Trailblazing female captain of Hong Kong’s Cathay juggles flights and motherhood

Hongkonger Candy Wu Suk-fun has attended parent-teacher meetings of her two children with such regularity that other parents get the impression she is a full-time stay-at-home mother.\nBut she is not. Wu is a captain with the city’s flag carrier Cathay Pacific Airways.\nShe became the airline’s first home-grown female captain in 2009 and continues to juggle her career and raising her daughters, aged 12 and 15, by being extremely conscientious with time management.\n“As a mother, it is challenging. For example, sometimes after I land at 5am, I attend an 8am parents’ meeting at school. I also shop for groceries and take care of my mother,” she said.\nWu, 53, started as a pilot trainee and was among the first batch of Cathay cadets trained at the Flight Training Adelaide academy in 1994.\nAccording to Cathay Group CEO Ronald Lam Siu-por, about 9 per cent of around 3,400 pilots are female. Of them, about 30 are female captains.\nThe group’s proportion of female pilots is higher than the average of about 4.5 per cent among international airlines. It has plans to raise the figure gradually to about 20 per cent.\n“We have over half of nearly 3,400 pilots trained through our own cadetship programme and less than half recruited from outside Hong Kong,” Lam said during a visit to the flight training centre last week. “It is a good balance.”\nAbout 1,500 pilots of the group have been trained at the Adelaide academy since 1994. Cathay partners with two flight training schools, the other being in Arizona in the United States, which offers the same training courses.\nWu was pursuing a civil engineering degree at the University of Hong Kong when a classmate told her about a Cathay job fair on campus and encouraged her to apply to be a pilot, as she was among the few in her class who met the key requirement of having perfect eyesight.\n“So I joined the career talk, was attracted to the offer of training in Adelaide and decided to apply,” she recalled.\nIt was a decision that changed her life, Wu said last week, as she and captain Eddie Chung Kiu-leong – a former classmate from the training centre – operated two direct flights between Hong Kong and Adelaide and returned to the academy for the first time in years in a sentimental reunion of sorts.\nWu was among 10 trainees chosen out of about 1,000 applicants in 1994. She graduated in 1995, qualified as a captain in 2009, and now flies Airbus aircraft.\n“Women are no different from men in operating an aircraft,” said Wu, whose husband is also a pilot but with another airline.\nDespite breaking the gender ceiling, she is no different from pilots of all genders who must constantly learn about and adapt to technological advances and new aircraft models.\n\n“To be a pilot now is a more achievable dream than before,” Wu said. “There is more access to information, such as on WhatsApp groups.”\nCaptain Chris Kempis, Cathay’s director of flight operations, said new technologies allowed cadets to train with flight simulators that were close to reality.\n“We don’t need to practise landing and take off in a real airplane, which is a dangerous thing to do if you have never flown the aircraft before. You obviously use a simulator, which allows trainees to attain a high level of competency because the fidelity and accuracy is extremely high,” he said.\n“We have started to use evidence-based training as well,” Kempis said, referring to a modern approach that collects trainee data and tailors training to fit individuals rather than keep everyone on the same repetitive test as they do recurrent training.\nFlight Training Adelaide CEO Johan Pienaar said that with the rapid development of artificial intelligence, the interface between pilots and systems had become more important. But the fundamental navigational skills remained the same.\n“I have no doubt that in five or 10 years, Airbus will have already run a fully autonomous flight on an A320 out of Paris. So we are going to see some significant changes in the future,” he said.\n“But there will always be a requirement for logical thinking and human interface to ensure the safety of passengers.”\n