As a girl growing up in Ottawa in the 1940s, Lorna deBlicquy longed to slip earth's surly bonds and traipse "the skies on laughter-silvered wings" as RCAF pilot John Gillespie Magee famously wrote in High Flight.
In fact, as a high school student, she wrote an essay comparing flying to "a symphony in shining silver," a simile that did not impress her English teacher.
Babysitting to earn money to pay for flying lessons, she soloed at 14, took up skydiving a year later and became the youngest female to make a parachute jump in Canada. A bush pilot, and in the aeronautical vanguard as a high-altitude pilot, she flew helicopters, DC-3 transports and gliders.
She ferried supplies, equipment and personnel to the high Arctic, carried sightseers and trainee pilots in New Zealand and supplied aid packages to Ethiopia in the mid-1980s.
"Lorna played a major role in gaining acceptance of women in all aspects of aviation," said her former husband Richard (Dick) deBlicquy in an e-mail message. "The pace was always too slow for her, and she was violently outspoken in pushing for equal opportunity [but] she was a real trailblazer in opening doors for the equal employment of women in positions of responsibility and trust."
A writer as well as a pilot, she composed editorials and articles about discrimination against women and eventually soared through the gender ceiling to become Canada's first female civil aviation inspector. Transport Canada awarded her its McKee trophy in 1993 and Woman In Aviation, International included her, along with Amelia Earhart, Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Sally Ride, in its top 100 women in the history of flight in 2007.
"She absolutely adored flying," said her daughter Elaine deBlicquy, a registered massage therapist, "so she was always amazed that people wanted to reward her for stuff that she thought was fun."
Her mother was happy that she was able to break down barriers, according to Ms. deBlicquy, but mainly "she felt that all women should work equally hard for the status they received."
Lorna Vivian Bray was born in a small town in Huron County, Ontario in the early years of the Depression, the youngest by several years of three children of a bank manager. By the time Lorna was 14, her father had been transferred to Ottawa, where she attended Glebe Collegiate. After a cousin took her on a flying excursion over the city, she was obsessed with becoming a pilot.
The urge to fly may have been imprinted on her DNA; her brother Harry Bray, a decade her senior, was a bomber pilot in Burma during the Second World War. According to a family story, Lorna's father (who had been an anti-aircraft gunner in the First World War) was sending aerograms overseas to Harry, begging him to warn Lorna about the dangers of flying, even as she was writing "ferocious letters" to her brother asking him to extol aviation's joys.
Her parents allowed her to take flying lessons at the Atlas Aviation Flying School at Uplands Airport (now Macdonald Cartier International) so long as she maintained at least a 75 per cent average in school, earned the money for her lessons, and took the earliest bus back home because "nice girls didn't hang around airports," as Ms. deBlicquy later told her daughter.
She made her first solo flight on Sept. 14, 1946, at age 14, in a Piper J-3 Cub, a light, lemon curd yellow training plane that has often been compared to the Model T Ford because of its simple functionality. By 1948, she had enough hours to qualify for her private pilot's licence.
An excellent student, she went to Carleton College (now University) in 1950 on a scholarship, graduating three years later with a teaching certificate and her commercial pilot's licence. About this time she met the two men she would later marry. Richard (Dick) deBlicquy, the son of a Belgian pilot who had immigrated to Winnipeg in the 1920s, was a radio officer in the RCAF and a regular at the flying school. The other man was Tony Nichols, a geologist she had met at Carleton. They married after she graduated and moved to northern Manitoba. To get there, the couple bought a float plane, which she flew the 1,300 miles on her own over rugged and desolate terrain.
She quickly found a job as a bush pilot, flying a Waco Standard 5-place bi-plane for Taylor Airways of Wabowden, a railway town southwest of Thompson. While living in a tent at a geology camp in Thicket Portage for two years, three months and 14 days, as she later grimly recounted, she flew drillers, fishermen, government inspectors, First Nations people and supplies to and from northern communities and reserves.
By the early 1960s, her marriage to Tony Nichols had collapsed, so she moved back to Ottawa, where she worked part-time as an instructor at Bradley Air Services in Carp, Ont. Mr. deBlicquy, with whom she had maintained a correspondence, was flying part of the year in the Canadian Arctic, then working as a helicopter pilot in New Zealand, and doing stints in between at Bradley.
Sharing a love of flying, each other and adventure, they spent the winter of 1962 on flying gigs in New Zealand and were married in Wellington the following spring. Their only child, Elaine, who was born on Jan 4, 1966, soon learned "good bladder control" and how to cope with motion sickness in the back seat of a small plane.
Ms. deBlicquy, who was one of the first women to make a career in aviation in this country, flew from one pole to the other and many places in between for the next three decades, learning to fly gliders, Twin Otters and helicopters in extreme weather and isolated locations. By 1970 the deBlicquys had settled once again in Ottawa where she took up her old post as an instructor at Bradley Air Services in Carp. For excitement, she resumed air racing, which she had first taken up two decades earlier. Her feats were beginning to be recognized. That same year she became the first Canadian to win the Amelia Earhart Scholarship from the Ninety-Nines, an international organization of women flyers. She used the prize money to pay for instrument-flying rating.
In 1975, she applied for a job as a pilot with a subsidiary of Air Canada that provided commuter service on Twin Otters between Ottawa and Montreal, as Joyce Spring writes in The Sky's The Limit: Canadian Women Bush Pilots, probably the best account of Ms. deBlicquy's career. She had experience flying these planes in the Arctic, she had logged more than 6,000 hours and she had her Airline Transport Licence - more qualifications than many of the male applicants possessed.
When Ms. deBlicquy wasn't hired, she complained publicly in articles and on radio shows about discrimination. The same thing happened a year later when, having been appointed a Designated Flight Test Examiner by the Department of Transport in 1974, she was rejected for a job in flight training standards. Once again she pointed out the prejudice against women pilots.
In 1977, she entered a competition for a position as a Civil Aviation Flight Inspector, knowing there was no good reason to overlook her. Fortunately, the zeitgeist was changing. "The Status of Women Committee had gone to bat for her," according to Ms. Spring. "Lorna was not only qualified, she was high profile and she was articulate, and she wasn't going to go away. She got the job."
The deBlicquys divorced in the mid-1980s after more than 20 years of marriage. She carried on flying until she finally grounded herself in 1999.
"I have had the best flying life possible for one who never wanted to do anything else," she wrote in Canadian Ninety-Nines 2006 Here & Now. "I am lucky, thankful and pleased to have spent most of my life doing what I loved." Ms. deBlicquy was also awarded the A.D. Dunton Alumni Award of Distinction from Carleton University and the Orders of Ontario and Canada.
LORNA DEBLICQUY
Lorna deBlicquy was born in Blyth, Ontario on Nov. 30, 1931. She died of Alzheimer's Disease on March 21, 2009 in Beaverton, Ont. Ms. deBlicquy, who was 77, is survived by her daughter Elaine and her sister Phyllis Thatcher.