Southwest Airlines celebrates first all-female flight crew

Southwest Airlines has celebrated its first 'unmanned' flight, with an all-female crew of two pilots and four flight attendants undertaking a journey between the US cities of St. Louis and San Francisco, California.

The airline tweeted a photo taken by a member of the crew shortly before takeoff on the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft.

Others were quick to take to social media to show their support for the all-female service between St. Louis and San Francisco.

Southwest is America's third biggest airline and the seventh largest in the world, with around 49,000 employees. In the UK, male pilots outnumber female pilots 16 to 1, rising to 33 to 1 at the nation's biggest holiday company, Thomson.

Writing in The Independent this year, Simon Calder said: "When I checked on the flight-deck gender split three months ago [January2017] with all the leading airlines serving UK passengers, a remarkably consistent pattern emerged: at British Airways, easyJet, Monarch and Ryanair, just 6 per cent of crew are female."

He also noted that only one flight in roughly 300 flights to and from the UK is flown by two women; 17 have have one male and one female pilot; and the remaining 282 are two-man operations.

In March this year an all-female crew became the first in Egypt to take to the skies, with Egyptair dispatching two flights with only female staff to Abu Dhabi and Kuwait from Cairo. This followed an all-female pilot crew flight on Royal Brunei Airlines to Saudi Arabia in 2016. In 2012, Sharifah Czarena Surainy Syed Hashim, who captained the 2016 Saudia Arabia flight said: “Being a pilot, people normally see it as being a male dominant occupation. As a woman, a Bruneian woman, it is such a great achievement. It’s really showing the younger generation or the girls especially that whatever they dream of, they can achieve it."