D I SCOVER / A WORLD OF INSPIRATION
Left: Silva in the cockpit of a Boeing 737. Below: a few years after arriving in Australia, with her one-year-old daughter Tema and husband Ken.
Job offers in Australia followed with Virgin, and by the time her international airline career really took off in her 40s, she was already a grandmother. But age, she says, was never a barrier. “I felt fit, I felt good enough, and felt
deserving enough to wear the uniform with pride.” Ken sadly died in 2020, and with the borders closed by the pandemic, Silva was made redundant. She is still eligible to be a domestic
PEOPLE WE ADMIRE SILVA McLEOD This pioneering grandmother flew through the glass ceiling when she found her wings, and continues to make the most from life’s opportunities and challenges. Words INGRID LAURENCE
pilot, and is hoping to pass medical tests to allow her to fly. “My wings were clipped when Ken died. But three years down the track, I’m pretty sure Ken would love to see me get back in the skies, he knows how much joy that has brought me.” In the meantime, she has retrained as a real estate agent, is enjoying golf and her community in the Mornington Peninsula, and volunteers for Meals on Wheels. “I hope I’ll get my medical, but at the same time if I don’t, hey, the world is full of opportunities and excitement and challenges.”
A t the height of her flying career, when she was piloting B777s from Australia to America, Silva McLeod would create quite the commotion in the US arrivals hall. “The customs officers would call out from one desk to another: ‘Oh look, there’s a woman pilot!’” she laughs. Earlier, she’d also been a rare female pilot at the Royal Flying Doctor Service, a “tough
after meeting and marrying her Victorian husband Ken while he was working in Tonga. She settled into life as a mother to two young girls, but when Ken was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer, their world changed. Recognising that life is short, he gave his wife a flying lesson as a birthday present, and supported her subsequent decision to train as a commercial pilot. She is the first Tongan woman to become an airline pilot. But as Silva recounts in her new memoir, Island Girl to Airline Pilot , her path to the skies was far from smooth. Despite success as a flying instructor and with the RFDS, she had to leave her family behind and move back to Tonga to secure her first job with an airline.
gig”, she tells us, which saw her flying challenging rescue missions to remote regions.
Even more remarkably, Silva, now in her early 60s, hails from a small village in Tonga. “While it had always been my fantasy to fly, I never in my wildest dreams thought that it was going to happen.” She arrived in Australia in 1981
ISLAND GIRL TO AIRLINE PILOT (Exisle Publishing, $34.99) is out now.
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DARE SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2023
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