07/21/2026
Lynn Rippelmeyer grew up on a farm in Illinois in the 1950s. There were no women flying airliners then. Not one. So she did the only thing a girl in that position could do with the feeling.
"I had an interest in aviation because there were airplanes flying overhead, and I thought how much fun it would be to see the world from up there," she said. "The closest I could come to pretending that was riding my horse up to the top of these limestone bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, about a mile away from the farm, and imagine that the horse had wings, like Pegasus, and could soar and fly over the fields."
In 1972 a sorority sister talked her into moving to New York to become a stewardess. TWA hired her and put her on the Boeing 747.
She loved the airplane. She also kept finding excuses to walk to the front of it, asking the crew about switches and hydraulics and engines.
The next summer she started flying lessons on a small seaplane in Vermont. "I just loved it," she said. "It was the closest I've ever been to being addicted to anything."
She got her commercial licence in 1976 and a job as a first officer at Air Illinois in 1977.
The airline already had a female captain, Emilie Jones. When he hired her, the owner told her the 2 of them would never fly together. She asked why. She remembers his answer: "Well, we have to have a man up there in case anything goes wrong, don't we? And we also don't want to scare our passengers away, do we?"
Then one day Emilie's first officer called in sick, and Lynn was the only pilot who could reach the airplane in time. The dispatcher phoned the owner. She could hear him shouting down the line.
He let her take the flight on 2 conditions. No announcements, and the cockpit door stayed shut.
"Nobody had to know there were two women in there," she said. "So that's what we did."
It was December 30, 1977. The first scheduled airline flight in American history flown by an all-female crew, and the airline hid it. Afterwards, in her words, "since nobody died," they were allowed to fly together again.
In 1978 TWA moved her from the cabin to the flight deck, the first flight attendant in the industry to make that transfer. Then she was furloughed.
Seaboard World hired her, and in 1980 she became the first woman ever to fly a Boeing 747. Then Seaboard merged with Flying Tiger, and she was furloughed again.
"I was 30 years old at this point, didn't have a job, wasn't married, didn't have an income," she said. "Flying was not working out. I was wondering if I had messed up my life."
Then in 1981 a brand new airline called People Express took her on. She made captain in under a year. And in 1984 she flew a 747 from Newark to London, the first woman to command a jumbo across an ocean.
She retired as a captain in 2014. Her uniform is in the Smithsonian.
