Maiden Flight

The passenger on the turboprop wheeling out to the runway at Paris' Orly Airport could hardly believe his eyes. As the cockpit door briefly opened, he had got a glimpse of the crew up front. There beside the pilot sat a good-looking blonde. It was Jacqueline Dubut's debut as France's first lady pilot on a scheduled airline.

Even before the flight--a 215-mile hop to Nantes--27-year-old Jacqueline was on her way to becoming a flying folk heroine. French newspapers endlessly told how the pretty pioneer,* charmed by the tales of Aviator-Author Antoine de St. Exupery, worked in a factory as a teen-ager to pay for glider lessons, later finished at the top of the class in her pilot's exams--only to be turned down by Air France because long flights would be "too tough" for a woman. If a woman at the controls seemed odd to Air France, it did not to Air Inter, the fast-growing outfit that hired Jacqueline last May, and had her well up in a public-relations orbit before her first flight.

Le Figaro & Fruit Juice. As a government-owned counterpart of huge, foreign-flying Air France, Air Inter began operating in 1960 as France's first and only domestic airline. "Why bother?" asked many Frenchmen, accustomed to zipping along France's long, poplar-lined roads at Citroen speed--80 m.p.h. and upward. Air Inter soon proved why. Cramming passengers into mini-bucket seats, and serving only Le Figaro and fruit juice in flight, the line carried 16,000 passengers in its first year, passed 500,000 in 1964, reached 1,170,000 last year. It started with a handful of chartered planes and a staff of ten, now has 23 aircraft of its own, including five jet Caravelles, and 1,370 employees.

Air Inter will give up its modest $800,000 annual subsidy at year's end --but not its Gallic formula for a large income: outrageously high fares. Officially, the line excuses them on the ground that high fuel costs help run operating expenses 30% above those of similar, U.S. airlines. Privately, one Air Inter staffer frankly admits that "80% of our passengers are businessmen. They don't care what the fare is --it's the company that pays."

If customers find that a pretty pilot makes those stiff fares easier to swallow, Air Inter presumably will not mind. But Rear Admiral Paul Hebrard, a retired naval aviator who is Air Inter's chairman, insists that Mlle. Dubut is aboard only because the airline has now outgrown its supply of males. "Her record was faultless. There was no reason not to hire her," he says. Not content to leave well enough alone, the admiral makes the ridiculous claim: "She must also be considered not as a girl, but as a boy."

* There are fewer than half a dozen others flying for scheduled airlines elsewhere in the world, none in the U.S.

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