the pandemic, offering lucrative pay packages to incentivize recruitment. This summer, American Airlines had to park close to 100 regional airplanes because it couldn’t find enough regional pilots, which prompted all of its regional carriers—PSA, Envoy, and Piedmont— to announce a bonanza of pay upgrades. 

“We’ve done a tremendous amount of work to get all of our resources aligned to grow,” Morgan said. “But we have a gap in 2023-2024 between the number of airplanes we want to fly and the captains we need to fly them.”

• READ MORE: PSA Airlines Joins Piedmont and Envoy in Boosting Pilot Pay

As part of a package offered in June, Piedmont offered potential new hires pay based on experience at other airlines in an attempt to lure some pilots away from competitors. With that, it updated its captain’s pay scale to range from $146 per hour to $213 per hour. It also included new work rules, enhanced bid schedules, and additional hotel rooms for commuting pilots.

With this recent bonus, Morgan said the airline is hoping to recruit experienced pilots to get them through a 24-month period for a two-year commitment to the airline. 

There are, however, caveats. The airline said the $100,000 bonus would replace the current pilot retention bonuses that expire at the end of the year. Instead of paying multiple bonuses over five years, Piedmont will now pay $100,000 up front to qualified pilots. Ultimately, Piedmont said pilots who opt-in could take advantage of its contractual flow program with American’s mainline carrier.

News of the retention bonuses come as the airline is planning to make strategic expansions. It announced in August that it was planning to add 15 Embraer 145s to its fleet that would come from its regional partner, Envoy. It also offered employment relief to furloughed Express Jet Airlines pilots after that carrier filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

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