Female pilots of the national flag carrier Vietnam Airlines are often nicknamed ‘the long-legged’ as they look like beauty queens or fashion models thanks to their good appearance.

Besides hiring a large team of foreign pilots, the flag carrier now has 558 Vietnamese male aviators and eight Vietnamese female pilots.

The ‘long-legged’ are under 30 years old. After each flight, some passengers linger to request the women to pose with them for pictures, or ask for their phone numbers for ‘convenient contacts later’.

Other passengers even sent messages of gratitude via air hostesses to pilots after they learned that they had female pilots on the flight, said Nguyen Ly Huong, who is a pilot trainer for the twin-engine turboprop short-haul aircraft ATR-72 and is going to take over the post of chief pilot. Now, Vietnam has no woman acting as a chief pilot.

Huong, deputy chief pilot of Cambodia Angkor Air – a joint venture of Vietnam Airlines in Cambodia – has over 2,500 hours of flight time with ATR-72. It is the longest time among Vietnamese female pilots.

“To fly four trips with total time of four hours, a pilot spends 11-12 hours making preparations,” Huong said, adding that it is not including possible problems such as bad weather, technical problems, and troubles from passengers.

‘Models’ in the air

Huong said she and her teammate Nguyen Thi Thanh Thuy, started working for Vietnam Airlines in 2009 and were the first female pilots of the airline. Thuy is now the deputy chief pilot of Airbus A321 at Vietnam Airlines.

Then, many people curiously looked back at her on seeing she was wearing the pilot uniform, Huong recalled.

Years having passed by, the curiosity from clients has gone down because of the increasing appearances of Vietnamese female pilots on flights and in airports.

“It is our pride to work for the national air carrier. We are proud to introduce ourselves as pilots of Vietnam,” said female pilot Dong Phuong.

Aside from learning technical terms to operate a plane, female pilots do more than that since “we learn from one another how to use make-up to become more beautiful and polite looking,” said a female pilot.

‘This profession chooses me’

An interesting detail is that most women come to this job by chance, not from a previously planned intention.

Huong, who is working for Cambodia Angkor Air, said she graduated from the urban traffic planning and management faculty of Transport University in 2005. On preparing to go to work, she realized that she met standards for a pilot and just tried it.

Nguyen Kim Chau, who has over 1,500 hours of flight time and started flying for Vietnam Airlines with ATR-72 aircraft when she was 21 years old, admitted that most female pilots of the carrier were working in other jobs of other professions before selecting flight operation by chance.

Chau, 25, is the youngest female pilot of Vietnam Airlines. Last year, she finished learning to switch from flying an Airbus A321 to an A330.

In 2008, the woman who stands at 1.65m tall was preparing for an overseas study trip in the U.S. and happened to know that Vietnam Airlines was recruiting women to train as pilots.

“I applied because I don’t like paper work,” she said, adding that she prefers changes and that she tailors her hair style every two months to be ‘cheery’.

Another female pilot is Tran Trang Nhung, who said she had never imagined to work as a pilot for an Airbus A330. In 2007, she was admitted to the information technology faculty of the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology.

Once, she entered the website of Vietnam Airlines to book tickets for her family and knew that it was recruiting pilots.

She tried it and passed an entrance exam for trainee pilots. "This profession chooses me," she added.

Dong Phuong, who has Vietnamese parents but was born in Belgium, is a special case. When she realized her passion for flying, she was still in high school. She even applied for training as combat pilot for Belgium Air Force but failed.

She confessed that she only studied business to satisfy her father’s dream. But later, she dropped the business curriculum and switched to learn flying.

Female pilot Nguyen Thi Thanh Thuy revealed that a pilot flies on average 90 hours a month.

According to the Flight Crew Division 919 based on Hong Ha Street in Ho Chi Minh City, it costs VND3 billion (US$144,000) to train a female pilot.

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