Pioneer pilot: After six decades as a pilot, Jean Tinsley of Atherton takes to the skies again this month at a Peninsula helicopter show Pioneer pilot: After six decades as a pilot, Jean Tinsley of Atherton takes to the skies again this month at a Peninsula helicopter show (June 08, 2005)

By Rebecca Wallace

Almanac Staff Writer

On St. Patrick's Day in 1937, a young Jean Tinsley stood in Oakland with her eyes on the sky. The famed, doomed aviator Amelia Earhart was taking off on her first attempt to fly around the world.

Sixty-eight years later, Ms. Tinsley remembers the momentous day clearly.

"I didn't think it was any big deal," she says. "She never was my hero, particularly."

It's easy to be blase when you're making your own history. In 1945, Ms. Tinsley herself started soaring through the clouds as an airplane pilot. She began flying balloons in 1961 and helicopters four years later.

An Aero Club of Southern California publication once stated about Ms. Tinsley: "This flying grandmother has more aviation firsts than most of her contemporaries." Indeed, she's racked up quite a few.

Ms. Tinsley was the first female president of the Helicopter Club of America and, recently, the first woman elected to the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators in London. In 1976, she became the first woman officially qualified to fly a constant-speed prop gyroplane.

(Gyroplanes look like helicopters but have no motor for the rotor blades; a propeller moves the craft forward, and the flowing air spins the blades and creates lift.)

Now, six weeks after hip-replacement surgery, Ms. Tinsley, 78, sits among the sun-warmed flowers and lawns of her Atherton back yard and contemplates her next move. She'll be flying the enormous Sky Crane in the Vertical Challenge Helicopter Air Show at the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos next week.

The largest helicopter in the show, the Sky Crane is 88 feet long and weighs about 22,000 pounds with fuel, Hiller spokesman Willie Turner says. (In contrast to this behemoth, an average helicopter is 30 to 40 feet long and weighs 4,000 to 7,000 pounds, he says.)

"I first flew one in Las Vegas in 1968," Ms. Tinsley says. "It can lift a small house."

She briskly dismisses any post-surgery concerns. "I can fly," she says. "The doctor said, 'You can fly anything you can climb into.'"

No stewardesses here

That just-try-to-stop-me-attitude has served Ms. Tinsley well in her flying career, which began when women were more likely to be piloting a Hoover.

The San Francisco native filled her room with model planes as a child, and owned a four-passenger Piper Comanche at a young age. She sported a T-shirt that said, "Love me, love my airplane."

But society didn't always know what to make of a pilot in lipstick.

"My first helicopter instructor said, 'What are you doing in the cockpit? You belong in the kitchen.' Needless to say, that was the last time I flew with him," Ms. Tinsley recalls.

In 1951, she applied for a job as a pilot with Pan Am, but was offered a gig as a stewardess. She responded, "That's not exactly what I had in mind."

So flying became "an expensive hobby" she pursued once a week for years, darting in and out of airports around California. She also worked as a technical writer and editor, and had a busy family life: At 32, she married Clarence M. Tinsley Jr., a widower with five children. The couple had another child of their own.

"My husband hated flying, but he never asked me to give it up," she says.

Even though she wasn't a commercial pilot, Ms. Tinsley found camaraderie in aviation circles. She was active in several groups, including the Whirly-Girls, an international society of female helicopter pilots created in 1955.

Around her neck dangles a gold Whirly-Girls medal, with her name and Whirly-Girl number, #118, engraved on the back. The medals were designed by Howard Hughes in the organization's early days, but he had only 150 made -- because he said there would never be more than 150 female helicopter pilots, Ms. Tinsley says.

The group now has 1,348 members.

Indescribable air

Words fail Ms. Tinsley when she's asked why flying means so much to her.

When asked to describe her feelings when she first went up in a plane as a 12-year-old passenger, she sweeps her arms wide, gasps a little, and says, "How can anyone describe it?"

Certainly, there's the appeal of going where no woman has gone before. Next to her Whirly-Girls medal is a small gold pendant in the shape of an X. That shows she's also an experimental pilot.

In 1990, Ms. Tinsley became the first woman tilt rotor pilot in the world, according to a press release from NASA. She flew an XV-15 research aircraft, which has the vertical takeoff and landing capabilities of a helicopter as well as the forward speed and range of a fixed-wing turboprop airplane, according to NASA.

It was part of a demonstration for the U.S. Congress, Ms. Tinsley says, matter-of-factly pointing to a cockpit photo with a dizzying array of instruments.

How can one keep track of all those knobs and switches? She shrugs. "It becomes automatic."

Globe-trotting has also become customary. Ms. Tinsley has been a judge in the World Helicopter Championships since 1973, in Russia, England, Poland and other locales.

"She knows just about everybody in the aviation industry," says Jim Ricklefs, a pilot and longtime friend. He's seen Ms. Tinsley at aviation conventions for years and affectionately calls her "an airport groupie."

Watching women claim their place in the skies has been heartening for his friend, he says, recalling an incident a few years ago in which Ms. Tinsley had to be airlifted from Kauai to Oahu for an operation.

"It was a medevac airplane and it had two pilots aboard and two nurses. The two pilots were female and the two nurses were male," Mr. Ricklefs says, chuckling. "That almost made her well right there."

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