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Life Takes Wings: Becoming the World's First Female 747 Pilot
In Life Takes Wings , Captain Lynn Rippelmeyer soars with inspiration from a starry-eyed farm girl gazing at the sky to flight attendant to first female pilot of the revolutionary Boeing 747. More than just a story of one woman’s love affair with the skies, Life Takes Wings combines lessons in tenacity, humility, humor, perseverance, and partnership with the exhilaration of defying social norms, and the rewards of being true to oneself. Inspired to become a commercial airline pilot in an age when it was not an option for girls, serendipitous relationships lead Lynn to her first flying lessons in a seaplane, then to becoming flight instructor and charter pilot while also working as a flight attendant. Perceived as being incapable of flying, women were relegated to the cabin. Ignoring the pilots' negative comments, Lynn became a number of aviation's female firsts – member of first all-female commercial airline crew, first flight attendant-to-pilot, and first female pilot of the Boeing 747. Through laughter and tears, Life Takes Wings shows the sky is no limit for those who follow their dreams.
- GenresBiography
268 pages, Paperback
Published May 10, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 22, 2023
I turned the final page of this book while sitting on a 789 flight QF22 coming in to land at Tullamarine airport Melbourne Australia. I had departed from Dallas, Texas, USA late evening of the previous day. I felt I had travelled back in time while on this aircraft. The journey time was around 17 hours. I looked out the small window at the long wide wing to my left and realized I now view being in the air in a new light. I have a new interest in the staff on the plane. I paid more attention to the men and women who attended to passengers on the flight. I was more aware of the voices over the intercom announcing the departure and arrival. I have a new appreciation of the requirements and efforts given to the Pilots and Captain. In all honesty I’ve never thought about what it takes before. I’ve never previously thought about what’s changing in the aviation sector with career pathways and opportunities. I don’t fly often, at most 4 flights a year across the past 15 years. This book has opened my eyes, a new reason to look up in the sky.
I met Lynn in December 2022 at a networking meeting for women entrepreneurs and small business owners. I had taken the book with the promise to recommend it to the neighborhood book club that I belong to if I think it’s worth sharing. I was born in 1973. Lynn graduated from a 4 year Education degree majoring in English and Psychology in 1973, I guess I was not yet born the day Lynn graduated from college. This memoir gave me an opportunity to understand how it felt to be in a plane looking at the moon as it travelled on the horizon. I doubt I’ll ever get to sit in the front two seats of any plane. Let alone while that air craft is hundreds of meters above the earth. Reading this book gave me an opportunity to imagine how that might feel and to appreciate more about just what it really takes for a woman to be in that front seat. I will definitely be recommending this book to any book clubs I can.
I met Lynn in December 2022 at a networking meeting for women entrepreneurs and small business owners. I had taken the book with the promise to recommend it to the neighborhood book club that I belong to if I think it’s worth sharing. I was born in 1973. Lynn graduated from a 4 year Education degree majoring in English and Psychology in 1973, I guess I was not yet born the day Lynn graduated from college. This memoir gave me an opportunity to understand how it felt to be in a plane looking at the moon as it travelled on the horizon. I doubt I’ll ever get to sit in the front two seats of any plane. Let alone while that air craft is hundreds of meters above the earth. Reading this book gave me an opportunity to imagine how that might feel and to appreciate more about just what it really takes for a woman to be in that front seat. I will definitely be recommending this book to any book clubs I can.
May 25, 2022
This is the best book I've read in 2022! Finally a pilot put enough aviation detail into a memoir about a pilot. The good news is that there is another one coming out by Lynn Rippelmeyer. I am frustrated that I missed her book signing at Lone Star Flight Museum. If you are a parent of a daughter, a pilot, or both like me you will enjoy this book.
April 18, 2022
I managed to have a forty-year career as a reference librarian at a county public library branch without ever understanding the difference between a memoir and a biography.
I knew that memoirs were personal stories, as were autobiographies. But I had never read one and so never "got it". Meaning I never understood the difference between the two genres.
Memoirs, it turns out, have more in common with historical fiction and with the movies that proclaim to be "based on a true story".
Memoirs describe what the story FELT LIKE to the person living through this experience. Like historical fiction and the movies "based on a true story", supporting characters in a memoir can be an amalgam of several different people meshed into one character for clarity and story purposes.
I wanted to read Life Takes Wings by Lynn Rippelmeyer because we came from the same generation. She was only a year or so older than me.
I, too, grew up in the 1950's and had the conversation with my mother that, if I didn't get married and needed to be able to support myself, the careers open to women were nursing and teaching. (Librarians were not mentioned during that conversation but could be seen as lumped together with teachers.)
I became a librarian. My sister became a teacher.
I was in a career where most of my fellow librarians were women. But I was very aware that in the 1970's women were entering what had earlier been considered male-only careers.
Ms. Rippelmeyer had to thread the needle to get the flying hours/experience she needed to become an airline pilot before the age of thirty without the path her male counterparts took because the men could join the military and become military pilots. They didn’t need college either to earn their wings.
By the time Ms. Rippelmeyer thought of joining the military (which had produced the pilots being hired by the airlines in the 1960's & 1970's), she was 24 and could not devote seven years to the military and still be under 30 when she applied to be an airline pilot. (Age 30 was literally the cutoff age. Over thirty and the airlines would not hire you whether you were a man or a woman.)
Ms. Rippelmeyer is also the ONLY person who was a flight attendant first and literally transferred from the cabin to the cockpit.
It is also true that Ms. Rippelmeyer was a beneficiary of many lucky breaks.
Opportunities became available to her at crucial times. She was able to cobble together both the flying hours and the book learning needed to pass the stringent written FAA exams as a civilian whereas her fellow (male) pilots had all learned to fly as military pilots.
Her career started when she put herself through college. TWA required a four-year college degree to apply to become an airline pilot (which was not necessarily on Ms. Rippelmeyer's radar when she got her degree in English literature and Educational Psychology).
This is the FIRST print book I have read since my disastrous fall in 2018, when I destroyed my right shoulder. I was able to read this book because it was a 245-page trade paperback which was both very engagingly written AND vivid. This book had short chapters with punchy anecdotes that spiced up each chapter and made her book a real page turner!
I had also earlier seen a presentation by Ms. Rippelmeyer about her career as the first woman to fly a Boeing 747 so I knew that she could tell a good story and I really liked the feminist aspect of breaking down gender barriers.
During her recent author reading/book signing, Ms. Rippelmeyer said that her writing teacher had explained that a memoir is about how her experience had FELT as she was living it, not just about the facts.
An autobiography presents an author's life from soup to nuts. That is, from the time the person had been born, that person's childhood and early career, and then whatever events had made that person notable or famous, etc. Like the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
When you write a memoir, you do do research to try to get the facts covered as correct as possible but you may well have to reconstruct conversations which had not been written down at the time, the same as the author writing a historical fiction book has to do.
A memoir covers a particular period in an author's life, particular experiences, and may in fact jump around rather than just present the tale in strict chronological order.
Ms. Rippelmeyer's book was not published by the usual suspects (traditional publishers such as Simon & Schuster, Harper, etc.). Nor is the book simply self-published. Instead, Ms. Rippelmeyer went with Morgan James, a hybrid between the two extremes of traditional publishing & outright self-publishing.
In fact, she was advised that she was really writing TWO books. The first goes through her time as a flight attendant and when she first became an airline pilot. The second explores her airline pilot career and what her life was like as she realized her longtime dream of flying commercial jets for a living!
Highly recommended for women who lived through the beginning of women being able to take their places in male-dominated careers and for those 21st Century women who wanted to know how it all started for women who wanted to break out of the nurses-or-teachers-only career paths for women!
And highly recommended for open-minded men who believe that girls should grow up to be anything that they wanted to be, just like their brothers do.
I knew that memoirs were personal stories, as were autobiographies. But I had never read one and so never "got it". Meaning I never understood the difference between the two genres.
Memoirs, it turns out, have more in common with historical fiction and with the movies that proclaim to be "based on a true story".
Memoirs describe what the story FELT LIKE to the person living through this experience. Like historical fiction and the movies "based on a true story", supporting characters in a memoir can be an amalgam of several different people meshed into one character for clarity and story purposes.
I wanted to read Life Takes Wings by Lynn Rippelmeyer because we came from the same generation. She was only a year or so older than me.
I, too, grew up in the 1950's and had the conversation with my mother that, if I didn't get married and needed to be able to support myself, the careers open to women were nursing and teaching. (Librarians were not mentioned during that conversation but could be seen as lumped together with teachers.)
I became a librarian. My sister became a teacher.
I was in a career where most of my fellow librarians were women. But I was very aware that in the 1970's women were entering what had earlier been considered male-only careers.
Ms. Rippelmeyer had to thread the needle to get the flying hours/experience she needed to become an airline pilot before the age of thirty without the path her male counterparts took because the men could join the military and become military pilots. They didn’t need college either to earn their wings.
By the time Ms. Rippelmeyer thought of joining the military (which had produced the pilots being hired by the airlines in the 1960's & 1970's), she was 24 and could not devote seven years to the military and still be under 30 when she applied to be an airline pilot. (Age 30 was literally the cutoff age. Over thirty and the airlines would not hire you whether you were a man or a woman.)
Ms. Rippelmeyer is also the ONLY person who was a flight attendant first and literally transferred from the cabin to the cockpit.
It is also true that Ms. Rippelmeyer was a beneficiary of many lucky breaks.
Opportunities became available to her at crucial times. She was able to cobble together both the flying hours and the book learning needed to pass the stringent written FAA exams as a civilian whereas her fellow (male) pilots had all learned to fly as military pilots.
Her career started when she put herself through college. TWA required a four-year college degree to apply to become an airline pilot (which was not necessarily on Ms. Rippelmeyer's radar when she got her degree in English literature and Educational Psychology).
This is the FIRST print book I have read since my disastrous fall in 2018, when I destroyed my right shoulder. I was able to read this book because it was a 245-page trade paperback which was both very engagingly written AND vivid. This book had short chapters with punchy anecdotes that spiced up each chapter and made her book a real page turner!
I had also earlier seen a presentation by Ms. Rippelmeyer about her career as the first woman to fly a Boeing 747 so I knew that she could tell a good story and I really liked the feminist aspect of breaking down gender barriers.
During her recent author reading/book signing, Ms. Rippelmeyer said that her writing teacher had explained that a memoir is about how her experience had FELT as she was living it, not just about the facts.
An autobiography presents an author's life from soup to nuts. That is, from the time the person had been born, that person's childhood and early career, and then whatever events had made that person notable or famous, etc. Like the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
When you write a memoir, you do do research to try to get the facts covered as correct as possible but you may well have to reconstruct conversations which had not been written down at the time, the same as the author writing a historical fiction book has to do.
A memoir covers a particular period in an author's life, particular experiences, and may in fact jump around rather than just present the tale in strict chronological order.
Ms. Rippelmeyer's book was not published by the usual suspects (traditional publishers such as Simon & Schuster, Harper, etc.). Nor is the book simply self-published. Instead, Ms. Rippelmeyer went with Morgan James, a hybrid between the two extremes of traditional publishing & outright self-publishing.
In fact, she was advised that she was really writing TWO books. The first goes through her time as a flight attendant and when she first became an airline pilot. The second explores her airline pilot career and what her life was like as she realized her longtime dream of flying commercial jets for a living!
Highly recommended for women who lived through the beginning of women being able to take their places in male-dominated careers and for those 21st Century women who wanted to know how it all started for women who wanted to break out of the nurses-or-teachers-only career paths for women!
And highly recommended for open-minded men who believe that girls should grow up to be anything that they wanted to be, just like their brothers do.
January 8, 2023
A look at one woman's journey to become a pilot for a major airline. Learned alot about the aviation industry and the beginning of women pilots in the industry and the path they cleared.
June 27, 2022
I just finished reading Lynn's book. I enjoyed it very much, it made me laugh, it made me cry, it brought back many memories. It was a good page turner, I wanted to read on to see how the each chapter ended. I recommend Life Takes Wings, I think you'll enjoy it.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews