Mentorship Programs for Women in Aviation

What mentorship programs actually exist for women in aviation?

Four categories of formal programs dominate: membership-organization platforms, identity-specific networks, operator-sponsored pairings, and university-affiliated tracks. Women in Aviation International (WAI) runs the largest with its Connect platform, which matches mentees and mentors across 15,000+ members in 100+ chapters. The Ninety-Nines, founded by Amelia Earhart and 98 other licensed women pilots in 1929, runs mentorship informally through its 155 chapters and formally through its scholarship-pairing structure, where Amelia Earhart Memorial Scholarship recipients are matched with prior recipients for guidance through advanced ratings.

Sisters of the Skies, founded by Black women professional pilots, runs a structured mentorship pipeline from middle school through type rating, including its Solo Sponsorship program that funds and mentors candidates through private pilot completion. Whirly-Girls International handles the rotorcraft side, pairing helicopter-rated women with student and transitioning pilots. On the corporate side, NetJets, Flexjet, Wheels Up, and Jet Aviation each run internal women-pilot networks that include formal mentor matching for new-hire first officers and upgrade candidates.

How does the WAI Connect mentorship platform work?

WAI Connect is a year-round online matching system open to all paying WAI members, with no application cycle. Members create a profile listing career stage, certificates held, aircraft category, employer, and the specific topics they want to discuss or teach — interview prep, type-rating financing, transitioning from regional to corporate, returning after maternity leave, or moving into a chief pilot seat. The system filters by those tags, and either party can initiate.

WAI also runs in-person mentor matching at its annual conference each March, which drew roughly 4,500 attendees in 2024 and where the organization distributed more than $750,000 in scholarships across roughly 130 awards. Conference mentor meetups are structured speed-mentoring formats, typically 90 minutes, with 6–8 mentors per table rotating through groups of mentees. The pairing is not lifelong; it is designed to produce one or two concrete next steps — a resume edit, an introduction, an interview practice call.

What does The Ninety-Nines offer that WAI does not?

The Ninety-Nines is pilot-only and chapter-centric, which produces a different mentorship texture. Membership requires a current pilot certificate, which means every mentor relationship sits between two certificated pilots rather than between a pilot and an aspiring student or industry adjacent professional. Chapters meet monthly, often at a local airport, and the mentorship is geographic and aircraft-specific — a mentee flying a Cirrus SR22 out of a Class D field can sit with a mentor flying the same aircraft out of the same field.

The Amelia Earhart Memorial Scholarship is the organization's flagship, funding advanced ratings — instrument, commercial, multi-engine, ATP, type ratings, and jet transitions — at amounts that have exceeded $10,000 per award in recent cycles. Recipients are paired with prior recipients, producing a multi-generational mentorship chain that is unusual in aviation philanthropy.

What do Sisters of the Skies and ISA+21 add?

Sisters of the Skies addresses the specific gap that Black women hold roughly 150 of the approximately 170,000 ATP certificates issued by the FAA — well under one-tenth of one percent. The organization runs Solo Sponsorships that fund private pilot training and pair the candidate with a Black woman professional pilot through completion, then continues the relationship into instrument and commercial. It also runs the Sisters Empowering Sisters mentorship cohort for women already in the industry working toward upgrade or major-carrier transition.

ISA+21 (the International Society of Women Airline Pilots) is airline-focused and requires Part 121 or equivalent military experience for full membership, but its mentorship outreach extends to corporate and charter pilots considering the airline path or vice versa. The organization maintains a directory that pilots use to find type-rated mentors for specific airframes — useful when a corporate pilot is preparing for, say, a Global 7500 or Gulfstream G700 type ride and wants to talk to a woman who has been through it.

Which private-aviation operators run their own mentorship programs?

NetJets, Flexjet, and Jet Aviation are the three largest operators with formal internal women-pilot mentorship structures. NetJets' women-pilot affinity group, which has grown alongside the operator's pilot headcount past 3,500, runs a new-hire mentorship match within the first 30 days of indoc and a separate upgrade-track mentorship for captains-in-waiting. Flexjet runs a similar program through its Red Label pilot organization, with mentor pairings handled by base and fleet — a Praetor 600 first officer in Cleveland will be matched with a captain on the same fleet.

Wheels Up, despite the restructuring, has continued its women-pilot mentorship through its training partnership and aligns mentors by aircraft category. Beyond the operators, FlightSafety International and CAE both run mentorship adjuncts to their type-rating courses, where women in the cohort can request a mentor match with a prior graduate of the same type course — particularly useful for sole-female-in-the-class situations, which remain common in heavy-jet type ratings.

How do university and ab-initio programs handle mentorship?

Embry-Riddle, Purdue, the University of North Dakota, and Auburn each run women-in-aviation chapters that function as feeder mentorship networks into industry. Embry-Riddle's WAI chapter, one of the largest collegiate chapters in the country, pairs incoming freshmen with juniors and seniors, who are in turn connected to alumni at the major operators. The pipeline is intentional: a freshman flight student in Daytona can be three introductions away from a NetJets recruiter by the end of her first semester.

ATP Flight School, CAE, and L3Harris run smaller but functioning mentorship adjuncts for ab-initio women, generally pairing students with CFIs or recently hired airline first officers. The match is less about long-term career mentorship and more about getting through the checkride pipeline without the attrition that disproportionately affects women students — a 2021 University of Nebraska study put the female student-pilot dropout rate meaningfully above the male rate, with cited reasons including instructor mismatch and isolation.

What should a mentee actually ask for?

Specific, time-bound asks produce results; vague requests for "career advice" do not. The most effective first ask is a 30-minute call with a stated agenda: resume review, interview prep for a named operator, financing approaches for a specific type rating, or a walkthrough of the transition from a Part 135 charter seat to a Part 91 corporate flight department. Mentors at the senior captain and chief pilot level field dozens of these requests and respond best to messages that name the aircraft, the operator, the timeline, and the decision the mentee is trying to make. The mentorship programs above exist to lower the cost of that first introduction; the substance still has to come from the mentee.